A competitive analysis is an offensive and defensive strategy where you identify major competitors, opportunities and threats in the current marketplace. It helps you to find out what your competitors are doing right, and it reveals opportunities that they haven’t taken advantage of.

Stay objective with your competitive analysis and analyze both, your current and potential competitors that might enter the market. Your completed analysis should be able to answer the following questions:‍

1. What is out already out there?
2. Which products are working?
3. Which products are not working?
4. What features are common that are expected by our users?
5. What features…

Feedback in a digital product is essential for users to understand if the action taken was successful. To understand the concept of feedback we have to understand that feedback is the reason why human beings have been surviving and evolving for millennia. According to Dictionary.cambridge the word feedback means the following:

‘Feedback is a reaction to a process or activity, or the information obtained from such a reaction’.

It is a key component of all interactions we have in our daily life. The feedback that works, feels so natural that we rarely think about it.

‘Feedback is what links the…

Debates between marketers and UX designers are not uncommon. I’ve encountered a few debating over features or interactions like pop-ups, newsletter signups, etc.. Instead shouldn’t both teams, Marketing as well UX Design, focus on the people ensuring they are having a great experience using the product? Doing their best to ‘convince’ not-yet users by a great experience to become full-time users?

It is clear that UX Designer have to take users’ aspirations as well as business goals into consideration. Often it is a fine balance for UX Designers advocating users and taking care of business goals simultaneously. As mentioned above…

How can Designers create positive experiences with digital products? Aaron Walter, former director of User Experience in MailChimp and now the VP of design education at Vision says it very nicely in his book Designing for Emotion:

As designers, we’re in a unique position to help users follow their gut instincts. Using common design tools like layout, color, line, typography, and contrast, we can help people more easily consume information and make a decision driven by instinct more than reason. Just as you chose the shirt you’re wearing because it felt right, we can help our audience sign up for…

In my last article, I wrote about Atomic Design and how it can be a great starting point to create a design system. Today I want to talk about design systems and what a design system actually is. Let’s get into it…

What is a Design System?

A design system is a single source of truth (SSOT) containing all elements needed to design, realize and develop a product. It is a concept to ensure that everyone in a product team bases decisions on the same data and elements. To create a mental picture, think of an industry that also uses systems that ensure that the…

Industries such as Architecture or Industrial Design have developed smart modular systems for manufacturing extremely complex objects like airplanes, ships, and skyscrapers. Inspired by this, Atomic Design was proposed as a system that involves breaking down a website or web application into its basic components so that they can be reused throughout the site. Due to new devices with new screen sizes, that are getting released each year, creating pixel-perfect design gets harder if no systems are put in place.

Approaching this problem, Brad Frost coined the term and methodology of atomic design. …

User research is a booming sector in the UX field lately and I see more and more job openings as UX Researchers. It truly is an essential part of UX, but sometimes it gets cut short due to time or budget limitations. So what is the real benefit of user research and how do we decide which research methods are most valuable to our project?

In the following, I will get into the importance of user research, when to best apply it and what the difference between quantitative and qualitative user research is.

01 Why do we do user research?

Let’s start with the obvious question. Why…

I keep reading the same questions over and over again…

Is it smart to work as a freelance UX Designer when you are just starting out?

How high are the chances to score a remote gig?

Where do I start?

You may have asked yourself these questions since working remotely, digital nomadism and freelancing have become more and more popular amongst Generation Z. Tim Ferriss defines the ‘new rich’ as the following:

The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility…