If you’re a product designer this is one of the most important topics you have to deal with. Braden Kowitz of Google Ventures Design, in his recent post Why you should move that button 3px to the left: “Designers notice the gap between functional and delightful, and that’s why we obsess over the little details. [...]

Continue Reading: Justifying fit and finish

Great post by Zach Holman of Github: You Won’t Regret Positive Feedback: I think our industry does feedback really poorly. I sure as hell do. My first impulse whenever I see a comp is to shit on it. Honestly. Even if it looks great. Especially if it looks great. We instinctively want to pick apart [...]

Continue Reading: Two goals of giving feedback

Product designer David Cole of Quora writes in The Rise of Product Design: “Looking back at the ideas espoused by the UX community, I find their relevance to my work winnowing by the year. Many of the practices seem forged in the fires of consultancy. Advocacy is a repeat theme in UX writing, but is [...]

Continue Reading: Product design replacing UX?

Solid piece by Nick Bilton in the New York Times about the trend of flat UI: The Flattening of Design Several thoughts: 1) I’m not convinced that flat UI is a good thing…in my experience it does make UIs seem simpler but often at the expense of visual priority and affordances. Many flat UIs suffer [...]

Continue Reading: To flat or not to flat?

Interesting piece on how Facebook did UX testing for their new Home software. Some of the more interesting bits include: Did most of the testing on Facebook employees (non-design or development) Utilized diary testing to find out about long-term effects of content (initial reaction is often positive, wanted to see how people liked it over [...]

Continue Reading: How Facebook did UX testing for Home

Cindy Alvarez makes a great point about how people talk about products…when talking about using something new we usually talk about what we’re replacing. She suggests these comments take one of several forms: Now that I use X, I’ve stopped using Y Using X means I no longer need to do Y X is much [...]

Continue Reading: Your product is replacing something…what is it?

My good friend and colleague Dan Ritzenthaler has written Wireframes: A good communication tool, a poor design tool, an article that captures his insights on a lot of the conversations we’ve had lately at HubSpot. Dan is not dismissive of wireframes, but he doesn’t think they’re a good design tool. Instead, Dan says that wireframes [...]

Continue Reading: Wireframes are dead. Long live wireframes.

Recently I had the honor to be interviewed by Des Traynor for the excellent Intercom blog. Des and I talked about the controversy around whether wireframes are dead (they are , about working and designing remotely, as well as the role of metrics in the future of design. Des is a great interviewer, asks piercing [...]

Continue Reading: My thoughts on wireframing, remote working, and the role of metrics in design

A nice little slide deck called Stop thinking up startup ideas. This point is worth repeating. Don’t imagine ideas that don’t exist, solve existing problems instead. So instead of “hey wouldn’t it be cool if…?” it’s more like “hey, did you know that…?”. It’s a small change of words, yes, but the first question is [...]

Continue Reading: Which problems to build product from?

I recently wrote up a really valuable lesson we learned from the Google Ventures design team, that applies to much more than design: Always be Capturing. “‘Always be capturing’ is about the habit of continuously recording the value from your conversation. For example: If you’re talking about a new concept, you should be sketching it [...]

Continue Reading: Always be capturing: a valuable tip for effective meetings