Universal Principles of UX: 100 Timeless Strategies to Create Positive Interactions between People and Technology (Rockport Universal)

Describing the functionality in words also helps verify all logic and thinking. It’s very easy to accidentally overlook things like error states, edge cases, inactive states, hidden content, tool tips, logged-in states, or animations if they are not written down. Without annotations, it’s very difficult to reference decisions and rationale on proje

Every time we work on self-initiated projects in our studio—projects that are for ourselves and not for a client—we create our own brief, set our own deadlines, and determine the problem statement ourselves. That’s because design is not art and needs to solve a real human need. As the American minimalist artist Donald Judd famously said, “Design ha

Studies have indicated that to generate more creative solutions, we should sketch while talking, as it stimulates parts of the brain devoted to visual processing, giving us an additional creative boost.

At the same time, the brief can’t be too limiting—there still has to be enough space to allow for surprising solutions. When I was doing my master’s in communications design at Pratt, a professor once said to me that if the brief is “design a better toothbrush,” you will always end up with something that looks like a toothbrush. But if you open up

Is it exactly 20 percent? Not necessarily. But thinking of it as 20 percent is a good start. If we focus our attention on the top 20 percent of user traffic and ensure those items are first in line for any kind of enhancement or additions, we can make relatively small improvements that will yield disproportionately powerful results. In other words,

Almost all products need both a “novice” and an “expert” mode, but it’s important to keep in mind that power user features should always be an alternative way to use the interface—never the primary way.

Once all the card-sorting exercises were done, we put all the categories into a spreadsheet and highlighted consensus (labels and groupings that were created by most) and ambiguity (cards that were placed in various categories by different people). Then we used those insights to inform the design of the new global navigation system for the museum.

One of the things Anton and I agreed on when we first started our studio is that we would use any kind of downtime between projects for personal experimentation. During these pauses, we create our own project brief and

Afterwards, we put together a document with everything we have learned with one clear problem statement that this project will need to address. This is our North Star. Every decision will have to map to that. If we don’t agree on this up front, or we don’t figure out early on where there could potentially be pushback or delay, that negative domino