Among many funny and heart-warming stories, Lars Myttig in his book “Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way”, says one particular thing that is very good advice on so many levels. He says that when you are splitting a log of wood, you have to place it on a stomp, and while you’re taking a swing, imagine that you’re going with your ax through both the log and the stomp all the way to the ground. This way you kind of fool your muscles to do more work and make sure the ax goes all the way through. And I believe this piece of advice goes for all those struggling with finding a focus point. …
The recurring nightmare for designers and engineers (Part 1 of 2)
You’re a designer.
Your last project, just like every project before it, ended up in a spiral of chaos.
It started with your neat vector file detailing main screens, but ended up as weeks of back and forth with engineers and stakeholders. Everyone wanted to have a say. Everyone found something missing. So many pieces of UI have plenty of states — no wonder you forgot to draw a whole artboard for every single one of them! Besides — the PM was threatening you with all the deadlines. Oh, and your vector tool started to lag with over 100 artboards detailing the states people have requested to see. Things quickly got hectic! Just when you thought you have some control over this mess, the developers finished the first set of features. You felt the blood rushing to your face — nothing looks the way it’s supposed to. The typography was all messed up. …
Now that you understand the constant tug-of-war between designers and developers (read part one of this article here), let’s talk about how to fix this.
Design Systems and a Single Source of Truth (Part 2 of 2)
The past 10 years brought a lot of maturity to the world of web technologies. CSS became extremely powerful and grew in tools that empowered predictable and sustainable workflows (from preprocessors to modules and style linters). JavaScript became the standard of development for a variety of platforms. It added features increasing readability (maps, arrow functions…) and modularity of code (ES6 Modules). …
Sometimes writing about design tools feels completely absurd.
Majority of the design tools on the market have their roots set in the image paradigm dating back to the 80s. They output either raster (Photoshop) or vector graphics (Sketch, Figma, Xd…). Both formats are great for their original use cases — print and illustrations, but they are barely usable for today’s interface design. For historic reasons, image–based tools gained popularity in the space of interface design and continue to dominate the market today.
Due to the historic misunderstanding on how a design tool for digital product design should work, I have to write this completely obvious statement about inputs: inputs are the fundamental way for users to communicate with digital products. …
It is a duty of designers to make digital spaces accessible for all people.
No one should feel excluded from digital experiences by means of their visual, motor, auditory, speech or cognitive disabilities. Taking care of accessibility is an ethical imperative for designers.
And yet, until now, design tools have completely failed to deliver sufficient ways to help create accessible experiences.
Shockingly, no design tool has invested into the creation of dedicated accessibility features. Researching the subject, I found just two barely working plugins for two of the vector design tools. Their creators had the right intentions and I commend them for the effort. Unfortunately, plugins frequently exist in unstable environments and break thanks to their platform’s updates. The problems of accessibility are way too serious to hang them on third party plugins developed by good-hearted folks. …
UXPin’s 8th birthday this month brought on some deeply nostalgic memories.
Eight years on the design tools market has given us a pretty broad perspective. We’ve seen trends come and go, big companies enter the market and leave, companies with lots of capital doing nearly nothing and small players out–innovating everyone. One could write endlessly about it. I don’t want to bore you, so instead I’ve boiled it down to five specific lessons.
1. Being right is not enough. You have to be right at the right time.
Timing is everything. We’ve experienced it all — we’ve been too early, too late and exactly on time. Only the last group of events strongly benefits business.
Examples of being too early
The first version of UXPin had a flawless real–time collaboration (multiple people editing one design mockup simultaneously. We called it multiplayer design) in… 2011. No-one really cared about it for the first 5 years of UXPin. …
On November 11th UXPin turned eight!
Time flies! In 2010 I was 24, working as a UX Manager at a thriving Polish eCommerce company and, after several unsuccessful attempts to start a tech business (the youthful energy!), I took a break from any serious side projects. However, I still wanted to channel my energy towards something productive; 9 to 5 was never really an option for me. Instead of pursuing dreams of a tech breakthrough, I decided to team up with two friends and enjoy exploring the problem that bothered us for years — design — engineering collaboration. Without any business goals in mind, we started to think about helping designers and engineers work better together. …
Building things was always my passion. As a kid I spent countless hours playing with weird Russian metal construction sets (I guess only kids from the former Eastern bloc know what I’m talking about), wooden blocks, LEGO… I was the kind of kid that disappeared into his own world for hours, completely consumed by creating the next great thing.
And while over the years plenty of things about me have changed (there’s barely a cell in my body that remained untouched, for an interesting discussion check this reddit thread), the passion of building has not changed a bit.
The task of creation fascinates me so much that over 7 years ago I co-founded a startup focused on helping designers and engineers create products together. A tiny side project at first, UXPin, grew to be a real business helping the world leading companies scale their design and development. Thanks to our design, prototyping and design systems tools companies can build better products faster. …
Design just doesn’t scale like engineering. As teams grow, your processes and products will eventually break.
That’s why we’ve gathered 15 experts to share their best practices for scaling design successfully.
On Oct 3–6, we’re hosting our third virtual event: UX at Scale 2017. Learn from UX leaders at Salesforce, Atlassian, Airbnb, Google, IDEO, Autodesk, and many others.
Thanks to sponsorship from Salesforce and Atlassian, the event is totally free to join from anywhere. Based on past attendance, we’re expecting 25–30,000 registrants.
Topics include: design systems, building UX teams, calculating UX ROI, automating processes, crafting design culture, cross-functional collaboration, and more. …
Introducing the 2017–2018 Enterprise UX Industry Report
User experience has historically been an afterthought for B2B products. Professionals had to use whatever the company paid for and the richness of features was deemed more attractive than a stunning experience.
In a selling process run by ‘line items’, the user always loses.
In recent years, the situation has changed completely. The lower cost of software development and easier availability of capital for software projects has created a hypercompetitive market. Today, for every task and process, companies can choose from multiple comparable solutions.
There’s only one thing that sets them apart — user experience. …
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