The Best User Experience Design Links of 2018
Each week, I curate the best UX articles, design tools, and resources on my newsletter, UX Design Weekly. I went back and looked at the stats from the past year to find the best of the best. Here are the top links designers were reading and sharing in 2018.
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10 New Principles Of Good Design
Dieter Rams' design principles get a 21st-century update.
7 Basic Design Principles We Forget About
Some basic design principles that will make your designs better.
Subverted Design
Designers have lost their way. Making sense of our shifting priorities.
Here’s everything I’ve learned from designing 10,000+ UI screens as a lead product designer.
10 lessons learned while reflecting on one’s design career.
How to Build a Design System with a Small Team
5 tips on building a design system with lots of additional resources.
Build your design portfolio around one awesome story
Advice for designers putting together their first or second portfolio.
Working Through Design Challenges in Digital Product Design Interviews
How to approach a design challenge no one expects you to solve
Really Bad Design Exercises
Design exercises can be really awful if you let them.
A Portfolio Hiring Managers Can’t Deny
How to make a portfolio that lands your dream job.
The Things Junior UX Designers Should Do More Of (Not Just Design)
A few tips that growing designers should take into consideration during their first year on the job to accelerate career growth.
How to grow as a Junior UI Designer
Start by learning 5 important design fundamentals.
What every product designer should take away from Lyft’s new UI
Lyft updated their app and made the most frequent elements the most reachable.
Why most redesigns fail
A case study on big name redesign fails and what you can learn from them.
The Inside Story of Reddit’s Redesign
How Reddit and its team of designers redesigned the “front page of the internet.”
All great interfaces have one thing in common
Why great interfaces need time to grow.
What’s the ROI of UX?
The people who hire designers and ask them what their value is clearly don’t know what designers do, don’t really care and don’t really want any value they might contribute.
3 practical cheat sheets for designing attention-grabbing UIs
Improve your design skills with the power of cognitive psychology and user behavior.
People Don’t Scroll (and Other Page Length Myths)
A few myths to avoid and guidelines to follow when writing your page content.
Vital UX skills that few designers have, and how to develop them
Actionable insights for critical skills few designers have.
Common webpage design mistakes
Simple layout and design tips to help you create a stunning webpage.
10 rules for better dashboard design
Tips on designing dashboards — from defining the purpose of designing at the end.
7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design
Improving your designs with tactics instead of talent.
7 Rules of Using Radio Buttons vs Drop-Down Menus
Radio buttons and drop-downs should be used in certain scenarios to make it easier for a user to select a given input.
10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make
Revisiting principles from Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
3 rapid prototyping exercises to improve your UX skills
By practicing these rapid prototyping exercises you can train yourself to think through solutions faster and to always validate your ideas.
The 9 Rules of Design Research
Tips to understand customers and do research to support our design decisions.
3 Awesome User Onboarding Flows for Web
Looking at the onboarding flow for Dropbox, Netflix, and Canva.
Use these top 10 tips when you design for forms
Some best practice in form design.
My 6-point microcopy checklist for non-UX writers
Use this checklist to make your writing clear and to the point.
Product Design: Expectations vs Reality
Some of the mistakes we make and the expectations we have when designing digital products.
Seeing vs. reading
The key to creativity is to alternate between those two thinking modes.
Why Small Teams Win And Bigger Ones Fail
How many people do you need to design a great product?
The Intuitive and the Unlearnable
Why some designs won’t ever stop sucking.
How do you design a design doc?
Tips on creating design documentation.
What web designers need to know about Hick’s Law
How to apply Hick’s law to your UX design.
How to develop an eye for Design
By routinely analyzing other apps, you’ll develop your product thinking and get better at designing apps yourself.
Ever wonder why the most popular apps are starting to look the same?
Designers can spend more time focusing on what really matters.
How Not to Design a Product Like Everyone Else’s
Why all the products on the market look the same?
The Evolution of UX Process Methodology
The UX process is confusing even to most designers.
The Psychology of Design
We can use some key principles from psychology as a guide for designing how people actually are.
DNA of a Designer
The traits of strategic designers and how they vary.
Only One Deliverable Matters
Only the product matters. Everything else gets thrown away when you ship.
How focusing on the customer (not the competition) brought us +1 million signups
Don’t assume you know what customers want. You have to look at the data.
Good to great UI animation tips
Practical suggestions to improve your UI micro-interactions.
How To Design Emotional Interfaces For Boring Apps
By using positive stimuli we can make users feel more excited, less distracted, and ultimately happier.
Delicious Digital Design Process
A guide on how to survive in the digital design competitive world.
Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)
Jared Spool gives his thoughts on why we can’t reduce user experience to a single number.
Design for People, Use People Language
Pay attention to the way you talk about the work you’re doing.
Designing Tables for Reusability
Designing a standard table UI pattern that could be used across multiple product lines with different use cases and different target users.
Creating User-friendly forms
Some tips to make your forms easier to use.
Gamification: A guide for designers to a misunderstood concept
How to build a gamification system the right way.
The Methods UX Professionals Use
An overview of how common methods are used and how their use has changed over time.
The biggest WTF in design right now
What are user flows and why you need to use them?
User flow is the new wireframe
An illustrated guide on the different ‘resolutions’ of user flows, and when to use them.
User Journey Maps or User Flows, what to do first?
The differences between user journey maps and user flows and which one to focus on first.
Overflow
User flow diagramming tool for designers.
Laws of UX
Guidelines for designers to consider when building UIs.
Design in Tech Report 2018
Examining how design trends are revolutionizing the entrepreneurial and corporate ecosystems in tech.
The Design Genome Project
Explore the DNA of the world’s best product design teams.
100 example UX problems
A list of common UX problems to challenge and inspire designers.
Streamline 3.0
Over 30,000 icons in 3 distinct weights. It’s the only icon set you’ll ever need.
React for Designers
Learn how to build and animate your site from scratch using React.
Humaaans
Mix and match illustrations of people with a design library.
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