A thought experiment for evaluating the potential of your product ideas — This is part of the series on how design can help you build better product. Thought Experiment At the end of the previous article Say No to Dogmatism in UX Design, there’s a list of questions for you to examine your product ideas. Is there a user pain or problem here? …

This is part of the series on how design can help you build better product. As you may have known, there are 6 stages in the design thinking framework: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. However, it doesn’t mean that we have to follow these 6 stages rigidly…

“I don’t want to waste time doing user research because that will only give us something trivial.” That was one of the many reasons I heard from other designers about why we shouldn’t do user research. “Research” seems to be a dry word, something in stark contrast with the beautiful…

Bad designs have real consequences. I’ve lost my groceries and almost lost my bank card because of — well, bad designs. The Train Seats Living in Toronto, I rely on the TTC subway to travel around the city. After boarding the train, I always try to avoid Seat A and B next to…

With products or services created by design-led companies such as iPhone and AirBnB gaining recognition, product teams nowadays are more aware of the existence of design, and yet many still think of it as something that is of lower priority than engineering or product management. To non-designers, this seems justified…

It’ll be good for your self-esteem. — It took me almost 30 years and a lot of reading to learn this: keeping a highlight reel of ourselves is so important for fostering healthy self-esteem. People with healthy self-esteem are collected and nonreactive in the face of doubts, judgements or insults. Life is tough. When the outside world…

Many of us love Apple’s products because they are delightful to use. If we observe a bit carefully, it’s not hard to see how their designers think: They are constantly inspired by nature, which informs not just the visuals (i.e. skeuomorphism), but also interactions. When you enter a wrong passcode…

In art and design, the levels of details is closely related to the amount of visual interest in a piece. Rich details can help us transform something bland and banal into something amazing, and one way to add details is through what I call microcontrast, which is the contrast within…

Changing careers can be scary, especially when you haven’t had a complete picture of the field you’re thinking about getting into. To help you cope with the overwhelm and avoid analysis paralysis, below are three quick tips. …