Being the only one on the design team has allowed me to step out of my comfort zone.
It has been over two years since being the sole designer in an Adtech startup based in Singapore. During this time, I’ve learned a lot about myself as a designer and my preferred working style and design process. The past two years weren’t always smooth sailing; I had to read up and understand the various concepts of UX disciplines by myself as I had no mentors or senior designers to learn from. …
Offering visual examples of how specific UX Laws can help you to create a better user experience.
The brain has a defined method on how to process complex information. This includes the different elements and components within a website or mobile application such as text, colors, images, and animations. The effort required to process all this information is known as “cognitive load,” and it is critical to your product design’s success.
In this information age, we’re constantly engaging with different forms of data — which might be too much for our brains to process. As designers, our designs should allow the user to focus on their objective, rather than overloading them with information.
It takes effort to balance values and ethics with business objectives and goals.
We all know data is king in this day and age. Most large companies would use some form of analytical product to gather data at a massive scale before presenting those metrics to stakeholders and the media to show their current progress.
Yet, these numbers can be selective and far from telling the truth. When you instrument any flow, feature, or design, there’s always a way to game it. Have you ever tried deleting your Facebook account, only to find it ludicrously hard to do so?
These little design tricks are commonly known as “dark patterns”. They are subtle ploys…
It may differ slightly based on the job description and company, but I hope this article will increase your chance of success.
My first ever article was about how I became a UI/UX designer with no experience, and it talks about my journey on how I got hired as one. After publishing that story, I got messages from people who had similar experiences or are trying to get into UI/UX design. Some of the questions that I always got was:
- How was the interview process like?
- What were some of the questions asked?
- How do I better prepare myself for those questions?
Below are some questions to help aspiring designers in their interview process and hopefully succeed in passing it.
Why do you think UX design is important?
It’s essential…
Design doesn’t always have to be visual when optimizing the user’s experience.
Usability has always been a critical aspect of UX design. Yet, a new design era is taking this notion to the next level — “invisible design.” It’s not enough for products to be usable; they have to blend seamlessly into our daily lives by removing any form of distractions.
When we talk about “invisible design,” we don’t mean it literally but rather design that is unobtrusive to the point of elegance. This design form is not meant to be attractive as it’s meant to be used, not looked at. …
As a designer, recognizing the effects of micro-interactions is just as important as designing them.
UX design deals with the overall user experience when interacting with the product. Its goal is to optimize the design of the product to allow users to achieve their objectives quickly. One way of doing that is to use micro-interactions that focus on minor details to inform the user of the product’s current state.
This helps to create a feeling of well-being once the user discovers them. As a designer, recognizing the effects of micro-interactions is just as important as designing them. …
What makes Freemium work? Lessons from Dropbox, Mailchimp, Similarweb, Medium, Adobe.
As a product designer, I know that designing a successful freemium product is hard. Why would the user pay extra when they are already getting what they want for free? On the other hand, a freemium product needs to have long-term utility to drive better retention — or else your users might abandon your product altogether.
From a business strategy perspective, a freemium product should be designed to maximize revenue by taking advantage of both the user acquisition opportunities of a free product and the monetization of a paid product.
The UX designer’s job is to work with the business…
User-need statements are powerful for defining and aligning on the design problem.
It has been close to two years since our team created a design process to clarify our workflow. During the months of refining and iterating the process, I realized the importance of defining the scope; this is usually the first step in the design process, and the main goal is to understand the purpose of the design better and define the project requirements. Some of the critical questions to answer at this step are:
- What problem are we solving?
- What are the users’ goals?
- Are there existing technical or business constraints/limitations?
- How does the current user flow look like, and…
Offering visual examples of how different companies design their user experiences.
Grammarly is an online platform that offers digital writing assistance such as grammar correction, plagiarism detection, and other cool features. This article will be focused on its web app where users can write or edit their word documents.
When you first sign up to Grammarly, it comes with a demo document used to educate users on its main functions and features — intelligent editing. The demo document is an excellent way of introducing new users to their features, which would otherwise be impossible until the user creates their own work.
Design is no longer subjective. Data rules our world now.
The design world has always taught us to follow a design process whenever a new feature or product update is made. We’re taught to fully explore the issue, define the problem, do extensive research, and brainstorm all possible solutions before implementing it.
I’m not sure about everyone, but at least for me, there were times when the solution “instinctively” pops into my head when considering the business problem. However, I always used to convince myself that we should follow the design process for reassurance that it’s the right move — even if the process takes a longer time.
Yet, sometimes…
Jeremiah Lam
Jeremiah Lam is a UI/UX designer, writer, and tech enthusiast living on the sunny island of Singapore
