100 Days of Product Design

I love startups and founders of startups. I particularly love those founders of startups that have failed, and when I see a candidate with…

It’s happened again, another designer, another design challenge, another squandered 10 hours. Isn’t it about time we put an end to this…

Visual sitemaps reveal the organization of all the pages or screens within that site. It’s a great way to get the big picture of the…

The nitty-gritty of classifying and organizing content.

Design fast. Out loud. In front of an audience.

I spend a lot of time coaching businesses in how to build and manage design teams. A question that comes up a lot — or I should say, a…

Product designers must think about more than just what will delight users. They must also understand the core functionality and business…

Mental maps are how the user remembers the organization of your website. They’re a snapshot of how the navigation works, memorized.

How you get users from one place in the application to another. How they accomplish their goals.

Where are you going, how do you know you’ve arrived, and can you find your way back?

Sketch has become the industry standard for wire framing digital product design. Simpler than Photoshop or illustrator to learn, Sketch has…

Designing for mobile viewing is more than just making sure the content fits on a small screen. It requires a detailed understanding of how…

“Expected behavior” is a term for what users believe they know about how an application will work. These preconceived notions impact how…

There are three main strategies for making websites and applications mobile-friendly. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Ideation — a.k.a. brainstorming — can come at any point in the design process, though we usually think of it as kicking off a project.

The concept “Mobile First” came out of a movement to improve the mobile user experience by focusing on progressive enhancement instead of…

Storyboards help you (and the product team and stakeholders) empathize with your user(s). By showing the use case as a visual sketch…

Personas are how we distill all the individual users’ data we collect, into broad characterizations of our users.

The user journey shows how a user is feeling and what he’s thinking at different points in time while using your product.

So you hired someone to do your UX. You dutifully created personas, ran focus groups, drew up wireframes, made a pretty visual design and…

The test of a good wireframe is how concise and detailed are the annotations.

Large websites are built with a set of page modules that hold different types of content. Instead of designing a website with the finalized…

Learn to synthesize the results and put your research notes together into a presentable format to deliver to the product team.

An empathy map shows you how individual users feel, think and talk about the experience of using your product.