Creative Ref

If you’ve gotten stuck, don’t blame yourself. Big UX projects can have lots of moving parts, be disorienting, confusing, overwhelming, and full of dead ends.That doesn’t mean you’re not a good designer. I believe the test of a good designer is getting into these dead ends and figuring out how to get out.Whenever I’m starting to feel a little lost, I take a moment to understand where I am and where I want to go. I always begin by asking myself the following questions:What do and don’t I know?What do I want to know?Which methodologies might help me know?

By testing this part of the application, I uncovered WHY people were leaving sooner. These new insights gave me a new hypothesis:If we reduce the number of onboarding steps, users will get to use the important part of the product faster and therefore see the value sooner.

This hypothesis gives us something that we can empirically test, gave me a direction for my designs, and gave us new potential metrics to track. Now I could track how many people are reaching the end and how long they stay there as success metrics.

UX projects are massive, complicated, and lengthy. Be kind to yourself and take it one step at a time. Break down your projects into little bite-sized pieces and ask yourself, “What do and don’t I know, What do I want to know, Which methodologies might help me know?”

Let’s keep the blame for “spoil­ing” any elec­tion where it be­longs—with the peo­ple who voted.Largely, how­ever, I think these the­o­ries are pro­moted by po­lit­i­cal jour­nal­ists as a means of pro­tect­ing their own hoary nar­ra­tives of pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics. Here’s mine: It’s chaotic. It’s weird. No­body knows any­thing. Thus, eval­u­at­ing the can­di­dates through the de­sign & ty­pog­ra­phy of their cam­paign web­sites is as valid a method as any. If you think oth­er­wise, you’re a ty­po­graphic spoiler.

I’m mys­ti­fied by the com­plete lack of in­ter­est in dis­till­ing the can­di­date’s pitch to any kind of con­crete ar­gu­ment. In an elec­tion, isn’t the ma­jor ques­tion “Why you and not the other one?” Why can no one an­swer this? The av­er­age Dori­tos ad­ver­tise­ment makes a bet­ter case.

A quin­tes­sen­tial ex­am­ple of what hap­pens in de­sign projects when a large bud­get is handed over to a large com­mit­tee: by try­ing to be every­thing to every­one, it avoids be­ing any­thing to anyone.

If you’re Mar­i­anne Williamson, why aren’t you swing­ing for the fences? Act­ing pres­i­den­tial was never go­ing to be your lane.