Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.

Visuals can stir up feelings or paint a scene in an instant. However, they may not always nail down the details or explain things as clearly as words can. Words can be very precise and give you all the information you need. Yet, sometimes they miss that instant impact or emotional punch.

For each visual you add to your presentation, you should ask yourself “What does it really say?” And then check: Does it enhance the meaning of my message, or is it purely decorative? Does it belong at this point in my presentation? Would it be better for another slide? Is there a better image that says what I want to say?

Computers don’t feel, and that means: they don’t understand what they do, they grow images like cancer grows cells: They just replicate something into the blue. This becomes apparent in the often outright creepiness of AI images.

AI is really good at making scary images. Even if the prompt lacks all hints of horror kitsch, you need to get ready to see or feel something disturbing when you look at AI images. It’s like a spell. Part of the scariness comes from the cancer-like pattern that reproduces the same ornament without considering its meaning and consequence.

Placing pictures next to each other will invite comparisons. We also compare images that follow each other. Make sure that you do not inadvertently compare apples and oranges.

When placing multiple images in a grid or on one slide after the other, ensure they don’t clash in terms of colors, style, or resolution. Otherwise, people will focus more on the contrast between the images rather than their content.

Repeating what everyone can see is bad practice. To make pictures and text work, they need to have something to say about each other.

Don’t write next to the image what people already see. A caption is not an ALT text.

The most powerful combination of text and image happens when the text says about the image what you can’t see at first sight, and when the image renders what is hard to imagine.

Do not be boring or overly explanatory. The visual should attract their attention to your words and vice-versa.

If a visual lacks meaning, it becomes a decorative placeholder. It can dilute your message, distract from what you want to say, and even express disrespect to your audience.

There are certain design principles you can apply to this like composition, hierarchy, color theory, and so on, but to the regular consumer, it’s the gestalt of all your design decisions that ultimately makes an emotional connection. We know emotion is so much of what drives purchasing behavior so the more nebulous goal of visual design is often pulling those levers in just the right ratio to elicit a desired connection to your product.

ven something as foundational as increasing white space in your design can instantly improve a customer’s perception of your brand’s worth when it’s done intentionally.

almost all clients agree that they need better look and feel in their digital experience, that they are looking to add some type of emotional signal that’s missing. But when it comes time to accept changes that address those problems, I’ve had several instances where clients are resistant to solutions that depart too significantly from what they’re already comfortable with. Usually that reservation is overcome when I correlate the visual changes to the ways in which the user experience is improved and the resulting impact on business performance. There will be also times when a client expresses to us that they’ve never been satisfied with their brand or website and they point to competitors that evoke certain emotional qualities that they are aspiring to capture. In those cases it’s quite rewarding to be able to translate those more nebulous feelings into concrete terminology that gives us specific visual principles to bring in or improve on.

By Katharine Schwab4 minute ReadOver the last year, Ideo’s philosophy of “design thinking“–a codified, six-step process to solve problems creatively–has come under fire. It’s been called bullshit, the opposite of inclusive design, and a failed experiment. It’s even been compared to syphilis.Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”

“If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”

“There is a real need to build respect for one another and trust in the safety of sharing ideas so you can move forward,” Hendrix says. “Knowing when to bring judgments is important. Cultures that are highly judgy, that have hierarchy, that are rewarding the person who is the smartest person in the room, don’t do well with this kind of methodology.”

There are a multitude of viable culprits behind this revenue drop. Robson himself pointed to the pandemic and tightened global budgets while arguing that “the widespread adoption of design thinking . . . has reduced demand for our services.” (Ideo was, in part, its own competition here since for years, it sold courses on design thinking.) It’s perhaps worth noting that, while design thinking was a buzzword from the ’90s to the early 2010s, it’s commonly met with all sorts of criticism today.

“People were like, ‘We did the process, why doesn’t our business transform?'” says Cliff Kuang, a UX designer and coauthor of User Friendly (and a former Fast Company editor). He points to PepsiCo, which in 2012 hired its first chief design officer and opened an in-house design studio. The investment has not yielded a string of blockbusters (and certainly no iPhone for soda). One widely promoted product, Drinkfinity, attempted to respond to diminishing soft-drink sales with K-Cup-style pods and a reusable water bottle. The design process was meticulous, with extensive prototyping and testing. But Drinkfinity had a short shelf life, discontinued within two years of its 2018 release.

“Design is rarely the thing that determines whether something succeeds in the market,” Kuang says. Take Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. “Jeff Bezos henpecked the original Kindle design to death. Because he didn’t believe in capacitive touch, he put a keyboard on it, and all this other stuff,” Kuang says. “Then the designer of the original Kindle walked and gave [the model] to Barnes & Noble.” Barnes & Noble released a product with a superior physical design, the Nook. But design was no match for distribution. According to the most recent data, Amazon owns approximately 80% of the e-book market share.

The rise of mobile computing has forced companies to create effortless user experiences—or risk getting left behind. When you hail an Uber or order toilet paper in a single click, you are reaping the benefits of carefully considered design. A 2018 McKinsey study found that companies with the strongest commitment to design and the best execution of design principles had revenue that was 32 percentage points higher—and shareholder returns that were 56 percentage points higher—than other companies.

There are four signs your idea has legs:People pay you money: Several people start to pay for your product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection toContinued usage: People continue to use your prototype product, even if it’s hackyStrong emotion: You’re hearing hatred for the incumbents (i.e. pain) or a deep and strong emotional reaction to your idea (i.e. pull)Cold inbound interest: You’re seeing cold inbound interest in your product

Every prosumer collaboration product, including Figma, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, and Slack, spent three to four years wandering in the dark until they stumbled on something that clicked.

As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities.

Cities have lots of rules and regulation about how things can be designed and built, reducing the need for and value of creativity

The situation is similar in our field. In 2009, companies might ask a designer to “imagine the shoe-shopping experience on mobile,” and such a designer would need to marshal a considerable number of skills to do so: research into how such activity happens today and how it had been attempted online before and the psychology of people engaged in it; explorations of many kinds of interfaces, since no one really knew yet how to present these kinds of information on smartphones; market investigations to determine e.g. “what % of prospective shoppers have which kinds of devices, and what designs can accommodate them all”; testing for raw usability: can people even figure out what to do when they see these screens? And so on.In 2023, the scene is very different. Best practices in most forms of software and services are commodified; we know, from a decade plus of market activity, what works for most people in a very broad range of contexts. Standardization is everywhere, and resources for the easy development of UIs abound.

It’s also the case that if a designer adds 15% to a design’s quality but increases cycle time substantially, is another cook in the kitchen, demands space for ideation or research, and so on, the trade-off will surely start to seem debatable to many leaders, and that’s ignoring FTE costs! We can be as offended by this as we want, but the truth is that the ten millionth B2B SaaS startup can probably validate or falsify product-market-fit without hiring Jony Ive and an entire team of specialists.

We design apps downstream of how Apple designs iOS. There’s just not that much room for innovating in UI at the moment

Today, for a larger-than-ever percentage of projects, some good libraries and guidelines like Apple’s HIG can get non-designers where they need to go. Many companies could probably do very well with1 designer to do native design + create and maintain a design systemPMs and executives for ideationFront-end engineers working off of the design system / component library to implement ideasSo even where commodification doesn’t mean no designers, it still probably means fewer designers.

If, for example, they land AR / VR, we will once again face a world of businesses who need to figure out how their goods and services make sense in a new context: how should we display Substack posts in AR, for example? Which metaphors should persist into the new world? What’s the best way to shop for shoes in VR? What affordances empower the greatest number of people?

But there will at least be another period when engineers who “just ship” will produce such massively worse user interfaces that software designers will be important again.

“design process” and “design cycles” are under pressure and may face much more soon. Speed helps, and so too does a general orientation towards working with production however it’s happening. This basically sums to: “Be less precious, and try to fit in in whatever ways help your company ship.”

being capable of more of the work of making software can mean becoming better at strategy and ideation, such that you’re ever executive’s favorite collaborative partner; you listen well, you mock fast (maybe with AI), and you help them communicate; or it can mean becoming better at execution, learning, for example, to code.

Reddit is rumored to have plans to go public, but they need better leadership than the current team. Huffman has shown no leadership skills. He doesn’t know how to read the room. Most importantly, he lacks the social empathy to lead a social platform. Even more disappointing is the lack of comments or intervention from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the always chatty — who seems to have advice for every other founder, except for his co-founder. […] In an attempt to monetize the content generated by the community, Huffman forgot that it is the people who make the platform. The community is the platform. It is something the owners of social media platforms forget. […] It happened with MySpace. It has happened with Twitter. It is now happening with Reddit. They never learn from past mistakes. They assume that because they own the platform, they own the community. Every time they forget that important thing, they erode the community’s trust. And once that trust goes, so does the unfettered loyalty. People start looking for options.

I have zero faith in Steve Huffman’s ability to lead Reddit. What kind of chief executive officer posts this comment after a massive community backlash?

closing off 3rd party API access mostly serves an IPO, not OpenAI. If Reddit merely wanted to restrict the ability to scrape its data, they could have done so without killing off clients – e.g. via licensing deals. However, perhaps if access to training data is seen as an elbows-out brawl, I could see how Reddit would be extremely protective of its data. I mean, lyrics websites, map makers, and dictionaries go to great lengths to protect their data. It would not be a giant stretch for Reddit to do so as well.

Huffman is right that, in the end, the whole situation reflects a product problem: the native Reddit apps, both on desktop and on mobile, are ugly and difficult to use. (In particular, I find the nested comments under each post bizarrely difficult to expand or collapse; the tap targets for your fingers are microscopic.) Reddit didn’t really navigate the transition to mobile devices so much as it endured it; it’s little wonder that millions of the service’s power users have sought refuge in third-party apps with more modern designs.

Of course, you shouldn’t discriminate, but when we say belonging, it has to be more than just inclusion. It has to actually be the proactive manifestation of meeting people, creating connections in friendships. And Jony Ive said, “Well, you need to reframe it. It’s not just about belonging, it’s about human connection and belonging.”And that was, I think, a really big unlock. The next thing Jony Ive said is he created this book for me, a book of his ideas, and the book was called “Beyond Where and When,” and he basically said that Airbnb should shift from beyond where and when to who and what?Who are you and what do you want in your life? And that was a part of the inspiration behind Airbnb categories, that we wanted people to come to Airbnb without a destination in mind and that we could categorize properties not just by location but by what makes them unique, and that really influenced Airbnb categories and some of the stuff we’re doing now.

Duolingo had already implemented several gamification mechanics successfully, such as the progression system on the home screen, streaks, and an achievements system. And second, top digital games at the time had much higher retention rates than our product, which I took as evidence that we hadn’t yet reached the ceiling for gamification’s impact.

The moves counter allowed users only a finite number of moves to complete a level, which added a sense of scarcity and urgency to the gameplay. We decided to incorporate the counter mechanic into our product. We gave our users a finite number of chances to answer questions correctly before they had to start the lesson over.

Depressingly, the result of all that effort was completely neutral. No change to our retention. No increase in DAU. We hardly got any user feedback at all.

When you are playing Gardenscapes, each move feels like a strategic decision, because you have to outmaneuver dynamic obstacles to find a path to victory. But strategic decision-making isn’t required to complete a Duolingo lesson—you mostly either know the answer to a question or you don’t. Because there wasn’t any strategy to it, the Duolingo moves counter was simply a boring, tacked-on nuisance. It was the wrong gamification mechanic to adopt into Duolingo. I realized that I had been so focused on the similarities between Gardenscapes and Duolingo that I had failed to account for the importance of the underlying differences.

Referrals work for Uber because riders are paying for rides on a never-ending pay-as-you-go system. A free ride is a constant incentive. For Duolingo, we were trying to incentivize users by offering a free month of Super Duolingo. However, our best and most active users already had Super Duolingo, and we couldn’t give them a free month when they were already in a plan. This meant that our strategy, which needed to rely on our best users, actually excluded them.

Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself:Why is this feature working in that product?Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e. will it translate well?What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?

Our failure with the Gardenscapes-style moves counter hadn’t actually disproved any of the original reasons why we believed gamification still had upside for Duolingo—we had only learned that the moves counter was a clumsy attempt at it. This time, we would be more methodical and intelligent about features we added or borrowed.

We deliberately made our leaderboard as casual and frictionless as possible; users were automatically opted in and could progress to the top of the first league by merely engaging consistently in their regular language study. By keeping the game mechanic exciting, but making it simpler than in FarmVille 2, we felt like we had struck the right balance of adopting and adapting.

as I’ve wrestled with writing this, it’s clear that many just don’t see the problem, as they assume a cheap button is nearly as good as a proper dial. They’ll openly admit a dial is indeed better but a cheap button is “good enough” and that a dial is “just too expensive.” That actually may be true! There are cases when using a push button is the right choice. But not always. We need to understand when to try a bit harder. Yes, you’re spending a tiny bit more on hardware, but you’re creating a product that is usually much easier to use, reduces returns, and builds your brand which improves sales. Is this positive outcome a given? Of course not, nothing is guaranteed but we need to stop pretending there is NO COST to cheaping out on buttons.

The dial changes the frequency with a simple twist. The push button device “Deconstructs” the twist dial into two up/down buttons. Each press increments the frequency a tiny amount. This means a twist is replaced with many button presses. Again, they are ‘functionally equivalent’ but the expression and ease of use are quite different.

“Adding a feature” is never free. Always start with the user’s problems first. If pressed into using one of these four abuses, make sure to fully appreciate its impact, the friction it creates, and what you can do to work around it.  Adding a feature shouldn’t also “add a problem.”

As a professional UX Designer, I want devices to offer more. But UX Design isn’t about cramming everything into your product in the vague Hail Mary hope it’ll ship a few more units. That’s the sales team speaking, not the user. It’s the wrong motivation and creates monsters.

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

Shifts in visual narratives happen every decade or so, so it’s not surprising that the design world is moving away from the corporate flatness of web2. Instead of reminding us of the problems of our current world and the harm that’s been caused by Big Tech, the new, abstract forms of web3 distract us from the crises of the day with the promise of a new virtual world.

TikTok looked at what makes their content unique. Applying an OOUX mindset, the most interesting object is the “post” populating the feed. Two things stand out. First, the videos are very short, with only a couple of seconds of runtime. Which meant the usual distinction between browsing and watching made little sense. Second, opting for a truly mobile experience, their videos would be portrait mode. This meant users could browse and watch in the same orientation, one video at a time. The design decision to merge the browse and watch experience into one stream with autoplay broke all kinds of conventions. Yet, by doing so, it created a unique and engaging experience that is even borderline addictive.

Tinder understood that the selection moment is what makes them unique. They wanted to provide a quick and easy method for their key interaction to decide if a user is a match or not.

It’s not just a question of “how do we make this usable?” it’s more about “how do we make this usable for users and increase feature adoption which will drive more revenue?“

In complexity science, ‘emergence’ describes the way that interactions between individual components in a complex system can give rise to new behavior, patterns, or qualities. For example, the quality of ‘wetness’ cannot be found in a single water molecule, but instead arises from the interaction of many water molecules together. In living systems, emergence is at the core of adaptive evolution.

Design for emergence prioritizes open-ended combinatorial possibilities such that the design object can be composed and adapted to a wide variety of contextual and idiosyncratic niches by its end-user. LEGO offers an example — a simple set of blocks with a shared protocol for connecting to one another from which a nearly infinite array of forms can emerge. Yet as we will see, design for emergence can generate value well beyond children’s toys.

In contrast to high modern design, user-centered design takes a more modest position; the designer does not inherently know everything, and therefore she must meticulously study the needs and behaviors of users in order to produce a good design. User-centered design remains the dominant design paradigm today, employed by environmental designers, tech companies, and design agencies around the world.

In this paradigm, design is about gaining knowledge from the user, identifying desirable outcomes, and controlling as much of the process as possible to achieve those outcomes. ‘Design’ remains synonymous with maximizing control.

But consider even the ‘desire path’ example pictured above. The modal user may be well supported by paving the desire path indicated by their behavior, but what good is a paved path leading to stairs for a wheelchair user? In practice, user-centered design tends to privilege the modal user at the expense of the long-tail user whose needs may be just as great.

User-centered design has a better track record than high modern design, but it still exerts a homogenizing effect. The needs of the modal user are accommodated and scaled through software or industrial manufacturing, while power users and those with edge cases can do nothing but actively petition the designer for attention. In most cases, diverse users with a wide variety of niche use cases are forced to conform to the behavior of the modal user.

In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result. In this way we can think of design for emergence as a form of ‘meta-design.’

In other words, to address the long-tail problem, the tool must be flexible enough that it can be adapted to unexpected and idiosyncratic problem spaces—especially those unanticipated by the tool’s designer.

In contrast to user-centered design, design for emergence invites the user into the design process not only as a subject of study, but as a collaborator with agency and control.

What all these tools have in common is support for open-ended adaptation to highly contextual problems without the need for technical knowledge. Rather than building a static, purpose-built solution to a single common problem with lots of users (and lots of competitors), they’ve won robust user bases by supporting a broad swath of long-tail user needs.

Design for emergence is composable. It provides a limited ‘alphabet’ and a generative grammar that’s easy to learn and employ, yet can be extended to create powerful, complex applications. As Seymour Papert once remarked, “English is a language for children,” but this fact, “does not preclude its being also a language for poets, scientists, and philosophers.”

It creates more generic-looking interfaces that may perform well in numbers but fall short of appealing to our senses.

It’s easy to make data-driven design decisions, but relying on data alone ignores that some goals are difficult to measure. Data is very useful for incremental, tactical changes, but only if it’s checked and balanced by our instincts and common sense.

It became clear to the team in that moment that we cared about more than just clicks. We had other goals for this design: It needed to set expectations about what happens next, it needed to communicate quality, and we wanted it to build familiarity and trust in our brand.We could have easily measured how many customers clicked one button versus another, and used that data to pick an optimal button. But that approach would have ignored the big picture and other important goals.

Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.Data is good at measuring things that are easy to measure. Some goals are less tangible, but that doesn’t make them less important.While you’re chasing a 2% increase in conversion rate you may be suffering a 10% decrease in brand trustworthiness. You’ve optimized for something that’s objectively measured, at the cost of goals that aren’t so easily codified.

Design instinct is a lot more than innate creative ability and cultural guesswork. It’s your wealth of experience. It’s familiarity with industry standards and best practices.

Overreliance on data to drive design decisions can be just as harmful as ignoring it. Data only tells one kind of story. But your project goals are often more complex than that. Goals can’t always be objectively measured.