January 6, 2022No Comments

Why Wordle Works

Wordle is like Wheel of Fortune meets Minesweeper, but without any math. But why is it catching like covid?

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July 28, 2021No Comments

Cute does not have Cooties

Some people avoid using the word "cute" because the they are afraid of disenfranchising the 'stereotypical' male demographic. In reality, the idea that the demographic even exists is a manifestation of toxic masculinity.

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November 12, 2019No Comments

UI Designers: Creating component modules instead of screens will save you days of time

When designing using mockups, you’re showing all of the content within the layout. You’re repeating that content endlessly just to display one change on one component.

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November 12, 2019No Comments

A quick note on failing to succeed

We only build our prototypes for success, but people learn from failure.

The most difficult part of creating clickable/tappable prototypes for usability testing is how much functionality to include. 99% of the time you’ll create a flow that matches the outcomes you are testing for. There isn’t a lot of extra bandwidth to build in every button on every thing — you just want to test to see if people will naturally move toward the goal you’ve asked them to reach. You’re trying to see that your design has properly informed your user on how to succeed — but people need failure, too.

Part of how humans explore is by opening all the doors and lifting all the covers to see what’s inside. If you let users click on all the things and see what’s under the hood, they’ll have a better sense of where they are and where they should go next.

August 21, 2019No Comments

To be a great logo designer: Practice your Puns

Similar to six degrees from Kevin bacon, puns are essentially finding degrees away from the original concept. Take tree puns. What is one degree away from a tree? Leaves, branches, roots. These are your most common answers. And that’s what many logos are. They are just one degree away from the story they’re trying to tell (What I call low-hanging fruit). But the truly remarkable logos are often telling multiple stories. or finding concepts that are one or two degrees further than the first thing you think of. The first thing that people want to design whenever they are creating logos for services that help others is almost always some variation of hands. Holding hands, hands shaped into hearts. well let’s play the pun game with hands. “Hand”les are a good start. What are handles for? They’re for steadiness, support. That seems like a unique logo mark to try drawing.

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February 25, 2019No Comments

When Marie Kondo starts a UX redesign.

Marie Kondo never says “holy shit” when she sees a disaster home.

Marie looks at piles of mess and disorder and says, “Yes, I can’t wait to help make this better.”

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July 21, 2018No Comments

Design Tiers to Prevent Design Tears

I think of my design process as going through tiers of quality, with a Tier One design being something I’ve come up with within my first 4-6 hours of brainstorming. The problem is, Tier One designs are low-hanging fruit, and the designs you’re looking for are at the top of the tree.

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July 21, 2018No Comments

Teaching Users to Read

Neuromarketing researcher Dr. Christophe Morin, founder and CEO of SalesBrain, tells us that you must first grab your users on a deeper level before you can reach them with facts or features. Applying the principles of obtaining engagement to the onboarding process we get three steps.

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July 21, 2018No Comments

R. U. Cyberpunk?

Fifteen years ago we thought the future would be full of portable gadgets, and we had no idea that they would fit into a piece of metal no thicker than a pancake.

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January 1, 2015No Comments

220 Screens: How to Stay Organized With Your Designs

Keeping consistency in your work not only will save you time from needing to rebuild work that’s already been done, but it’ll keep your team on the same page when new work needs to be created in the future.

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