Categories
Design Product Management

Design Portfolio Site

When I’m sourcing for a Product Designer, I see a lot of portfolios.

Like, a lot a lot.

And today, it takes so long to judge if you are aesthetically a good fit for us.

In the last five years, there’s been a trend for product designers to tell more about their process. How they’ve been more helpful in other parts than just the aesthetic.

I understand why it’s like this.

Product Designers are becoming more and more product-focused (as opposed to design focused). Which is great. I LOVE a Product Designer who will be my partner in crime, not just my pixel buddy.

What I usually see on these portfolio sites, in order:

  1. Overview of the project
  2. Paragraphs about the research process
  3. Pictures of sticky notes, and other assets from brainstorming
  4. Early wireframes
  5. The final design

Problem is, when I’m searching for a Product Designer, I need to start at the final result.

Right now, I’m looking for someone who can extend our app and our brand. Not start it from scratch, not overhaul it.

And for that, I just need to see what your general style is.

Then I want to go deep on your process to see how you’d fit with us.

I also want you to talk about results. Talk about the impact your design had on the goals. Show me that you understand the spreadsheet side of your role, too.

What I want to see on a product designer portfolio site:

  1. Overview of the project
  2. The final design
  3. Research process
  4. Wireframes
  5. Results

Categories
Design Usability

Overlooking UX is Overlooking Your Customers

UX design is hard, regardless of platform. This is a job that most people don’t truly understand.

A UX designer’s job isn’t to make the experience “pretty” or “nice”, it’s to make the experience usable. To guide the users to take the actions that the business needs them to take in order to solve the user’s problem.

You can spot a great UX designer a mile away.

A great UX designer understands what’s important in the interface. A great UX designer understands the typical workflows and maturity of their existing (and potentially next-up) users. A great UX designer deeply understands the problems that their users want their solution to help solve.

A great UX designer understands their user beyond the app. They know how and when and where to best reach them. They understand what phrases connect with their users and when to use them.

A great UX designer understands what’s possible “under the hood”. They know what the front-end and back-end are capable of. They know what devices their users use and tailor the experience to that.

And all of this while strengthening existing branding and interface consistency.

A great UX designer is an invaluable partner to their product and engineering counterparts.

UX design is not an easy job to understand, and it’s not an easy job to do. But it’s certainly more than most companies give it credit for.

And if you overlook the importance of a great UX designer, you’re overlooking your customers.

Categories
Design

Shitty First Drafts

As long as I can remember, it has always (always, always) taken me three attempts to make something right. Whether it’s the smallest bit of graphic design, the most important copy for an email blast, or even a recipe attempt – it always, always takes at least three tries before I make something that I would even consider sharing with my closest allies.

Thinking about the three attempts, they almost always follow the same pattern:

  • The first attempt was just to get the idea out of my head.
  • The second attempt was either starting completely over (because attempt one didn’t work), or beginning to hone in on the idea.
  • By the third attempt, I am finally starting to get somewhere.

I thought this was just me. Maybe, I wondered, I’m 1/3 slower than the most genius designers, writers or bakers out there.

Turns out, I’m not unique (just like everyone else)!

Talking to other creatives – especially designers and writers – they report the exact same thing: things don’t really start to come into focus until the third attempt at something.

  • The first draft is the “down draft”. For me, it’s about getting it out of my head and down on paper.
  • The second draft (assuming that I didn’t just immediately throw away your first try entirely) is the “up draft”. I start to clean it up a little bit here and there. Smoothing some edges out in the idea or presentation.
  • The third draft (again, assuming I haven’t bailed in shame and private embarrassment) is the “dental draft”. I wish I could take credit for this awesome name, but it was in fact Anne Lamott In Bird by Bird. She named a third draft the dental draft to “check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy”.

Once I came to terms that this is just the creative process, I could embrace it and stop feeling like feel like less of a sham.

Categories
Design Product Management Tech

All About the Creation of Disney’s MagicBand Program

The story of how a group of Disney engineers worked on a secret project to breathe new life into an aging Walt Disney World audience.

Disney’s MagicBand is part park ticket, part credit card and part room key. But the result, and the story behind it, is typical Disney magic.

The technology is, obviously, very cool. But what’s particularly inspiring about these articles is how it tells the story of Disney designing this wristband as the way to remove every friction point from a Walt Disney World vacation experience.

These are pretty long reads, but are totally worth the time.

Categories
Customer Experience Design

What Restaurant Website Designers Can Learn from a Utility Company

national-grid-quick-pay

Now this. is usability that solves a problem: when you login to the National Grid website (our electric utility company), you are immediately given a one-click option to pay your bill with your stored bank account information.

Since this is literally the only reason I ever go to the National Grid website, it’s a great time-saver for me.

(Now I just wish that restaurants website designers would understand that all anyone wants from a restaurant website is the menu, hours and a way to make a reservation.)

Categories
Design Usability Web Design

The #1 Rule of User Interface Design

Make clickable things appear clickable. Don’t make unclickable things appear to be clickable.

Print this off and put it next to your monitor. It’s not particularly clever, but it’ll save you hours of work by the time it gets to the product manager for review.

Categories
Design Examples Web Design

Authentic Design, or: “Removing Depth Doesn’t Solve the Problem”

Smashing Magazine has a great post today about the new “minimalistic” or “flat” trend that is becoming increasingly popular lately.

While I admit I’m in the middle of a redesign of BoxRowSeat to make it more “minimalistic” and “flat” (with an emphasis on “responsive”… I know, I hate myself, too), this article hits on all the main points about what’s important if you want to follow this style. From the article:

Outlook 2013

It would be a mistake to rigidly apply a minimalist design aesthetic to an interface as a style in the hope of making the interface simpler and more digitally “authentic.” For example, ruthlessly eliminating visuals such as shadows, colors and varied background styles would not necessarily make an interface easier to use. In some cases, it would achieve the opposite by undermining hierarchy and focus, which were established by those very shadows and background colors.

Outlook 2013’s interface was updated to fit Windows 8’s modern theme. But with the interface being flattened, all of the content and menus were merged onto a single white plane, becoming more cluttered as a result.

Read the (long, but completely worth it) article at Smashing Magazine.

Categories
Design

All About MailChimp’s Logo Redesign

It’s always a little shocking seeing a company’s new logo, but MailChimp has done the impossible: made it both noticeable to people who care and unnoticeable to people who don’t.

Print

My new favorite blog, Fast Company’s design-specific blog FastcoDesign, has the entire write up of the process here.

 

 

Categories
Design

How to Make the Perfect Pinterest Pin

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This is the perfect Pinterest image, according to Curalate, a Philadelphia startup that specializes in image-based social media marketing on Instagram and Pinterest.

According to this article on Wired, Curalate has been analyzing Pinterest data for about a year, and have determined that there are six things that make a Pinterest pin re-pinnable:

  • Little background
  • Multiple colors
  • Lots of red
  • Moderate light and color
  • Portrait style (vertical orientation)
  • No human faces

Most of that list makes sense, but “no human faces” surprised me. From Curalate: “We think of Facebook as a network of people, and Foursquare as a network of places. Pinterest is a network of things … and it seems like on a network of things, faces are actually a distraction.”

Categories
Design

Classic Movie Posters Minimalized

plakaty4_vector(BEHANCE)From what is becoming my favorite blog, Fast Company’s co.design blog has published a designer’s interpretation of movie posters in a minimalistic style.

The designs rigorously adhere to the same mold: a circle overlaid by two diagonals, all inscribed in a square. The structure seems stringent, but, as Krasnopolski found out, it could actually yield “plenty of possibilities.” His poster for the original Star Wars, for example, consists of a grey circle diametrically bisected by a single line and set on a black background.

See all of the minimalistic movie posters here.