May 20, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #508
This newsletter issue was sent out to 190,202 subscribers on Tuesday, May 20, 2025.
Editorial
Last weekend, I stumbled upon a wonderful conversation on the value of design with Jony Ive. It’s about the value of care and love in design, the huge impact of emotions in our work, and just how dangerous it is to articulate the value of design in numbers or metrics.
It’s a fantastic interview to watch, which has reminded me yet again why I’m in this industry in the first place. But ironically, we’ve launched a whole course on measuring UX impact and how to articulate the impact of UX to businesses.
No business can be successful without successful customers. Yet in so many projects I had to find inventive ways and strategies to make a strong case for UX research, and accessibility, and inclusive design, and good UX work.
Without it, all UX efforts appear to be uncomfortably mysterious to decision-makers, and hence — unfortunately — often not worth an investment. Conversations about design KPIs change that on the spot.
But of course UX is much more than that. Once we make that argument and get a buy-in, that’s where magic begins. With embedding value and care into the product and help people feel appreciated, understood, and thought of. We just need to get there first — and that path is often anything but a walk in the park.
If time allows, I’d like to invite you to check:
- upcoming online workshops on UX and front-end,
- check Smashing Videos on YouTube,
- Smashing Meets For Work (May 29th), our lovely online get-together for the community.
Happy learning, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. UX Survival Guide
Identifying and overcoming skill gaps, building a winning resume and portfolio, or presenting to executives — there are a lot of challenges awaiting UX professionals as they attempt to grow their careers. If you’re in the same situation, the UX Survival Guide has got your back.
Created by Miranda Slayter, Principal Designer at Booking.com, the guide features tools and resources to help you showcase your value and advance your career. The collection includes resources for junior, mid-level, and senior UX designers, among them videos, newsletters, guides, streams, workshops, articles, and templates. A useful guide, no matter which stage in your UX career you are at. (cm)
2. Sharing Work Under NDA
Sharing UX work if it is under an NDA? It actually is possible if you get a little creative, as Jessica Ivins shows. For many years, she assumed she couldn’t share her work if it was under an NDA. But then she found a way to present a case study of NDA-protected work to a panel of interviewers — while respecting the agreement, of course — and landed the job.
To help designers highlight their contributions to NDA-protected work, Jessica summarized her approach. Once you’ve reviewed the NDA to understand what you can and can’t share, she recommends storytelling as an effective way to show your contributions to the project. For example, you can share your methods, how you tackled challenges, and the decision-making process without revealing confidential details. Precious tips to keep in mind for your next job search. (cm)
3. The Anatomy Of Design Workshops
Empathy mapping, value proposition, customer journey — the number of design workshop types out there can be scary. But even if they might seem like rocket science at first sight, things aren’t as complicated as you might think. As Slava Shestopalov shows, all workshops are atomic and anyone can easily grasp the nature of any complex workshop by learning its elementary parts and key principles.
In his post, “Anatomy Of Design Workshops,” Slava explains in detail how every workshop can be broken down into its constituent parts: the foundational activities that compose every workshop and variables that adjust the foundational activities to your use case. A must-read for anyone who runs design workshops or is planning to do so. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Front-End & UX Workshops New York 🇺🇸
on Design Systems, CSS and AI Patterns - Figma Unlocked: What’s New from Config Free
with Christina Vallaure. May 23 - Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 4–18 - Accessibility for Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Jun 16–24 - Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christina Vallaure. July 23–29 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Aug 20–29 - Jump to all workshops →
5. Glossary Of UX Deliverables
Deliverables are an essential tool for any UX practitioner. They document what work has occurred and communicate ideas, research findings, and the context of a project. To help you navigate the different kinds of deliverables and quickly clarify key terms and concepts related to them, Huei-Hsin Wang compiled a UX Deliverables Glossary.
The glossary documents and explains more than 60 key terms — from Affinity Diagram to Wireframe. Each description includes links to related articles from the Nielsen Norman Group in case you want to dig deeper. One for the bookmarks. (cm)
6. Estimating And Prioritizing UX Work
How much UX effort does a project require? Do you need to hire an experienced researcher to do UX research, or can a designer do it? And how much design work is needed? Is it enough to consult UX, or does the project call for the full UX process with modeling, information architecture work, low fidelity, and mockups?
Planning UX capacity can be challenging, and many companies struggle with aligning on the capacity and priority of UX design and research work. Jeremy Bird’s UX Effort Framework 2.0 is here to help. Taking different levels of risk, clarity, and complexity into account, it helps teams estimate and prioritize UX work depending on the project’s needs. A fantastic little helper. (cm)
7. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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