Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://abduzeedo.com/morfos-design-merging-technology-and-nature-branding

Morfos Design: Merging Technology and Nature in Branding

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Morfos Design blends technology and nature in their architectural branding and visual identity with dynamic design and biophilic elements.

Morfos Design, a Milan-based architectural consultancy, specializes in creating mission-critical control rooms and innovative buildings. Their work draws on Italian design traditions and ergonomic principles, striking a balance between technology, nature, and user-centric solutions.

The project scope included research, strategy, logo creation, and crafting a comprehensive visual identity system. Morfos’ visual identity was designed to convey a harmonious blend of technology and nature, emphasizing key elements like user-centrism, innovation, and biophilia.

Central to the project is the custom-designed “MORFOS” wordmark. This logo reflects the brand’s core values—sensibility, dynamism, and technology. The letters’ fluid forms communicate movement and energy, while remaining adaptable to various compositions. The flexibility of the wordmark ensures that it integrates seamlessly across multiple platforms, enhancing the brand’s visual storytelling.

The visual language of Morfos Design takes inspiration from natural forms, merged with technological sophistication. With a minimalist color palette and modern typography, the design reinforces a connection to nature—integral to Morfos’ philosophy. The system’s flexibility ensures a cohesive brand narrative, whether in print, animations, or 3D motion.

An innovative vignette-system expands on the logo’s integration into the visual identity. These vignettes, inspired by natural shapes, are dynamic and adaptable, contributing to a fluid visual system. They can be animated or modified, reinforcing the brand’s emphasis on biophilic design and technological innovation.

By incorporating elements like collaboration and user-centrism, Morfos Design successfully bridges the gap between cutting-edge technology and the calming influence of nature. This visual identity system serves as a testament to their design ethos—creating spaces that are functional, dynamic, and deeply connected to the natural world.

Branding and visual identity artifacts

Credits

Strategy & Concept: Michał Markiewicz
Creative Direction & Design: Michał Markiewicz
Motion & 3D: Kasia Olejarczyk
Graphic Design: Edyta Mucha
Web Design: Edyta Mucha

For more information make sure to check out markiewicz.studio

Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2024/08/how-defend-your-design-process/

Maybe you’ve been there before: You’re in the middle of the design process, and stakeholders expect you to deliver faster. How do you best manage a situation like this? How do you communicate the design process and defend it when stakeholders think the design is taking too long?

Let’s take a closer look at what you can do to clarify false expectations and prevent them in the first place.

This article is part of our ongoing series on UX. You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 — with live UX training coming up this year. Free preview.

Why Stakeholders Ask For Quicker Turnaround

🤔 Polished deliverables hide the process.

When you show someone a polished, final design, they probably won’t see the complexity of the work behind it unless they are a designer themself, of course. That’s the knowledge gap that lies between designers and stakeholders and one of the reasons why stakeholders might make false assumptions about how long the design will take.

🤔 Polished deliverables suggest a fast production time.

Not familiar with the design process, stakeholders often track value in UX deliverables in an attempt to “measure design” and the progress made. And that can lead to a dilemma: When more final, polished deliverables arrive quickly, stakeholders also assume a faster production time. The real value of design, however, lies in the quality of the process behind it.

How To Get Support From Stakeholders

Design is all about well-orchestrated feedback loops. For different audiences, from customers and designers to developers and stakeholders. Cutting corners breaks these feedback loops. The result is poor inputs that lead to poor outcomes — often reversible but sometimes damaging for years to come.

Protecting the design process isn’t only in the interest of the designers but, most importantly, in the interest of the user and the business. So, how can we advocate for it?

✅ Highlight user value.

One mistake to avoid is to present deliverables as “finished.” Emphasize that you are still testing and highlight that the design process is a way to maximize user value and that business value comes from user value, not the other way around. No productivity optimization can automate user value, and there is no “later” phase to patch broken design work.

✅ Ask for uninterrupted time.

To get the time you and your team need to design, it might be an option to suggest uninterrupted times for heads-down design work. You could also suggest shifting priorities or reducing the overall scope.

✅ Be sincere about the process.

Also, remember to calibrate expectations: You don’t know how your stakeholders work, so you shouldn’t expect that they know and understand the design process. The more sincere you are about what’s needed to be ready, the more likely you are to get understanding and support, rather than fast turnaround requests.

✅ Visualize progress.

As designers, we often get defensive, not showing the work until we feel that it’s in good shape. Personally, I found it remarkably helpful to show the design progress to stakeholders early and repeatedly instead. Not to ask for a personal opinion on the design but if they think it actually helps deliver user value.

A great technique to visualize the complexity of UX work is event storming — we’ll take a closer look at how it works in a second. To keep stakeholders on top of things, it might also be a good idea to report progress proactively. So why not opt for a short, two-minute video update once a week?

Exercise: Event Storming

The most impactful way to be transparent about the process and explain why design takes time is to visualize it. Not as abstract Double-Diamond or Triple-Diamond diagrams, but as messy, real-world sticky notes on a huge Miro or FigJam board — with all the pieces of work needed to get to final deliverables.

How To Run An Event Storming Session

Basically, we bring everyone involved in the project on board for a 2-hour session. We set orange sticky notes as events required for the success of the project on a timeline. Then, we cluster these events and break them across lanes, with everything from user testing and stakeholder approval to research tasks and design initiatives.

The resulting timeline visualizes the process and acts as a reference for the work to be done, or the work completed. Sometimes, we add multiple lanes to map the work across different UX activities, e.g., UX research, UX metrics, and so on. Your timeline might also include any other teams and domains that are relevant to the work — think technical details, risks, stakeholder engagement, user testing, and others.

The Value Of Event Storming

To me, event storming creates a much more honest and real visualization of the design process compared to any diamond diagrams that we often use. It’s messy, it’s complex, it’s difficult, and it matches the complexity of real life. Plus, it’s customized to the needs of a specific project, with people who must be involved for successful delivery.

I can’t emphasize enough just how incredibly impactful this little exercise can be to create a shared understanding about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and what is required from all teams for a successful delivery. I hope it will help you defend your process the next time stakeholders ask for a quicker turnaround. 🙌🏽

Further Reading

“Design Without Process, Or The Form Factor Trap,” by Pavel Samsonov
“How To Increase Heads-Down Time To Design,” by Sungjoon Steve Won
“How Can You Find Time To Design?,” by José Torre
“Product Design: Too Much Work, Too Little Time,” by Tess Gadd

Meet Smart Interface Design Patterns

You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

Meet Smart Interface Design Patterns, our video course on interface design & UX.

Jump to the video course →

100 design patterns & real-life
examples.
10h-video course + live UX training. Free preview.

Original Source: https://ecommerce-platforms.com/articles/can-you-sell-directly-from-printful

Can you sell directly from Printful? Until very recently, the answer was “no”. While Printful’s wide range of integration options allowed creators to embrace a host of sales channels, there was no direct storefront option available from Printful itself – until now.

In June 2024, Printful launched it’s “Quick Stores” service – a free solution that allows beginners to create a simple store and start selling products instantly, without a traditional ecommerce platform.

Here, I’ll tell you exactly how this feature works, and explore some of the other options you have for selling Print on Demand products with Printful.

Can You Sell Directly from Printful?

Yes, you can sell directly through Printful, as of June 2024. However, there are some limitations. First, it’s worth noting that Printful’s solution for direct selling isn’t the same as what you’d get from some other POD companies. There’s no “marketplace”, like you’d get with Spring or Redbubble.

Instead, Printful offers access to a simple storefront where you can list the items you’ve designed with Printful, and start accepting payments. The experience is very similar to using Printify’s Pop-up Store solution. I should say, while the “Quick Stores” feature is great for beginners, and free to use, it’s not going to give you the same functionality as a full ecommerce platform.

You can’t really customize much of your store, beyond the name, logo, and your product names and descriptions. There are no themes to choose from, and you can’t sell any other products that aren’t created specifically with Printful.

Additionally, unlike Printify’s Pop-Up Store service, Quick Stores from Printful are currently only available for retailers and sellers in the US. This means not only can you not launch a store if you’re outside of the United States, but you can’t sell to global audiences either.

How to Sell with Printful’s Quick Stores Feature

Provided you (and your customers) are located in the US, getting started with Printful’s Quick Stores feature is very simple. All you need to do is sign up for a free account with Printful, and visit either the “Quick Stores” page, or your Printful dashboard. If Quick Stores are available in your region, you’ll find the option to create one in the “Stores” tab of your account.

Printful will walk you through the process of setting up your store, asking you to choose a business name, add your logo, and configure payment and shipping details.

Once you have your store, you can design your products in Printful’s Design Maker, or add the ones you’ve already created. You can pick which product images you want to showcase, set your prices, and add descriptions to engage your customers. Then, you simply share the unique link for your store with your customers, and they can make purchases from the link directly.

With Quick Stores, Printful takes care of the entire fulfillment processes, applying standard shipping rates to each purchase automatically. Every month, Printful will automatically transfer the profits from your sales to your bank account (provided your payout amount exceeds $25).

Try Printful Quick Stores

Other Options for Selling with Printful

The Quick Stores feature from Printful is excellent for beginners who want to start selling online without managing a full ecommerce platform, or using a marketplace like Amazon. However, it’s still pretty limited. First, for now, you can only sell in the US. Printful might expand this feature to other regions in the future, of course.

Secondly, you’re not going to get a lot of the features you would get with a full ecommerce platform, such as access to marketing tools, themes for store design, or the option to sell various different products and services.

The good news is there are other ways to sell on Printful. In fact, Printful integrates with dozens of platforms, including marketplaces like Etsy, Ebay and Amazon, and ecommerce platforms like Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace.

You can even sell through TikTok shop! Getting started is simple (and free). Start by visiting the Printful website and creating an account. You can do this by clicking the Sign Up or Get Started buttons on the website. Log in with your email, Facebook, Google, or Apple ID, and a password.

Next, follow these steps:

Step 1: Connect to your Chosen Sales Channel

Once you have an account, you can connect Printful to dozens of sales channels. Simply click on the “Stores” tab in the left-hand menu, then select “Choose Platform.”

Printful will guide you through the process of connecting your store step-by-step. Notably, some connections take a little longer to set up than others. For instance, Etsy, Shopify, and Square Online stores can be set up in a few minutes. However, other platforms take a little more work.

Step 2: Choose your Products

Once you’ve connected your storefront, the next step is choosing your products. There are more than 300 options to choose from, ranging from home accessories to t-shirts and sweatshirts. Click on Product Catalog in your dashboard to start browsing through options, and use the filter buttons to narrow down your choices.

After you find a product, you want to customize, click on Create Product Template, and this will take you to Printful’s design maker. When choosing your products, it’s worth keeping a few things in mind, such as the price of the product (how much it’s going to cost you before you add a profit margin), and the printing methods available.

Printful offers Direct-to-Garment, All-Over print, embroidery, and sublimation, sot here are plenty of great ways to customize your catalog. It’s also worth noting that some products are available for express delivery, so you might want to check if this is an option before you decide on your items.

Step 3: Add Your Designs

In the Design Maker, after you’ve selected your products, you can customize each item with unique images and content. You’ll be able to upload images directly, or choose from a library of pre-existing assets. You can also use text presets, clipart, quotes, and premium images to customize products.

If you’re using your own images, it’s worth making sure they’re in PNG or JPEG format before you upload them to the platform. This will boost your chances of a high-quality print.

Once you’ve chosen your images and text, you can move them into the ideal position on your products, adjust your design and text to fit within the print area, and more. Then, click “Save to Templates”, to prepare your product for selling.

Step 4: Adding Products to your Store

When you’re done designing, click on the Product Templates tab on the left-hand menu, and hover over the item you want to sell. When the three dot “menu” button appears, select Add to Store.

This will connect you immediately to the sales channel you’ve connected to Printful.

Add the mockups you’ve created with Printful to a new product page, and include a description. You’ll also need to choose a price for your product. Remember, when setting your prices, you’ll need to account for the base price of the product (Printful’s fees), the shipping fees, and the profit margin you want to end up with. I’d recommend a profit margin of about 30-40%.

Click Submit to store to finish.

Step 5: Manage Shipping and Fulfillment

After your products are added to your store, you’ll need to choose your shipping options. Printful offers two options. Flat shipping is the standard option, where you’ll pay set fees based on the products you’re selling and their destination – this is the most cost-effective shipping method.

Alternatively, you can choose “Live shipping”, which calculates the cost of shipping based on the customer’s address and the location of the fulfillment center. There are times when this option can be cheaper, if a customer is located close to a Printful fulfillment center. However, live shipping is only available for some platforms – like Shopify.

When you’ve chosen your shipping options, you have two ways to submit orders to Printful for fulfillment. One option is to manually send order details to Printful through your Printful dashboard. You can do this by clicking on “Product Templates”, hovering over the item, and selecting “Make an Order” when the menu button appears.

Alternatively – and this is the better option in my opinion- you can automate order fulfillment. In the Printful dashboard, go to Settings and select Order. Then, in your Order Import Settings choose to “automatically” fulfil each order, and click Save.

Step 6: Paying Printful

The good news is with Printful, you only need to pay for orders after your customers actually make them, this reduces your upfront costs as a seller. Whenever you submit an order, manually or automatically, you’ll be charged (rather than your customer). The amount you’re charged includes the base price of the product, taxes, shipping, and other fees (like fees for branding).

Notably, you do keep all of the money your customer pays you through your online store. Printful accepts various payment methods, including PayPal, debit, and credit cards.

To set up your payment options, go to the Printful Dashboard, then click on Billing followed by Billing methods.

Click Add new Billing method, and submit your payment details. You can set different billing methods for each sales channel you use, if you prefer.

Alternatively, you can set up a Printful Wallet in the Billing section, which you can add funds to whenever you choose. This is a good way to save yourself some time adding payment details every time a customer makes an order with your store.

Read more:

Printful Review 2024 – Expert Insights on Quality, Pricing, and Services

Printful vs Printify (2024): The Ultimate Comparison of Printify vs Printful Platforms

Can You Make Money with Printful?

Just because Printful doesn’t give you a full ecommerce platform, and currently limits its Quick Stores feature to US sellers, doesn’t mean you can’t make a profit with the solution. If you are based in the US, the new Quick Stores feature is a great way to dive into online selling with minimal effort, and absolutely no upfront costs.

Based on my experience, I’d definitely recommend branching out into a few different sales channels, even if you can use the Quick Stores feature, to boost your revenue.

If you’re based outside of the US, or you want more freedom to design your own storefront and sell to customers all over the world, Printful gives you a ton of integration options to choose from. Plus, it’s one of the most reliable POD companies I’ve reviewed, offering a wide range of high-quality products, and fantastic tools for creators.

The post Can You Sell Directly from Printful? How Does it Work? appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.

Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2024/08/thoughts-after-15-years-spent-ux-design-part2/

In the previous article in my two-part series, I have explained how important it is to start by mastering your design tools, to work on your portfolio (even if you have very little work experience — which is to be expected at this stage), and to carefully prepare for your first design interviews.

If all goes according to plan, and with a little bit of luck, you’ll land your first junior UX job — and then, of course, you’ll be facing more challenges, about which I am about to speak in this second article in my two-part article series.

In Your New Junior UX Job: On the Way to Grow

You have probably heard of the Pareto Rule, which states that 20% of actions provide 80% of the results.

“The Pareto Principle is a concept that specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. The principle was named after the economist Vilfredo Pareto.”

— “The Pareto Principle, a.k.a. the Pareto Rule”

This means that some of your actions will help you grow much faster than others.

But before we go into the details, let’s briefly consider the junior UX designer path. I think it’s clear that, at first, juniors usually assist other designers with simple but time-consuming tasks. Then, the level of complexity and your responsibilities start increasing, depending on your performance.

So, you got your first design job? Great! Here are a few things you can focus on if you want to be growing at a faster pace.

Chase For Challenges

The simple but slow way to go is to do your work and then wait until your superiors notice how good you are and start giving you more complex tasks. The problem is that people focus on themselves too much.

So, to “cut some corners,” you need to actively look for challenges. It’s scary, I know, but remember, people who invented any new groundbreaking UX approach or a new framework you see in books and manuals now used their intuition first. You have the whole World Wide Web full of articles and lectures about that. So, define the skill you want to develop, spend a day reading about this topic, find a real problem, and practice. Then, share what you did and get some feedback. After a few iterations, I bet you will be assigned the first real task for your practice!

Use Interfaces Consciously

Take the time to look again at the screenshot of the Amazon website (from Part One):

User interfaces didn’t appear in their present form right from the start. Instead, they evolved to their current state over the span of many years. And you all were part of their evolution, albeit passively — you registered on different websites, reset your passwords quite a few times, clicked onboarding screens, filled out short and long web forms, used search, and so on.

In your design work, all tasks (or 99% of them, at least at the beginning) will be based on those UX patterns. You don’t need to reinvent the bicycle; you only need to remember what you already know and pay attention to the details while using the interfaces of the apps on your smartphone and on your computer. Ask yourself:

Why was this designed this way?
What is not clear enough for me as a user?
What is thought out well and what is not?

All of today’s great design solutions were built based on common sense and then documented so that other people can learn how to re-use this knowledge. Develop your own “common sense” skill every day by being a careful observer and by living your life consciously. Notice the patterns of good design, try to understand and memorize them, and then implement and rethink them in your own work.

I can also highly recommend the Smart Interface Design Patterns course with Vitaly Friedman. It provides guidelines and best practices for common components in modern interfaces. Inventing a new solution for every problem takes time, and too often, it’s just unnecessary. Instead, we can rely on bulletproof design patterns to avoid issues down the line. This course helps with just that. In the course, you will study hundreds of hand-picked examples, from complex navigation to filters, tables, and forms, and you will work on actual real-life challenges.



Learn How to Present Your Work

The ability to convey complex thoughts and ideas in the form of clear sentences defines how effectively you will be able to interact with other people.

This is a core work skill — a skill that you’ll be actually using your whole life, and not only in your work. I have written about this topic in much detail previously:

“Good communication is about sharing your ideas as clearly as possible.”

— “Effective Communication For Everyday Meetings” (Smashing Magazine)

In my article, I have described all the general principles that apply to effective communication, with the most important being: to develop a skill, you need to practice.

As a quick exercise, try telling your friends about the work you do and not to be boring while explaining the details. You will feel that you are on the right track if they do not try to change the topic and instead ask you additional questions!

Gather Feedback

Don’t wait for your yearly review to hear about what you were doing right and wrong. Ask people for feedback and suggestions, and ask them often.

To help them start, first, tell them about your weak side and ask them to tell you their own impressions. Try encouraging them to expand their input and ask for recommendations on how you could fix your weaknesses. Don’t forget to tell them when you are trying to apply their suggestions in practice. After all, these people helped you become better, so be thankful.

Learn Business

I see a lot of designers trying to apply all of their experience to every project, and they often complain that it doesn’t work — customers refuse to follow the entire classical UX process, such as defining User Personas, creating the Information Architecture (IA), outlining the customer journey map, and so on. Sometimes, it happens because clients don’t have the time and budget for it, or they don’t see the value because the designer can’t explain it in a proper way.

But remember that many great products were built without using all of today’s available and tested UX approaches &mdahs; this doesn’t mean those approaches are useless. But initially, there was only common sense and many attempts to get better results, and only then did someone describe something as a working approach and specify all the details. So, before trying to apply any of these UX techniques, think about what you need to achieve. Is there any other way to get there within your time and budget?

Learn how the business works. Talk to customers in business language and communicate the value you create and not the specific approach, framework, or tool that you’ll be using.

“Good UX design is where value comes into the picture. We add value when we transform a product or service from delivering a poor experience to providing a good experience.”

— “The Value of Great UX,” by Jared Spool

Learn How to Make Interfaces Nice-looking

Yes, user experience should be first, but let’s be honest — we also love nice things! The same goes for your customers; they can’t always see the UX part of your work but can always say whether the interface is good-looking. So, learn the composition and color theory, use elegant illustrations and icons, learn typography, and always strive to make your work visually appealing. Some would say that it’s not so important, but trust me, it is.

As an exercise, try to copy the design of a few beautifully looking interfaces. Take a look at an interface screen, then close it and try to make a copy of it from memory. When you are done, compare the two and then make a few more adjustments in order to have as close a copy of the interface as possible. Try to understand why the original was built the way it is. I bet this process of reproducing an interface will help you understand many things you haven’t been noticing before.

Save the People’s Time and Efforts

Prepare to get some new tasks in advance. Create a list of questions, and don’t forget to ask about the deadlines. Align your plan and the number of iterations so people know precisely what and when to expect from you. Be curious (but not annoying) by asking or sending questions every few hours (but try to first search for the answers online). Even if you don’t find the exact answer, it’ll help you formulate the right questions better and get a better view of the “big picture.” Remember, one day, you will get a task directly from the customer, so fetching the data you need to complete tasks correctly is an excellent skill to develop.

Structurize Your Knowledge and Create a Learning Plan

When you are just beginning to learn, too many articles about UX design will look like absolute “must-reads” to you. But you will drown in the information if you try to read them all in no particular order. Better, instead of just trying to read everything, try first to find a mentor who will help you build a learning plan and will advise you along the way.

Another good way to start is to complete a solid UX online course. If you can’t, take the learning program of any popular UX course out there and research the topics from the course’s list one by one. Also, you can use such a structured list (going from easier to more complex UX topics) for filtering articles you are going to read.

There are many excellent courses out there, and here are a few suggestions:
“Selection of free UX design courses, including those offering certifications,” by Cheshta Dua
In this article, the author shares a few free UX design courses which helped her get started as a UX designer.
“Best free UX design courses — 2024,” by Cynthia Vinney (UX Design Institute)
This is a comparison of a few free UX design courses, both online and in-person.
“The 10 Best Free UX Design Courses in 2024,” by Rachel Meltze (CareerFoundry)
A selection of free UX design courses — using these you can learn the fundamentals of UX design, the tools designers use, and more about the UX design career path.
“The HTML/CSS Basics (.dev),” by Geoff Graham
The Basics is an excellent online course that teaches the basic principles of front-end development. It’s a good “entry point” for those just coming into front-end development or perhaps for someone with experience writing code from years ago who wants to jump into modern-day development.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Bruce Lee once said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

— Bruce Lee

You may have read a lot about some new revolutionary UX approaches, but only practicing allows you to convert this knowledge into a skill. Our brain continually works to clear out unnecessary information from our memory. Therefore, actively practicing the ideas and knowledge that you have learned is the only way to signal to your brain that this knowledge is essential to be retained and re-used.

On a related note, you will likely remember also the popular “10,000-hour rule,” which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller book Outliers).

As Malcolm says, the rule goes like this: it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials, like playing the violin or getting as good as Bill Gates at computer programming. Turns out, practice is important, and it’s surprising how much time and effort it may take to master something complicated. But later research also suggests that someone could practice for thousands of hours and still not be a master performer. They could be outperformed by someone who practiced less but had a teacher who showed them just what to focus on at a key moment in their practice.

So, remember my advice from the previous section? Try to find a mentor because, as I said earlier, learning and practicing with a mentor and a good plan will often lead to better results.

Conclusion

Instead of a conclusion (or trying to give you the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything), only a few final words of advice.

Remember, there doesn’t exist a single correct way to do things because there are no absolute criteria to define “things done properly.” You can apply all your knowledge and required steps in the classical design process, and the product may fail.

At the same time, someone could quickly develop a minimum viable product (MVP) without using all of the standard design phases — and still conquer the market. Don’t believe me?

The first Apple iPhone, introduced 17 years ago, didn’t have even a basic copy/paste feature yet we all know how the iPhone conquered the world (and it’s not only the iPhone, there are many other successful MVP examples out there, often conceived by small startups). It’s because Apple engineers and designers got the core product design concept right; they could release a product that didn’t yet have everything in it.

So yes, you need to read a lot about UX and UI design, watch tutorials, learn the design theory, try different approaches, speak to the people using your product (or the first alpha or beta version of it), and practice. But in the end, always ask yourself, “Is this the most efficient way to bring value to people and get the needed results?” If the answer is “No,” update your design plan. Because things are not happening by themselves. Instead, we, humans, make things happen.

You are the pilot of your plane, so don’t expect someone else to care about your success more than you. Do your best. Make corrections and iterate. Learn, learn, learn. And sooner or later, you’ll reach success!

Further Reading

A Selection Of Design Resources (Part One, Part Two)

Photoshop CS Down & Dirty Tricks, a book by Scott Kelby
Bestselling author Scott Kelby shares an amazing collection of Photoshop tricks, including how to create the same exact effects you see every day in magazines, at the movies, on the Web, and more. These are real-world techniques, the same ones you see used by leading Photoshop photographers, designers, and special effect masters.
“Why Designers Aren’t Understood,” by Vitaly Friedman (Smashing Magazine)
How do we conduct UX research when there is no or only limited access to users? Here are some workarounds to run UX research or make a strong case for it. (This article is an upcoming part of the “Smart Interface Design Patterns.” — Editor’s Note)
“UXchallenge,” by Yachin You
This website will help you learn how to solve real problems that customers face and present case studies that are related to these problems.
“Kano analysis: The Kano model explained” (Qualtrics)
Kano analysis (also known as the “Customer Delight vs. Implementation Investment” approach) is a tool that helps you enhance your products and services based on customer emotions. This guide will help you understand what is Kano analysis and how you can use it in practice.
“Kano Model: What It Is & How to Use It to Increase Customer Satisfaction” (Userpilot)
The Kano model uses quick and powerful data analysis to design your product roadmap. In this article, you will learn a brief history of the Kano model, a practical explanation of how it works, five categories of potential customer reactions to new features, and a four-step process for effective Kano analysis.
“The Pareto Principle” (Investopedia)
The Pareto Principle is a concept that specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. Named after the economist Vilfredo Pareto, this principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. The Pareto Principle is also known as the Pareto Rule or the 80/20 Rule.
“Figma Portfolio Templates & Examples” (UX Crush)
A curated selection of portfolio templates for Figma Design.
“How to Define a User Persona,” by Raven Veal (CareerFoundry)
As you break into a career in UX, user personas are one tool you’ll certainly want to have available as you gather user research and find design solutions to solve problems and create more human-friendly products and experiences.
“How to design a customer journey map,” by Emily Stevens (UX Design Institute)
A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. This detailed guide will teach you how to create such a customer journey map.
“Building Components For Consumption, Not Complexity” (Part 1, Part 2),” by Luis Ouriach (Smashing Magazine)
In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls, starting from how to make designers on your team adopt the complex and well-built system that you created to what are the best naming conventions and how to handle the auto-layout of components, indexing/search, and more.
“Effective Communication For Everyday Meetings,” by Andrii Zhdan (Smashing Magazine)
Before any meeting starts, we often have many ideas about what to say and how it should go. But when the meeting happens, reality may “crash” all of our plans. This article is about conducting productive meetings. The author will give you a step-by-step guide on preparing a solid meeting structure that will let you follow the original plan and reach the meeting goals.
“The Value of Great UX,” by Jared Spool
This crossover from poor UX design to good UX design is where value comes into the picture. We add value when we transform a product or service from delivering a poor experience to providing a good experience.
“How Designers Should Ask For (And Receive) High-Quality Feedback,” by Andy Budd (Smashing Magazine)
Designers often complain about the quality of feedback they get from senior stakeholders. In this article, Andy Budd shares a better way of requesting feedback: rather than sharing a linear case study that explains every design revision, the first thing to do would be to better frame the problem.
“Designing A Better Design Handoff File In Figma,” by Ben Shih (Smashing Magazine)
Practical tips to enhance the handoff process between design and development in product development, with provided guidelines for effective communication, documentation, design details, version control, and plugin usage.
“The HTML/CSS Basics (.dev),” by Geoff Graham
The Basics is an online course that teaches the basic principles of front-end development, focusing specifically on HTML and CSS. A good “entry point” for those just coming into front-end development and perhaps for someone with experience writing code years ago who wants to jump into modern-day development.
“Selection of free UX design courses, including those offering certifications,” by Cheshta Dua
In this article, the author shares a few free UX design courses that helped her get started as a UX designer.
“Best free UX design courses — 2024,” by Cynthia Vinney (UX Design Institute)
Check this comparison of several free UX design courses currently on the market, both online and in-person.
“The 10 Best Free UX Design Courses in 2024,” by Rachel Meltze (CareerFoundry)
A selection of free UX design courses where you can learn the fundamentals of UX design, the tools designers use, and the UX design career path. This guide provides a range of courses, from micro-tutorials to full-featured UI/UX courses.
“Researcher Behind ‘10,000-Hour Rule’ Says Good Teaching Matters, Not Just Practice,” by Jeffrey Young (EdSurge Magazine)
It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials, like playing the violin or getting as good as Bill Gates at computer programming. Turns out, a study also shows that there’s another important variable that Gladwell originally didn’t focus on: how good a student’s teacher is.
“An Apple engineer details why the first iPhone didn’t have copy and paste,” by Filipe Espósito (9to5Mac)
Apple introduced the first iPhone 17 years ago, and a lot has changed since then, but it’s hard to believe that long ago, the iPhone didn’t even have copy-and-paste options. Now, former Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda has revealed details about why the first iPhone didn’t have such features.
“Fifteen examples of successful MVPs,” Ross Krawczyk (RST Software)
Startups need to get their products to the market faster than ever in an increasingly competitive world. The minimum viable product is the way to achieve this, but you must be really able to provide the right key features that give value to a wide customer base in order to attract clients and investors on time.