If you can’t hire a designer it’s probably because you don’t have a design culture.

Continue Reading: Hire two designers, not one

It seems like everyone is hiring designers! They’re hiring product designers, UX designers, creative directors, directors of design, UI designers, visual designers, etc. There are even acquihires of entire design teams! So…how do you find a good designer? First, a quick backstory for people who have never read my blog before. Until this past August […]

Continue Reading: Tips on how to hire a good designer

I’m noticing an interesting practice emerging when designing for mobile: in-context messages that help you learn or give feedback about an app. Here’s an example: In this example from the New York Times Now app, the designers have dropped in a “quick tip” to let you know that you can swipe left to discover new […]

Continue Reading: In detail: Designing in context for mobile

Since paper receipts aren’t very useful these days, I’ve been choosing recently to have my receipts emailed to me. The other week I filled out my email address on a Square checkout device at my local coffee house (Atomic Cafe) and didn’t think much of it. But when I read the email receipt later I […]

Continue Reading: In detail: Square’s email receipt and feedback flow

Yesterday I wrote about how the design of the Weather.com illustrates the negative influence of advertisers on the site: the experience is degraded almost to the point of ridiculousness. Pages regularly have more than half of their real estate dedicated to linking to terrible, shallow content meant only to get clicks. Another, similar situation. Slate […]

Continue Reading: Paying to get rid of pagination on Slate.com? Really?

One of my motivators for creating the What to Wear daily report was the poor experiences I have had with weather sites. I never seem to enjoy using weather sites to do even the simplest of tasks, like finding out what the weather is right now. It seems as though weather sites are not in […]

Continue Reading: UI Analysis: Screen real estate on Weather.com homepage

If you’ve never read Bret Victor’s Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, now is a great time. Victor rails against what he calls “pictures under glass”, or the pervasive vision of the future which involves touch screens for everything. He points out that humans interact with the world in amazing ways, specifically through our […]

Continue Reading: Pictures under glass

A small observation with huge implications: scrolling is easier than clicking. This affects a lot of things, like whether to place information further down a page or whether to place it behind a drop-down, button, or link. Should we break up our articles like news sites onto 7 different pages? Are people happy clicking through […]

Continue Reading: Scrolling is easier than clicking

I think the future of sharing design work will be more about story and less about visuals.

Continue Reading: Tell your design story

The way to have product team members trust each other and get along is to have them sketch together.

Continue Reading: The importance of sketching in product design