Best of the Week for Product Designers

This is the 4th edition of this newsletter, but I wanted to do something slightly different this week. Inspired by a recent new format that Tobias van Schneider used on his (fantastic) weekly newsletter, instead of a new article this week, I’m sending you a handful of personal recommendations and resources from this week that I think you’ll enjoy.

1. As a product designer, I try to use many unique and well-crafted products to help feed my own ideas. I’ve been looking for an Evernote alternative with more modern thinking behind it. Both Dropbox Paper and Zoho Notebook are both great products that have popped up recently — be sure to check them out. But this week, one that I’ve been testing for a few months now was fully released: Notion.

It’s incredibly powerful — it can be your wiki, note taker, task manager, Kanban board, collaborative document editor, and so much more. It gives you the tools to craft it into whatever you need it to be. This would be cumbersome in most products, but they’ve done a really sharp job at making the interface and the interactions simple, communicative, and powerful.

2. This week, I finally started using the new version of a product called YNAB — or You Need A Budget. I tried it out in 2014 but was frustrated by much of the product. They’ve grown it into a totally different beast since. They call it a budgeting tool and methodology, but I think it’s so unique it isn’t even that: it really is the way personal financial management should be done. Within a few minutes of setting it up and starting to use it, I was convinced of that.

There isn’t a person I wouldn’t recommend it to. They’ve really figured out the right way people should think about their money, and they made that approach super easy with their interface. If you want to see a great example of product design meant to help users change their workflow for the better, look no further than YNAB. And if you’re looking to make your own finances better, try it out. It’s fantastic.

3. Something interesting happened for product designers in the U.S. Supreme Court this week — many of the design field’s pioneers and leaders together filed an amicus curiae letter for the ongoing legal battles between Apple and Samsung,

The Industrial Designers Society of America penned the crash course in design theory for the justices.

Drawing on cognitive science, design history, marketing theory, and consumer technology, it distilled from modern product design two fundamental rules:

1: Design is the product.

[A] product’s visual design becomes the product itself in the minds of consumers. Modern cognitive and marketing science verifies this fact.

First, the distinctive CocaCola bottle, which was designed and patented in 1915, helped the soft drink become the most widely distributed product on earth. A 1949 study showed that more than 99% of Americans could identify a bottle of Coke by shape alone, and customers routinely report that Coke tastes better when consumed from the patented bottle.

2: Design is an essential bridge between technology and consumer

Design is particularly important for consumer products with complex technology. Cognitive science proves that a product’s visual design has powerful effects on the human mind and decision making processes, and eventually comes to signify to the consumer the underlying function, origin, and overall user experience of that product.

Sight is overwhelmingly our strongest sense. In addition, the human brain recalls memories and emotions attached to visual stimuli for far longer than text or words. Because the brain does not separate the physical appearance of an object from its functions, a consumer’s subsequent exposure, experience, or knowledge of a product are cognitively mapped onto the product’s visual design such that the look of the product comes to represent the underlying features, functions, and total user experience.

The whole thing is fascinating if you get the chance to read it. If not, I’m writing a summary on it with a bunch of examples — I’ll send it to you on this newsletter soon.

4. Google published an amazing set of interactive 360° videos on the people that live in Rio’s favelas, coinciding with the Olympics. One woman became a computer scientist, another a dancer, another opened up a surfing school. It’s a fantastic piece, you could watch all of the stories during lunch (I did at least!).

5. A website called Product Pages launched this week, and they’ve curated a list of well-designed product pages. If you’re looking for inspiration, this is a great place to start.

6. Every day, I enjoy watching a few of Gary Vaynerchuk’s videos. Yesterday, he posted a video on the importance of knowing your strengths. It’s such a great thing to keep reminding yourself; to keep checking if you’re working in your strengths or forcing yourself to do something someone else could do better.

7. If you’re a Spotify user, be sure to check out Release Radar — it’s a new playlist automatically updated every Friday (so check out your first one today before it changes tomorrow) with new releases from the artists you listen to. (It falls on Friday because that’s the new Global Record Release Day as of last year.)

8. Finally, just last night I got a notification from Mybridge Design about their July Top 10 list of UX articles:

We’ve observed nearly 1,300 articles posted about UX Design in July 2016 and picked the top 10 articles. User Experience (UX) design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability and accessibility of the user interface. Mybridge AI evaluates the quality of content and ranks the best articles for professionals. This list is competitive and carefully includes articles for you to read, so that you can learn and improve your design work. 1,300 -> 10. Only 0.77% chance to be included in the list.

Less than 1%! That’s why it was beyond humbling to see what was ranked #5 for July.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week — stay tuned for a new article next week. If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, let me know on Twitter @alexobenauer.

Oh yeah — and thank you for voting last week on which book I should write first! The results were surprisingly conclusive, but I’ll announce it next week :)

Thanks for reading, and as always, keep in touch.
-Alex

P.S.: If you need a little motivation for your Thursday, here’s 3 words to inspire you any day you’re down, from Gary V.