Design Brief #131: IoT for Kids, Designing for Mental Health Improvement, Guerilla User Testing Guide
Welcome to the 131st edition of Design Brief. This week, you can read about:
- insights from one of the world’s biggest UX design events,
- IoT design for kids,
- technology for mental health improvement,
- Guerilla Usability Testing in a nutshell,
- and what Dribbble and Rio de Janeiro have in common.
Continue reading and check out the past issues.
In the news
- Adobe launched the Adobe Creative Cloud Plugin Accelerator for hyper-early-stage projects. Read more
- The Smashing Conference, a front-end- and UX-focused event, took place last week in San Francisco. Check out the recap.
Case study of our choice
Designing an IoT app for kids
Building an IoT product for children requires much technical attention. The on-boarding, assembly, and pairing processes should be directed at the parents, but kids should be involved too to make the product fun, intuitive, and interactive. Nadav Rikover, a mentor at Google Launchpad and a Design Sprint Master, decided to jump into the field of designing IoT apps targeted at kids and ran usability testing to discover the full potential of SmART Sketcher, a smart projector that will teach your kids how to draw and write using animated step-by-step instructions. Read more
The designer of the issue
Amrita Marino for an incredibly bold illustration style and the use of vivid colors.
Check out Amrita’s work:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/amritamarino
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BvAE2TflT3l/
- Website: https://amritamarino.com/
Design of the issue
Trove: An Emotional Health Platform for Managing Trauma Recovery
Trove was born as a result of the HackMentalHealth’s mental health hackathon, which aims at exploring the ways in which technology can be used to improve mental health. Mel Smith, along with five other team members, worked on a product that would make recovering from trauma easier. At the end of the hackathon, the team introduced the first iteration of Trove and will continue to build on the project. You can check the progress on Twitter. Read more
Tips and tricks
Check out some of our hand-picked tips useful in every designer’s daily work.
- How to handle the handover process with Zeplin. Read more
- Everything you need to know about Guerilla User Testing: what it is, its history, and how to practice it in a modern agile UX environment. Read more
- How to reduce the ‘Cognitive Overhead’ and prevent users from abandoning your product. Read more
- A curated collection of ten principles inspired by human-centered design and usability thought leaders. Read more
- A simple guide to understanding the role of research in product development. Read more
Open discussion
Andrea Drugay, the UX Writing manager at Dropbox, on UX writing in design ethics: The role of a user experience (UX) writer, sometimes called a product writer, is to provide the user of a product or piece of software with a positive and easy experience. Read more
Couldn’t agree more. One thing that I don’t understand and can’t agree on while designing is shaming users so that they perform actions that are good for us and not for them. It’s actually against user-centric design principles. I strongly believe it will backfire at some point, are you sure you want to take the risk? What’s more, the writing style should also be defined in your Design System principles, so that everyone on the design team is familiar with the products’ tone. I’d also recommend this resource for more on UX writing. If you have any trouble with your product language try posting a question on this facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/microcopy/. ~Dawid
The number of the week
- 6.4 million shots have been posted on Dribbble so far! That’s more or less the same number as the population of Rio de Janeiro.
Hope you enjoyed this issue — the next one will appear in two weeks’ time. To get updates straight to your inbox, sign up here. Meanwhile, hit me up on Twitter, LinkedIn, or leave a comment. I’ll be happy to see what you think.
Until next time,
Dawid Woźniak
