Didn’t fresh ideas arrive without being asked for? Why did I have to wait until the last moment to even notice, wait until moments before these old dented ideas have to be presented? Now it’s none of these things. Now it’s different. Now it’s quiet with muted color. Now it’s something I just do. No, it’s worse. Now it’s a job. It’s not my work, it’s my job. It’s a job, and the ideas don’t arrive like they used to. I keep designing what I know.
Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues.
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Workshops work really well to get everyone onboard with how to produce content. By involving as many people and key stakeholders as possible in these workshops, you can really underline people’s responsibilities, where they fit into the workflow and make it clear this process won’t happen overnight. In this article, James Deer shares the approach he developed to run content-planning workshops. While you will need to adapt the format to your scenario, you should be able to apply most of the steps.
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Design blueprints could mean the difference between a correctly implemented design that improves the user experience and satisfies customers and a confusing and inconsistent design that corrupts the user experience and displeases customers. For those of you who create digital products, design specs could mean the difference between efficient collaboration and a wasteful back-and-forth process with costly implementation mistakes and delivery delays. Specs can help you to build the right product more quickly and more efficiently. Effective collaboration requires effective communication. Investing in the development of workflows and tooling around to make this communication easier will pay off big with the effectiveness with which products are built.
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Low-fidelity prototypes are rough representations of concepts that help us to validate those concepts early on in the design process. Throughout this article, Laura Busche will look at some of the features that make low-fidelity prototyping a unique tool to radically improve your work and to build an environment in which users’ needs can be truly realized. This article focuses on the practice and general principles behind integrating low-fidelity prototypes in design in general, covering applications that range from graphic, web and user experience design to business and service design.
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Icon design is a very specific skill that overlaps illustration, screen design and, of course, visual design. An icon designer needs to understand lighting, proportions and, most importantly, the context of the icon itself. Is the icon you are designing going to be used on the web? Perhaps in a mobile app? Somewhere else? These are the questions that icon designers must asks themselves before starting work on a project. The answer will affect the icon’s details, reflections, shadows, background and many other features.
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In the context of software development, a product is the website, application or online service that users interact with. Depending on the size of the company and its products, a product manager could be responsible for an entire system or part of a system. This is confusing because, in most contexts, a product is a thing you sell to people. Product managers often get confused with category managers, which are the team that sources and merchandises the products sold on an e-commerce website. So, yes, “product” isn’t the best word for it, but it’s what we’ve got, But do companies really need product managers? And, if we can agree on that, what are the characteristics of a good one? Also, where does this role fit in an organization’s structure? Let’s explore these questions.
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Visual-feedback and bug-tracking services are becoming ever more popular, and integrating one of them into their workflow would simplify the communication process of any web developer. Fortunately, today’s web provides various solutions to optimize the communication process. In this article, Lusya Galkina has selected her top five tools and compared their features, functionality and pricing. She hopes that this review will simplify your workflow and speed up communication between your team and clients.
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Shocking user interfaces costs companies in productivity, training and even the customer experience. People are fed up with inadequate internal systems. Many of those interviewed had given up on the official software. Instead, they use tools like Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote. Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way around. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how to fix this.
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To fully realize that creativity, successful developers need to continually improve their skills. The web industry has grown from this desire to learn. You only need to look at the unwavering demand for conferences, workshops and training days for evidence of this, but the cost of continually sending your team to workshops and training days can quickly become unsustainable. Within your team lies a wealth of skills, knowledge and experience that can be shared and developed further. With a little effort and using resources freely available on the web, you can increase the technical competence of the team organically, with much lighter demands on time and cost.
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The vast majority of practices from the world of manufacturing have come to influence how things are done when designing and building software products as well. Lean thinking is one of the latest approaches software development companies have adopted to maximize value and reduce wasted effort and resources by breaking down an objective into a series of experiments. Approaches like design thinking tend to be lean by nature. There is a huge opportunity, however, to take this notion even further and align design to the new ways digital products are being built and improved on. Let’s look first at the current approach towards design and how it has an impact on the product.
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