Design systems evolve over time and so do the platforms they are built on. As maintainers, we need to make sure to keep them up to date. This includes Figma and your Figma design system library. Figma has only a basic versioning, so we need to be careful with changes. But there are some techniques to make sure we don’t release updates that break consumers Figma projects. In this article I will explain what I find to be the best process to make sure you can keep your library up to date without breaking designers’ files. Figma branch PR process I have often seen Figma files, especially for ..read more

Storytelling has been around for a long time, but story-making is now grabbing our imaginations for the future. From top left clockwise: Jensen Huang showcasing AI training with robotics; Steve Jobs unveiling the 1st iPhone; Sam Altman showing the audience how his first startup, Loopt, worked; the Industrial Light & Magic team creating special visual effects for Star Wars A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Or at least that’s how it goes with most of the George Lucas Space Opera franchise, better known as Star Wars. Star Wars Unlike its current popularity, which ..read more

Lessons from Loom, Canva & Otter.ai. For some products, time to Magic Moment (also known as the Aha! moment or Activation moment) can be long. Especially in enterprise Saas, where sales cycles can last months and months. However, what’s often missed is mini magic moments that can help users get to small nuggets of value before the main course. In this article, we’ll run through three ways you can do this is your early user experience — onboarding specifically — to help users activate quicker and reduce churn. We’ll see how GIFs, imagery, personalisation and various forms of ..read more

Sometimes, offering a free product isn’t enough. Overview of the Wild email flow I’m a sucker for deals. Look, I’m Dutch, and we’re known to love a great discount. So when an Instagram ad popped up with Wild offering two free travel deodorants… It caught my attention. I knew there would be a catch. I advise and consult D2C brands for a living, of course, there is a catch. And sure enough, there was. This time, it was the classic “you just need to cover shipping” deal. I’ve noticed a recent rise in D2C brands being so certain of their product that they offer a certain product for ..read more

Confessions of a UX professor. When I read articles blaming bootcamps for new UXers’ portfolios, I wonder whether we made a mistake. The portfolio push-pull — Composite by ups.ai.down, MidjourneyAnatomy of a Fall When I took the lead of the UX Portfolio Review team and later ran the Portfolio Design Sprint at Thinkful (previous Bloc, next Chegg) in 2020, the instruction was to ensure students wouldn’t get rejected. Initially, I admit, to avoid the company losing money — a safeguard against PR disasters and the nightmare of legal battles. Facing potential lawsuits over the return of s ..read more

Designing interaction for AI: communication vs information “Given a speaker’s need to know whether his message has been received, and if so, whether or not it has been passably understood, and given a recipient’s need to show that he has received the message and correctly — given these very fundamental requirements of talk as a communication system — we have the essential rationale for the very existence of adjacency pairs, that is, for the organization of talk into two-part exchanges. We have an understanding of why any next utterance after a question is examined for how it might be an answer ..read more

Can a designer still make ethical design when using nudging? Image credit: https://www.dmjx.dk/kurser-og-videreuddannelse/nudging-adfaerdsaendring-med-kommunikation I’m sure you have heard about nudging, nudge design or nudge theory or something in that area. It’s a theory closely associated with behavioral economics and psychology and have had overlaps into design and is often seen in close relation to user experience design as well. The term “nudge” was popularized by behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, a ..read more

Let’s start with a stigma: Football fans are aggressive. So when Amsterdam built its new stadium, authorities decided to design its seats in rainbow colours. According to psychologists, a colourful environment would reduce hooliganism. However, this decision caused widespread frustration among fans. The local club, Ajax, wears a red and white jersey. Red is often associated with aggression. Numerous football clubs adopted it as their primary colour. A rainbow-coloured stadium is not desired. Not even in Amsterdam, one of the gay capitals of the world. Twenty years later, when t ..read more

How to carve out time to do deep design work among neverending meetings Art by midjourney Ironically, designers often have less time to do deep work as they advance in their careers. The hours we'd typically spend researching, understanding complex problems, and iterating on design ideas are replaced by endless meetings and product councils, leaving us scrambling to do our work. If you've found yourself in this situation, where meetings clog up every hour of the day, it may be time to introduce friction into your work process. Doing so isn't just nice-to-have: it can often be a criti ..read more

Combining Expertise with widespread participation represents the actual Dilemma of the UX research field: beyond buzzwords, can we maintain quality in a broader Research landscape and build a culture of Research Maturity if UX Researchers Become Obsolete? Some thoughts navigating the Future of the Profession. Image generated via Leonardo.AI… struggling to grasp what researchers are doing :D The democratization of UX research has been a topic of debate for several months, both at conferences and in podcasts. Some stakeholders argue that anyone can practice it, while other professionals emp ..read more