Simon Li – Page 4 – Design and Code

Be an Excellent Facilitator: Learnings from Reading Communicating the UX Vision

If you want to design the best product or experience for your team, you might want to read Communicating the UX Vision by Martina Hodges-Schell and James O’Brien. It isn’t a book about design thinking, or user research, or interaction design, but a collection of anti-patterns that we designers often exhibit that prevent us from working in the most effective way with the team. Below are my learnings from the book and I’d like to share them with you.

5 Examples of Clever Use of Cognitive Biases in Product Design

How can we go beyond visuals when designing digital products?

So far in my blog, I’ve covered two ways to do that: One is to understand the user mental model. Another is to be more cognizant of the relationship between design and metrics. There’s a third way, which is to leverage cognitive biases.

According to verywellmind.com, cognitive biases are systematic errors in our thinking. They are the attempts of our brains to simplify information processing. They serve as heuristics, or rules of thumb, that can help us make decisions faster.

If you’re new to cognitive biases, here are five real-life examples I’ve collected that beautifully illustrate how they can be used in product design. Definitions of the biases below are pulled from Wikipedia.

Win the Number Game: Strategies for Data-Driven Design

You are excited about your new design. It certainly looks more beautiful than the production, but when it comes time to A/B test, it doesn’t fare well. Key metrics drop and your craft cannot be shipped.

If you’re a product designer, does this resonate with you? Has something like this happened to you before?

Miscillaneous

7 Amazing Books I Read in 2021 and What I’ve Learned from Them

I like reading books. A good book calms me down, opens my mind, and makes me feel enlightened when I finish its last chapter. Here are some of the amazing books that I read this year and I’d like to share them with you.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Visual Design

Denoise Our Designs

Here’s the design I created recently. It was a big card containing some smaller cards inside.

Cards inside a another card creates gaps and gutters, which are non-communicating elements that add noises to our design.

I knew it wasn’t the ideal design, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the problem was.