Well-annotated wireframes will answer every potential question to any audience, anywhere, at any time without the need to involve the UX designer. A developer on the other side of the world. A client in a different time zone. It also helps ensure all functionality is accounted for and allows us to refer back to our thinking weeks or months later. I

At their best, personas are a discovery tool for the UX team and a way to remind everyone else who’s working on the product that we’re doing all of this for actual people. However, it’s important to always keep in mind that personas are there to help inform design decisions, not mandate them. Personas can help point us in the right direction, but t

After this exercise, we can clearly see which features are our must-haves (features with high business value, high user value, and low technical complexity) and nice-to-haves (features with low business value, low user value, and high technical complexity). We then regroup with the project team and decide what will make it into our MVP versus a lat

we pre-select things for a user, we minimize the number of decisions they have to make,

hard to decipher, and harmful to the overall user experience. When in doubt, it’s best to always accompany an icon with a text description, and if you can’t, at least keep them in an expected location so users will know where to look for them based on muscle memory alone.

Whenever we create a content management system for a client (an internal tool that allows them to create, edit, and publish content), we have to make sure the interface is welcoming to both novice editors, who will probably use only the basic features to upload or change something every once in a while, as well as daily power users, who need to fre

In our studio, by the time we start designing, we have already mapped out all the features and know which devices are most common for our users. This knowledge allows us to make device-specific design decisions based on real requirements and device usage, giving us a higher chance a design that performs well on all of the devices needed.

Design takes courage on the client side as well as the designer’s side. It takes courage to accept that good design emerges from a nonlinear, intuitive, and unreplicable—dare I say magical—process of a talented and empathetic designer (see Principle 52). And once we feel strongly about something as designers, it’s more helpful to the success of the

Makes sense, right? I’ll let you in on a secret: Over the course of my seventeen-year career, I have only once been surprised by the results of a usability study—only one time. Considering we have completed over 125 separate projects, those are some pretty low odds. Saying this out loud in my field is almost sacrilegious, and I have gotten a lot of