“Get in over your head as often and as joyfully as possible.”
How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
“The soul never thinks without an image.”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
“I would be happy to learn just half the stuff I already thought I learned.”
“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”
“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
Christensen also cites the importance of "purpose branding"—building an entire brand around a particular job-to-be-done. Quite simply, purpose branding involves naming the product after the purpose it serves.
“Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.”
It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives.
I have complaints about the education our designers get. There are two ways of approaching UX design teaching, and neither of them is satisfactory. One, you come out of a traditional design school, and those are typically art based and concerned about beauty and emotional impact. That’s very important, but they don’t learn the underlying theory and understanding of people’s behavior that’s so necessary. The other school comes from the field of human-computer interaction. Today, it’s mostly computer scientists, and they do understand the fundamental theory, but they’re not very good designers. Most are not capable of making an emotionally pleasing, delightful experience. They can make things that are understandable. What we need to do is combine these new skills, or at least have them work as a team. Designs are not done by single people, they’re done by teams. You need to work with others who bring in different points of view and skills. Watch people do the task you’re trying to support, and support the whole task. If I support the task well, and I don’t do some of the details well, or a bit clumsily, it’s okay. It’s far better to support the task and mess up a little on the details, than it is to get all the details right and not support the task.
“Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.”
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction
“There’s the whole Buddhist thing about the essence of a bowl being its emptiness—that’s why it’s useful. Its emptiness allows it to hold something. I guess that means that design must talk about something else. If you make design about design, you’re just stacking bowls, and that’s not what bowls are for.”
I believe that everything has a grain, including the web.
You don’t think your way to creative work. You work your way to creative thinking.
No. I don’t think the Empire had Wookiees in mind when they designed it, Chewie.
Unfortunately, flat design has a major flaw: it often leads to click uncertainty and decreased user efficiency. When designers flatten the UI, they tend to remove many signifiers that normally tell users where to click.
Flat design, especially when combined with strategic minimalism, can be a powerful aesthetic tool. It can convey a sense of luxury or trendiness, and in some cases can be used to appeal to young adult users. It’s a lightweight UI, and can be easier to support across a range of device sizes.
Here are the questions you can use to qualify new features: Does this feature serve your exact ideal customer, or does it make your product interesting to new customer categories? Does this feature serve the user’s big goal, or does it add other goals to their plate (even if solved successfully)? Does this feature facilitate the user’s most important daily tasks, or does it add other tasks to their plate? Does this feature breed new objects to be managed with the app? Does this feature solve a pain, or does it merely add an extra layer of polish? What are the development and support (!) costs of building this feature? Can this feature be easily replaced by building an integration with another software product? What part of the existing user base will benefit from this new feature and start using it immediately?
Product Managers and Product Designers glorify our process for building products on Twitter, podcasts, and at conferences — but we should remember something important. Customers don’t actually care about how we build our products, or our process. Customers do not care about our Slack debates, our Jira tickets, or the compromises we make to our roadmap along the way. Customers only care about how our products feel in their hands, and nothing else. That moment when customers first open our apps and escape their reality for a few minutes as they discover something new — that is the moment that matters if you build products. We need to focus less on glorifying our process for everything we ‘product people’ do and focus more on what actually matters. What matters is that we build products that make customers smile and realize something new about themselves. What matters is that we build products that make life more fulfilling for billions of people by giving them access to education and new ideas. What matters is that we build products which make customers say: I honestly can’t imagine my life before I downloaded that app. We Product Managers spend our days writing specs, filing Jira tickets, and editing roadmaps. Process. Process. Process. What else could we have created instead of that perfect Gantt chart? Are there easy wins in our production apps that we could have discovered instead of seeking the perfect process? Can we think less about our perfect Product Manager workflows and think more about simplifying our products? Our job is to delight customers through the projects we build. Process is important, but do not forget that customers judge us on one thing. The product.
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.
Because starting with copy focuses you on the customer and the dream product you’re creating for them. You’re not worried about which font you should use, the border radius on your dialogs, or the interaction convention of the week.
The place to start the implementation is to list exactly what the user will do to achieve his or her goals and how the system will respond to each user action.
“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”
Too many apps try to use animation as a band-aid for the poor experience they’ve created. Remember that animation is there to help explain what is happening, not entertain. You’re not making a Disney movie.
When people don’t know what’s hidden in the nav they scroll the page to see if they can find what they’re looking for first. Opening a nav is a commitment. And what if when I open it I don’t find what I’m looking for? Research shows users would rather take their chances and scroll the page before diving into your hamburger nav.
There’s this fallacy that floats around the UX world telling everyone that less clicks means a better experience. And if users don’t have to click, well, then the person that created it must be some sort of UX god. Well, here’s the truth: Users won’t mind extra clicks as long as they’re meaningful.
It sounds counterintuitive, but you can reduce complexity by adding in a few extra meaningful clicks. Each tiny bite is much less of a cognitive load for your users than if you push everything on them up front. Make your experiences contextual-based and digestible, and no one will notice that it took them a few extra clicks—because it felt necessary.
Design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvelously capable, given the chance.
I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
“As we decrease uncertainty, we give ourselves permission to increase fidelity.”
If you cannot get a group of designers to generally agree that your design is easy-to-use and well-crafted, then it isn’t.
If you cannot get a group of people for whom your product is designed for to generally agree that your design is good, it’s not good.
The greatest frustration is feeling like you’re getting too much criticism from too many people (which, according to #2, means your design is not yet good). This is either because a) you’re working under too many constraints b) you’re not exploring solutions broadly enough, or c) the problem is beyond your current skill level.
“Good” design means it is a) valuable: you’re solving a real problem for people b) easy to use: people find it understandable, accessible and fast c) well-crafted: the entire experience feels designed with thought and care.
Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
Better design does not mean more design. Often, the most obvious designs are invisible.
Why Hidden Navigation Is Less Effective Why does hidden navigation have these effects? Throughout the article, we hinted at several answers: Low salience: A small icon is harder to notice on a large screen size (and even on a smaller mobile one). Low information scent: The menu icon or label doesn’t usually tell people what’s inside it, so they have no idea if they’ll find what they need by clicking on it. Extra work: To figure out what’s inside the menu, people must expand it. That increases the interaction cost for users and makes them less likely to do it, or, if they do it, they may take longer. Lack of standards: Hidden navigation is implemented in different ways by different sites. Some sites use it, some don’t. On mobile, patterns are starting to form, but on desktop there is a lot of variability and inconsistency in the placement and the labeling of hidden navigation. Low familiarity: Especially on desktops, hiding navigation is not a common pattern and people may not expect to find global navigation under an expandable menu. Some people may also still be unfamiliar with the hamburger icon that is frequently used for such menus. This low familiarity is exacerbated by the lack of standards which reduce long-term learnability (as further discussed in our course on The Human Mind and Usability, learning is facilitated by repeated exposure to the same pattern.)
We can’t afford to do months of work only to find out the feature isn’t valuable to our customers. Doing customer research up front and then testing small feature rollouts allows us to tighten the feedback loop and make small adjustments to features before they’re complete.
“Start your designing where users start their using.”
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”
Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.
Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.
“Less is more work.”
Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
“Practice safe design: Use a concept.”
If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.
“Leave it better than you found it.”
For UI elements, being understood beats being sophisticated every time!
“More interface” does not fix “bad interface”… it amplifies it.
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
Deep delight is holistic, and is achieved once all user needs are met, including functionality, reliability, usability, and pleasurability. Users may have a poor experience on a site, and yet feel surface delight occasionally. But deep delight only occurs when the user has reached a state of “flow” — that is, immersed productivity without much distraction from the main task. In other words, deep delight is experienced when the interface behaves like a surgeon’s knowledgeable assistant: it hands all the right instruments exactly when they are needed, without getting in the way.
UI embellishments can only produce surface delight; deep delight can only be achieved in functional, reliable, and usable interfaces.
The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases.
Like storytelling, every design project has one or more protagonists, a setting, a plot, a conflict and a resolution.
Most design leaders, like John Maeda in his Design in Tech Report, argue that designers need to code in order to survive. But if you’re a young or aspiring designer, I’m here to tell you, to beg you, to ignore these people. Design is about people, not technology. In order to design great products, you need to understand not just what you’re making, but why you’re making it. You do that by empathizing with your customers to feel their pain, and designers are effective only after doing so.
What companies need now and in the near future are designers that are writers and storytellers. Good writing skills enable designers to tell a strong narrative of the customer in a holistic, memorable way. The result is thoughtful design; creating products that people love and can’t live without.
The parallels between writing and designing are strongest when it comes to building context. Both require sensitivity to every plausible situation. Like writing, the design process considers varying levels of complexity in the context of use:
How does someone feel when they are using your product— not just during, but before and after.
Whether it’s in the form of personas, storyboards, journey maps or even a plain old written narrative, great designers start with clear, compelling narratives about the context of the customer’s problem they’re solving for.