This week I had the privilege of speaking to design students at two universities about my career. Here are some of the things I shared, most of which were answers to their questions.

5. Visual hierarchy is hard.

6. I know of only one way to successfully ship products and that is to ship imperfect products.

10. Creativity is storytelling.

Tell beautiful stories with your work! If you don’t believe you can change the world through design and the stories you tell with it, you’re selling yourself short.

The feedback we get from users is not what it seems! As software creators we apply a lens that makes us take user feedback in many different - often unhelpful - ways from how it was intended. Here's a list of user feedback myths to help jog assumptions.

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of my super-popular UI & UX Micro-Tips, I’ve brought together some of the most timeless tips, and bundled them in an 8-Bit format. Why? Just because :)

1. Whitespace is your design friend. Use it to improve your UIs instantly.
2. Choose a base colour, and then simply use tints & shades to add uniformity.
3. Reserve one colour for your Call to Action. Be really selfish with those CTAs.
4. Give the most important elements on the screen more prominence.
5. Present your icons with labels for easier comprehension.
6. To improve the optical balance of your headings, reduce the letter-spacing.
7. Make sure your shadows are coming from one light source. We don’t live in a land of a thousand suns remember.
8. When working with long-form content, style that opening paragraph to draw the user in.

Handcrafted interactions focused on utility & beauty.

About a year ago at Wix, we abruptly realized that, too often, we were not giving users the answers to these questions. When we got this wake-up call, we felt compelled to act swiftly, and not just to address the one error message that woke us up.

This is an example of a bad error message. It uses an inappropriate tone, passes the blame, speaks in technical jargon and is too generic.

https://medium.com/deliveroo-design/how-to-write-any-error-message-7a3348cce594

Ensure Your Interface Copy Is Role-Playable (My Account)

Be Especially Transparent And Clear When It Comes To Sensitive Topics

• The button label should reflect the specific action that occurs when the user clicks or taps it.
• Titles stick better in their memory, so they must be understandable as a standalone text.

Express Action With Verbs, Not Nouns

Unsure how to design and implement user-interface patterns? Use this collection of links to our content about specific patterns.

• A Note on Interface Guidelines
• Input Controls
• Forms and Wizards
• Tooltips, Dialogs, Instructional Overlay
• Icons and Indicators
• Menu Design
• Site Navigation Elements
• In-Page Navigation
• Search
• Errors
• Privacy and Ethics

An unofficial bonus chapter for the iOS Human Interface Guidelines: Learn how to structure iPhone apps with drill-downs, modals, pyramids, sequences, and more.

Most software is bad. I neither know why, nor how to solve the problem. Instead, the best I have to offer is a technique to keep the badness away for a while: friction logs.Friction logs are what they sound: a detailed log of everything that caused friction when using a product. This post teaches you how to make one. I recommend you to make one if:

A UI design case study to redesign an example user interface using logical rules or guidelines

Use space to group related elements
Be consistent
Ensure similar looking elements function similarly
Create a clear visual hierarchy
Remove unnecessary styles
Use colour purposefully
Ensure interface elements have a 3:1 contrast ratio
Ensure text has a 4.5:1 contrast ratio
Don’t rely on colour alone as an indicator
Use a single sans serif typeface
Use a typeface with taller lower case letters
Limit the use of uppercase
Use regular and bold font weights only
Avoid pure black text
Left align text
Use at least 1.5 line height for body text

Illustrated tips for making your UI and web designs more visually interesting · Backgrounds · Borders & dividers · Shadows · Text · Other techniques

I hold the opinion that state machines are underrated - GitHub - cpressey/Facts-about-State-Machines: I hold the opinion that state machines are underrated

A set of real-world challenges to practice crucial UX design skills. Train yourself in product design and take away portfolio-worthy deliverables.

• When tech is rugged, it’s a joy to use
• UI shouldn’t focus only on your hands. Use the rest of your body too
• The best UIs have simple, bold visual cues
• Physical UIs can be more intuitive and usable than screens
• Don’t just make it functional. Make it beautiful too

Sixty percent of first-time visitors leave a website in less than fifteen seconds. Yet, there is an often overlooked usability factor that improves visitor retention—scannability. These UI design tips for using research, science, and strategy to layout content help convert short-term visitors to long-lasting users.

If you’re a product designer, researcher, or marketer, UX writing is a tool in your content design arsenal to sharpen.
So what makes good UX writing? Copy that is clear, concise, useful, and consistent. Here are 10 tips to help you get there.

Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.

The more eloquent we are at communicating the story, the easier it will be for users/spectators to identify as a part of it.

General visual consistency

How to make our design look sleek and consistent? Start with preparing this:

1. Choose colors you want to use
2. Choose a font(s) you want to use
3. Decide on how deep/blurred you want your shadows to be.
4. If you are using icons, decide whether you want to use solid or outlines. Try not to mix them.
   By now, you created your little design-system. How cool! 😎
   Now you should stick to it.

If you want your shadows to look even more fanciful, make the shadow have the same color as the element that casts it, then lower the opacity. Ideally, the background would have a similar tone, too.

Making gradients look more smooth and delicate

Choose the right color for the font, so it matches the background.

The first pass will almost always suck.

In Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Ed Catmull equates new ideas to newborns. They need care and nurturing — space to breathe. Think of your initial ideas (read: designs) as a garden in the early stages. It will need constant watering and tending until the plants are strong enough to survive on their own and bear fruit. A garden doesn’t look like much in the early stages. But it has tremendous potential with the right care.

Artists work with an idea. They nurture it. This does not require ingenuity or creative genius. Forget about all of that. It doesn’t necessarily require a lot of experience either. It simply requires hard work to push through iteration after iteration. You are essentially watering the plants (the idea) and nurturing them.

“Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.”

A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great.

Your job is not to come up with the best idea.

Your job, then, is to take the best part of others' ideas and shape them into the best idea. I always have ideas and want to be the first to get them out in the open where they can be evaluated (and hopefully adored). This is my ego at play — talking to me, telling me to show everyone just how clever I am. I’ve had to learn to keep my mouth shut and temper my ego. My job isn’t to come up with the best idea. It’s to listen and watch.

Go beyond your industry.

Creatively find the time to be creative.

Your ability to sell is often far more important than your design skills.