A digital endorsement process gone wrong To run for President of Iceland, you need to be an Icelandic citizen, at least 35 years old, and have 1,500 endorsements. For the first time in Icelandic history, this endorsement process is digital. Instead of collecting all their signatures on paper the old-fashioned way, candidates can now send people to https://island.is/forsetaframbod to submit their endorsement. This change has, also for the first time in Icelandic history, given the nation a clear window into who is trying to run — and it’s a remarkably large number. To date, 82 people are ..read more

Who owns your voice? I have seen the future and it is no better or worse than our mindless present Photo by Justice Amoh on Unsplash One of the background details of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that I often catch myself sometimes wondering about is the concept of “Buster Friendly”. This novel was the basis of Scott Ridley’s Harrison Ford starring Bladerunner (1982) and its sequel, Bladerunner 2049. The movie and the book actually have very little in common. Dick’s novels can be too abstract and philosophical to translate to celluloid. Ridley used the no ..read more

On usability challenges across different age groups. If you’re a middle-ager, please take everything in this article personally. Stańczyk by Jan MatejkoWhy I low-key hate middle-agers Frankly, to me, middle-aged users (32–60 year olds) are very annoying. They are the only age group to hate big time and hold a grudge for the designer, even if it’s them who made a mistake. Middle-agers have zero tolerance for inconsistencies. And yet, we design mainly for them. It’s scary. Teens (16–19 y.o.) are blamed for being impatient and hot-tempered. But they are actually brilliant at identifying ..read more

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