Design Overflow, №2
The most interesting things the Stack Overflow Design team shared for the week of February 13th, 2017
Setting correct expectations. That was this week’s topic. Whether within our product teams, the company, or the 40+ million visitors to Stack Overflow every month; we need to remind ourselves that biggest part of our job as designers isn’t pushing pixels—it’s framing the conversation so we’re getting the right feedback at the right time.
“How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation”
The new site navigation is the first major update to Stack Overflow in 4 years. And the internal and external reception to this update dominated our team’s discussion this week. To kick off this week’s links, Creative Director Kurtis Beavers breaks down the problems with the previous navigation, solutions we explored, and our testing and implementation details.
“Design for the Feedback You Want”
But if you’ve spent hours pushing pixels only to get feedback that the flow doesn’t make sense, not only was that time wasted, but you might be more reluctant to change your design after all of the time you invested. (Emphasis ours)
We completely agree with Denise’s article here. Sharing journey maps, creating wireframes, critiquing designs, doing code reviews—the level of feedback needed (and desired) with each step changes. You want to make sure you’re building the right thing early, and sweating the details later.
“Proper Etiquette for the Advancement of Design”
by Dan Mall, presented at SmashingConf SF 2016
There are so many great pieces of advice in Dan’s talk. Dan practically walks through not only the reasons why designer should care about “setting the table” for design, but how to do it successfully.
“The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love”
by Donna Lichaw, Rosenfield Media
I’ve seen what happens when people feel good about what they can do with your product. They love your product. And your brand. They recommend it to others. They continue to use it over time…as long as you keep making them feel awesome. They even forgive mistakes and quirks when your product doesn’t work as expected, or your brand doesn’t behave as they’d like. People don’t care about your product or brand. They care about themselves. That’s something that you can and should embrace when you build products.
At the core of great products and brands are great stories. So argues Donna Lichaw in her book, The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love. In this short, insightful read, Donna explains why you should consider stories, how they’re structured, and the ways you can apply them to large, medium, or small ways within a product.
“Simple products for (many) users”
by Anisha Jain
A clear purpose enables us to create a North Star that the whole team can rally around, keep any V1 product simple, and communicate a product’s purpose through its design. It also makes it easier to say no to features that don’t matter and identify ones that do for the future.
If you’ve worked on a project long enough, you find you have seemingly competing user expectations at times. Anisha outlines a number of ways you can break down these seemingly impassable chokepoints to deliver great product experiences.
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