Sales design is a type of service design with its own best practices.
I’ve been designing for sales for the past five years, at Salesforce as a consultant & DocuSign as a product designer, and have come up with a working playbook.
Defining sales design
Service design enables all types of employees, with tangible and notable intangible design which contributes to a better customer experience.
Sales design enables sellers, which makes the buying experience better for the prospect/customer.
As the lines of sales and service blur, it’s important to bolster sales which creates a better service. This is a more focused goal that deals with the people selling first-time buyers, selling renewals to existing customers, and…
This alternative leads to a clearer direction.
Designers often get the visual ball rolling on a new project with a few ‘style tiles’ to help a client pick a visual direction. They look like headless UI kits with color swatches, typography samples, and graphs out of context. The problem with the format is they compare surface-level details, not the experience of the product. When you show surface-level details, you will receive surface-level comments. “I don’t like the red” or “mix these two together” is usually the subjective feedback. This puts the designer in a bit of a pickle without a clear direction on how to make decisions…
A guide to where to start your design career
The original medium for this content was a zoom lecture for Flatiron School students entering the job market.
Trying to figure out where to start your UX career sucks. The landscape for UX jobs was never that clear for me until I started bucketing types of companies I encountered. Let’s clear the air, understand the landscape, talk out some job rejection therapy, and get that bread. Mileage may vary.
7 years ago, I started working as a UI Design Intern. I’ve held many titles since then, like an Associate UI Designer, UI Designer, Senior UI/UX Designer, Experience Consultant, Senior Experience…
“As a European, I am deeply offended by this article.” — lit comments section 😉
The bashing of Fahrenheit is readily found everywhere, while the usability concerns of Celsius are not discussed because it is a part of the sacred metric system. The metric system is great, but Celsius does not need to be a part of it. All arguments against Fahrenheit end up in the defense of the metric system. What if we could constructively criticize the Celsius scale without promoting the imperial system or attack the metric system and offer a solution?
Removing Celsius from the metric system
For this discussion, let’s separate Celsius from the metric system. Poof—it’s gone. You know why? Not all base units in the…
By the end of a six sprint engagement, stakeholders have to keep track of all your design deliverables on top of other technical documentation, presentations, workshop outputs, etc. I’ve had this issue time and time again during agile sprints. Now I use InVision to hold all of our teams’ deliverables by creating a landing page and sharing out one link which tells the full engagement story. Here’s a template and how it works.
Update: I wrote this just before InVision released the linking in Craft across pages in sketch. The principles and paradigm is the same if you use that…
Refined résumés for people who want jobs
I’ve been disappointed with the thousands of garbage résumé templates saturating the market. There is no grace in a stacked and centered grey box. And no dignity in a skewed headshot and faux paperclip. Nothing strikes the right balance. It’s like the early days of the web out there—it’s scary.
HAVING A PHOTO, ICONS, or PSUEDO INFOGRAPHICS ON THERE DOESN’T MAKE YOU COOL.
I am a designer who makes custom icons and infographics amongst other things, but I NEVER want to see icons on your résumé. Delete please. And your profile photo—kill it. Color without purpose, die. …
Small batch no. 002
Check out small batch no. 1 too!
The point of this series is to highlight the little things — those subtly annoying problems that don’t get solved because they “don’t have a big impact.” While they may not be top-of-mind, these little annoyances impede our ability to build truly delightful things.
We’ll explore some UX mosquito bites as if we’re this guy trying to wash his car:
Small batch no. 001
The point of this series is to highlight the little things — those subtly annoying problems that don’t get solved because they “don’t have a big impact.” While they may not be top-of-mind, these little annoyances impede our ability to build truly delightful things.
We’ll explore some UX hangnails like Larry David trying to exit a parking garage and see if we can’t cook up a locally-grown-artisan-hand-crafted cold-pressed solution.
The subtle nuisance of the day:
84% of users don’t open emails on their native desktop mail*, yet the all too common ‘mailto:’ link is thrown onto individuals/agencies portfolio’s all over the interwebs…
Magic sauce delivery from your UI Designer
Here’s a slice of a product design process—synthesizing a client’s brand and turning it into product concepts that then lead to a full visual design system. This article is also featured on the InVision blog.
Step 1: Brand intake
Different agencies have their spin on this step so this isn’t the end all be all process, but what I’ve been a part of is a hybrid of the Cooper Brand Experience Workshop. Here is a crude outline of the workshop:
- Grab around 100 photos of different products and other things while keeping your clients industry in mind (cars, watches, packaging, abstract shapes, data visualizations…
