23 Random Thoughts from 2023
2 min readDec 29, 2023
- If a company’s goal is to drive metrics up, should we still measure user happiness?
- If every team has their own agenda and KPIs to meet, where does design stand?
- New features don’t always need to drive revenue; they can also drive happiness. Trust app is a good example. This drives brand experience.
- User experience is a great buzzword at the board table until they realize the hours needed to see the change. Then it’s literally “buzz off.”
- Products no longer spark joy but have become so functional, quick, and instant that they help users achieve things without understanding what they are doing. User experience has become a tool, not about the experience.
- Design communication or communication design? What difference does it make?
- Why does having a seat at the table matter, and why doesn’t it?
- What makes a good vs. great designer?
- This thing called design intuition is perhaps the strongest tool a designer has in their toolkit.
- I attended some summit meetings, and ‘empathy’ was the first word that got thrown out from a bunch of values. It felt oddly familiar when customer experience was the reason for their bad Google ratings.
- Where does innovation stand when we’re all data-informed?
- Believing in the product and what you do will make your work [insert your multiplier here]x more enjoyable.
- Know the rules and break the rules, but keep accessibility in mind. An 8px font is good to squeeze in content until you start reading it on your iPhone 11.
- Design is a way of life. It’s literally around you, and you live and breathe it. The thing about experiences helped us strengthen our design intuition.
- Sometimes justifying a design is not that bad. It’s a skill to sell and to sell well. If all else fails, forget everything and use your intuition.
- Heuristic laws and principles may seem less important than your solution. Simplify those terminologies and bring your audience in.
- What is good design? No one knows, or maybe some do. It’s a question that every designer should have at the end of the day.
- Designers are perhaps one of the strongest bunches of people. They constantly seek out the next better thing, which is why you see all the redesigns.
- Design visual sensibility is hard to train. Honestly, it’s hard.
- Contextual knowledge is key. Understanding the context and understanding the content makes your design better.
- Efficiency is underrated, but efficiency is not completing work for the sake of completing it.
- The ability to think in systems is not only helpful to build things up but also helpful to tear things apart.
- Designers should write.
- I still believe that design has the ability to change the world. (This is not a random thought, it’s a belief. 🫢)
