You might be well-aware of many UX processes that you are using in your daily job, but there are many more processes that you can utilise to change your strategy, or to bring a fresh approach to your designs. Let’s look at 20 most uncommon ones —

1. Abstraction Ladder

Developed in 1939 by an American Linguist (S.I. Hayakawa), Abstraction Ladder or Ladder of Abstraction is a mental model that helps you describe the level of abstraction and level of concreteness in your designs. …

When you think about death, you also think about the ways in which you can die, and not all of them are peaceful or pleasant. In medieval times, there used to be many creative ways to execute people, but this story isn’t about that.

This story is about a billionaire heir, someone who ‘should ideally’ have a lot of protection, a lot of security wherever he goes, and yet he was killed in the prime of his age.

This story is about none other than a Rockefeller — Michael Clark Rockefeller, the fifth child of the governor of New York and the future US Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller. …

A set of assumptions is something that we designers always start with, whenever we start a new project, but there are a few assumptions that we should never believe in, and let’s see what they are —

Never assume that your users know what they want

Users are like those children who will be really happy if you give them a toy to play with, but soon enough they will be enticed with a new, shiny toy in the market, and want that instead. The dropout rate of new apps and games is usually high. There is a curve that every product follows, and after peak success, comes decline. …

When the days are short and nights begin early, people gather in groups to narrate scary stories and frightening tales to each other, to keep the adrenaline rush high and to stay alert during the dark-times.

But this story does not need such a setting, because it is scary enough to be read even during the bright lights of summer. This is a story about Diogo Alves, also known as ‘Aqueduct Murderer’. He was a serial killer who killed around seventy people just in a span of four years, from 1836 to 1840.

And the most surprising thing about Alves is that, you can visit him even today. He still lives, even though it’s been more than a century to his death. If you are planning to visit Lisbon any soon, you can also add another task to your ‘to-do-list’ — to visit the Faculty of Medicine at University of Lisbon, where the scientists have preserved his head in a near-perfect condition in formaldehyde solution. Too much respect for a serial killer, you might think? But there are reasons why this act was performed. …

UX Design

As a user experience or a product designer, you are supposed to tackle design problems almost everyday in your job, and that is an essential ingredient to being a designer itself.

Even when you appear as a potential candidate, interviewing for a company, you want to come out as someone who has brilliant thinking approach, and a great problem-solving skill set.

Without which, you are just another run-of-the-mill designer who changes his/her resume on as-needed-basis for different job openings.

You don’t want to come off as that. You want to show that if the company is looking for a UX/product designer — you are the right person for the job, because you have that specialised niche skill-set that they are looking for. …

Getting a job

A resume or curriculum vitae (CV) is one of the most essential things while applying for a job. Now, after coronavirus pandemic, many people have been rendered jobless by their former employers and many new graduates and post-graduates are out in the market, looking for a job.

A CV is essentially the first step to any job application. Before you get to an interview or are given an assignment to solve, its your CV that is screened and analysed to see if your skill-set matches the requirements or not.

For this story, I talked to two people, one of them is a product manager in a bustling start-up in India, and the other is the head of human resource department from my former company. They agreed to help me understand some things from the hiring front, things that a candidate seldom knows. …

The Collector- Second runner up for November writing challenge

Urinating is an important activity in the human body, but it is celebrated wide and loud in Belgium. Chocolates, waffles, fries, beer, and piss — this statue will remind you to take a leak!

If you ever visit the wonderful country of Belgium, you will definitely make a trip to the Grand-Place, which is a major tourist spot in the capital city of Brussels. But once you are in the Grand-Place, you will also spot a crowd taking selfies and clicking pictures of a small statue, placed at a height.

From a distance, you might think it’s a fountain, but on a closer look, you will see that it’s dirtier than that. It’s a bronze statue of a little boy, pissing into a basin. Many people were even drinking water from the same basin, until 2019. Didn’t expect that, did you? But what makes it so famous and what influence it has had on the history of Belgium? …

Love

I found the man of my dreams in my high-school. Well, honestly I didn’t know that he’d become the man of my dreams back then. High school isn’t the time to be imagining 10 years ahead in future, but it surely is the time to explore yourself and maybe get into the first ever relationship of your life.

That is what we did in 2011. We never really felt the need to get out of what we started, and the rest is history. We got married in 2019 and got ourselves a permanent official government-signed deal to stay together.

10 years is a long-time to stay committed to one partner. Some might even find it excruciatingly boring while some might find it fascinating, but in all honesty — it is commitment, a promise and above all, simple stupid love. …