Strategy

Align your cross-functional team on important customer opportunities, and generate creative solutions to these opportunities

Dark patterns refer to a range of design techniques that can subtly encourage users to take some sort of action or put their privacy at risk.

Read about the process and decision-making framework of our EPD team as they worked on the learnability and ergonomics of the core Retool editor.

Links from video: • Deck PDF (best with video narration): https://www.dropbox.com/s/1dcni1mfr7k170a/Deck.pdf?dl=0 • Playing with Plugins - Jordan Singer (Config 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpYmcsszClo • Figma plugins: https://www.figma.com/@jordan • Automator: https://automator.design and https://automator.community • "Designer" demo: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304 • "The Design Industry, 2021" - Forrester: https://www.forrester.com/report/The-Design-Industry-2021/RES162917 Diagram: • Visit https://diagram.company • Follow https://twitter.com/diagram • Email jordan@diagram.email Jordan Singer: • https://twitter.com/jsngr • https://ibuildmyideas.com

Here's how I think about delight and its sibling, utility: Utility is the VALUE a user derives from interacting with your product. Much like profitability makes a business sustainable,… — Cameron Moll (@cameronmoll)

A core part of working in product, of course, is creating a product vision and strategy. Surprisingly, this isn’t always the most urgent thing — when I’ve been lucky enough to work on an extremely fast-growing product with a small team, sometimes what we needed most was just to keep up with users’ demands.

The findings that Substance uncovers can form the foundations of a range of activities that turn insight into action.

Figma just sold for $20 Billion.The highest price ever for a private SaaS company. An incredible 50x multiple their $400 million ARR. Here are the 10 reasons Figma dominated the design world:— Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry) September 17, 2022

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all⁰Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”Keats was right about our instincts. This paper shows we view more beautiful infographics as more trustworthy, and they get more “likes” & more scientific citations. https://t.co/JgRgteOmW9 pic.twitter.com/fAVOIkPmeo— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) January 16, 2022

Notes about design, work and life.

Scenario… I do a lot of research. The research is messy! It looks like this: I notice three broad groups: I take those three broad groups, and create a model/tool. For example, I generate three personas to adapt messaging for different buyers. I leave the company. My research rots in a folder somewhere. All that remains are the three personas and the messaging framework.

Pirate metrics is a 5-step framework for measuring and optimizing SaaS growth. All the AARRR metrics—acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, referral—are important, but which one really has the biggest impact on monthly recurring revenue (MRR)? Our free online calculator helps you do the math.

How do you know what design's impact is on the product you're building? Even if you could measure design, how do you identify what parts of the product experience are worth measuring in the first place? These are the types of questions digital designers inevitably end up asking themselves. They're

A simple way to keep product innovation under control while going fast.

Here’s a list of 59 prompts to use on your own or as a team, tackling transparency, wellness, and more.

I look forward to your feedback.

As a user experience designer, it can feel as though I am waging an on-going, never-ending battle against complexity, especially when working on enterprise systems.A popular route to simplify an…

Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of "concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games". Zynga's playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit. SCVNGR, which makes a mobile game with real-world challenges, has a playdeck. It is a deck of cards listing nearly 50 different game mechanics that can be mixed and matched to create the foundation for different types of games. I've republished the accompan...

How do we measure design quality? This question has been asked at every company where I’ve led design, and it comes not only from…

When a design team is small, fewer than 10 people, design quality can be successfully managed informally—reviews, crits, swivel-the-monitor discussions...

An in-depth overview of 20 product prioritization techniques and a periodic table to make sense of them all.

2019 UPDATE: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. You can order it…

All-in-one product design platform for prototyping, collaboration, and creating design systems.

Short courses, corporate training and design safaris for entrepreneurs, innovators, designers and managers

Deep dive into a design thinking methodology built to sustain itself across teams.

What is usability? How, when, and where can you improve it? Why should you care? Jakob Nielsen defines key usability concepts - give to your boss or anyone else who doesn't have much time, but needs to know basic usability facts.

The Jungle Gym: Issue #16

Although there can be many different instigators, roles, and activities involved in a discovery, all discoveries strive to achieve consensus on the problem to be solved and desired outcomes.