The following 7 design, inspiration and other bits of interest bullets that kept me pondering during last month:
- Let’s start the new year with a small challenge: consistency in design is the wrong approach. While a bit clickbait this article is a perfect start to any designer’s year. We tend to focus on product and its consistency way too much ignoring a more holistic design impact: “When you think about consistency, you’re thinking about the product. When you’re thinking about current knowledge, you’re thinking about the user.” http://bit.ly/consistency-in-design
- New year’s resolutions are a big pile of BS. I do believe (and have seen plenty of evidence) in an effective goal setting. It always comes down to the right type of challenges, systems and accountability. Challenge = stretch goal; system = structured way to perform and asses the progress; accountability = social commitment. Now combining all these, you as a designer can boost your career and value you deliver. For those who need an extra kick, I made a quick video with 10 UX design goals challenges for 2020 anyone can commit to. http://bit.ly/2020ux-challenges
- This month’s interesting random psychology study: this one’s from a few years back and covers how taking notes with a pen is more effective than keyboard typing when it comes to learning. The gist of it is that when we (or at least the students in the research study) take notes with laptops we tend to transcribe notes verbatim instead of deep processing it, digesting and giving a meaningful and easy to remember anchors first. http://bit.ly/note-taking-study
- Controversial (but truthful) short article on the secret to great UX – putting the user last. It’s more about consider more aspects to experience than just the end-user, and thus should be read/considered by all designers: http://bit.ly/put-user-last
- Have you ever met a person who didn’t have a surname? I did, and it made me reevaluate the way I design forms. The other day I was reading this twitter thread on shitty forms and how they discriminate people who don’t fit John Smith template. I also discovered this awesome article/listicles on the falsehoods programmers (and designers) believe about names. It lists 40 myths when it comes to designing for real human beings who can come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. Worth a read for every designer: http://bit.ly/name-falsehoods
- Sketch or Figma? Maybe Adobe XD? Putting 2019 design tools into perspective, this survey results spread perfectly summarizes the current (changing) state for tools in the design market: http://bit.ly/ux-tools-2019
- Lastly, what’s new with me? As always I have some exciting bits to share. During the holidays I’ve been tinkering to address my personal pain point when working with trading, big data, finance UIs – think multiple text field overrides, especially if it’s to do with decimals and/or special characters. As a result, I wrote a plugin for Sketch called decimal number generator. It’s free and available to download immediately. Get it here: http://bit.ly/sketch-plugin
Demo:
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