February 2015 Inside Design Articles

A brief history of user experience

Feb 26, 2015 — Think about the last time you ate at a restaurant. What cuisine did it serve? What made you to choose that particular restaurant? What was your first impression as you walked in? Were you asked to wait till you were ushered to an available seat? How was the menu arranged? Did food come quickly enough? How did it taste? How was the customer service? Did your squaring up go smoothly? Would you go back again?

How to design a connected workplace—in a historical landmark

Feb 25, 2015 — At the beginning of 2014, my agency, 383, moved our studio to an unused factory in the heart of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. We exist to help brands be more useful, so it only seemed natural to apply this purpose to our own space. Here’s the story of how it went, what we discovered, and how we built a more “useful” studio.

Top 4 tips from our webinar “Engaging engineering in design”

Feb 24, 2015 — Last Thursday, we hosted our very first webinar with FullStory’s Josh Teague: “Engaging engineering in design.” Josh shared best practices gleaned from his 10+ years as a product designer, 4 of which were at Google. Here are a just a few of the many pearls of wisdom he shared.

How to build habit-forming products, part 2: building on the loop

Feb 23, 2015 — Eating chocolate. Checking your phone. Crushing some candy. Disparate as these actions seem, they share one thing—they’re all habits. And habits all share a 3-part foundation known as the habit loop.

Friday inspiration: workspaces

Feb 20, 2015 — Your workspace has to work for you and be both creative and inspiring. For this week’s inspiration, we called on y’all to share your workspaces—and you delivered! Check out the 24 gorgeous places these lucky people get to call their offices.

Inside Design: Prezi

Feb 19, 2015 — Prezi’s presentation software lets users present and collaborate with each other in real time. I sat down with Peter Zimon, Lead Product Designer, and David Gauquelin, Director of Design, to discuss the design team structure, design culture, innovation, and what’s up next for Prezi’s design team.

36 free flat icons for your next productivity app

Feb 18, 2015 — Icons are a pain to design, especially if you’re faced with converting your old-school skeuomorphic icons into shiny new flat versions. Our friends at Vecteezy feel your pain. That’s why they’re releasing these 36 flat “office-themed” icons for free—just for you InVision blog readers. They’re yours to use as you like, no license or attribution required. The download’s got icons in 4 formats: AI, EPS, PNG, and PSD.

3 steps to bridging the gap between design and development

Feb 17, 2015 — Incorporating these 3 documents into your handoff process will give the developers working on your design a whole new vantage point.

6 time-saving Sketch plugins to install right now—for free

Feb 16, 2015 — ketch is quickly becoming the UI design tool of choice, so here’s our short list of the most helpful Sketch […]

Friday inspiration: ordinary moments, extraordinary photos

Feb 12, 2015 — ith the right framing, you can exalt life’s most mundane moments, revealing their extraordinary, breathtaking beauty. These photos do just […]

The perils of armchair design

Feb 12, 2015 — Let’s be frank: I’ve done it. I’d wager you’ve done it, too. Design inspiration sites are chock-full of it. The entire design, UX, and creative community does it every single day: “Ugh, this design totally blows. I could make this look so much better.” Photoshop > New … > My-Better-Layout.psd

Get 256 brand color swatches for Photoshop—free

Feb 11, 2015 — any of the world’s most recognizable brands owe some of their distinctiveness to their unique color palettes. If you’ve ever […]

How to build habit-forming products, part 1: the habit loop

Feb 10, 2015 — A compelling email or clever push notification can remind a user to come back to your product. But you may only get one visit. One conversion. What if there was a way to keep people coming back again and again—i.e., to create loyalty?

Join our first webinar: “Engaging engineering in design”

Feb 10, 2015 — ocializing your design means more than getting colleague and stakeholder buy-in. Because a successful design is more than just beautiful […]

Design teardown: designing for personas with UserTesting

Feb 5, 2015 — The shiny new UserTesting homepage! Eventually, every startup has to answer the million-dollar question: how are we going to make […]

How to be an amazing designer: the excellence bar

Feb 4, 2015 — Your excellence bar is the standard you hold yourself to—both creatively and professionally. It takes a ton of self-discipline, especially at today’s breakneck pace, to do your best work, and get the best work out of your team. And even more to not suck as a human while doing that.

3 ways users make decisions—subconsciously

Feb 3, 2015 — We don’t always have the mental bandwidth to weigh every possible outcome of our decisions or collect every piece of information available. Luckily, our brains have a fantastic way of processing data in less-than-optimal conditions: heuristics.

7 free resources every product designer needs

Feb 2, 2015 — Being a product designer comes with a host of challenges. And those challenges range from the purely technical—such as wrangling a thousand different device sizes—to the intimately personal—such as creative burnout.