User interface design is hard. Smartphones, tablets and laptops come in all shapes and sizes with and without keyboard, mouse and touchscreen input. For making your design great in this context, you must first learn to break your design.
Too often in projects I’ve seen design fail late in the development process due to it not being tested enough in different ways. This waste of time and energy can easily be reduced.
There are several reasons for this failure. Sometimes it’s stress, last minute content changes or unclear initial requirements. But sometimes it’s simply because we designers can be unstructured and sloppy. We need to get better, we need to start breaking our design before someone else breaks it for us.
Here’s my guide for putting your design through the wringer.
Break your design with real content
Every designer I’ve ever spoken to has agreed that using real content as early as possible is the way to go. Yet, I often see design filled with placeholder images, Lorem Ipsum text and comfortable made-up content.
Email. Love it or hate it, you probably have to use it on a daily basis anyway. Here are my best tips for writing emails people will read, understand and (most importantly) reply to.
I’ve sure sent my amount of crappy emails over the years. Emails with vague subject titles, unnecessary CC:s and forgotten attachments. Once, I’ve even hit the Reply All button and sent an email to over 500 coworkers.
I’m always trying to write fewer and better emails and faster and more helpful replies. However, I can always get better and so can you. Now, I’m gonna teach you how!
Here are my best pieces of advice.
Write a detailed subject title
Just like a well-written link on a website, you should know what an email is about just by reading its subject title. This makes searching your inbox less time-consuming and your recipients will hopefully find and read your emails sooner.
So make your subject titles are simple, non-clickbaity and have their keywords as early as possible.
There are lots of great tools for drawing wireframes today. However, I still prefer my good ol’ paper wireframing kit. In this post I’ll tell you why and explain how paper wireframing will make you a better designer.
In 2012 I was planning on taking my wireframing skills to the next level. I had gotten the excellent app Paper by FiftyThree for my new iPad and had ordered two well-reviewed tablet sketching pens all the way from the US.
Around this time, I also took a paper sketching course by the Swedish designer Mårten Angner. Taking this course completely changed my approach to making wireframes and over the years it has made me a better designer.
Let me tell you why paper wireframing is a must-have skill.
Today, images stand for about 50 % of a website’s total weight. Since poor performance is so tightly linked to decreased revenue and dissatisfied users, we designers must take more responsibility for website images.
Websites keep getting heavier and heavier. According to data from httparchive.org, the average website weighed 3686 KB on February 15, 2018. Six years earlier (February 15, 2012), the average website used to weigh 986 KB.
Websites have become 373,8 % heavier during the last six years. It’s mind-blowingly bad!
Video stands for a large part of a website’s weight today compared to a few years ago, but the largest contributor to the total weight is still images.
On February 15, 2018 images stood for ~49.3 % of the weight of an average website. Data from httparchive.org.
Why performance matters
When arguing for the importance of good performance, it’s easy to find supporting research.
If you’ve ever shared your knowledge and experience in front of a crowd, you know it’s an amazing and very rewarding experience. But getting speaking gigs can be challenging. In this post, I’ll share my advice on how to get them.
Since 2011 I’ve been giving talks on different topics such as accessibility, mobile first, responsive web design and how to become a macOS power user. It’s something that I enjoy immensely, learn a lot from and will keep doing for as long as I can.
While giving talks is a science on its own, getting speaking gigs is something that doesn’t happen automatically. You have to work on your social and marketing skills. Selling yourself doesn’t come easy to most people. I’ve sure struggled with it.
Luckily, I’ve learnt a thing or two about selling my talks over the years. So, here are my best pieces of advice on getting more speaking gigs.
