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Every designer has a different way of “plugging in” when they start working on a new design. Listening to music is probably one of the best options when you go on a design sprint. You might prefer putting on a guilty-pleasure TV show in the background. But once in a while, you might want to switch it up and learn something new while you design your upcoming masterpiece.

Below is a compiled list of every great design podcast to help you focus, gain inspiration, and stay entertained while you design. We’ve got everything from funny shows related to the industry to the best tech podcasts about design to podcasts that will help you look at your designs in a new way.

ShopTalk

ShopTalk is a live design and UX podcast hosted by Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. Each week, the duo are joined by a special guest to discuss front-end web design and development and to answer questions submitted by listeners. There are over 260 episodes of this podcast, so it should keep you busy for a while.

Adventures in Design

If you’re looking for something to start your morning with every day, Adventures in Design has a new episode Monday through Friday. With nearly 600 episodes to date, this podcast covers “the reality of trying to live your creative dreams.” Topics run the gamut, and you’ll find a lot of fun banter with this daily dose of design.

Design Details

Hosted by Bryn Jackson and Brian Lovin, this design podcast lets you learn from the best in the industry. As they put it, the hosts talk to the people who design their favorite products. In recent episodes, that includes interviews with a product designer at Slack, a creative director at Google, and the design lead at Shopify.

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

This podcast claims to be the world’s first podcast about design. Episodes are composed of conversations with designers, writers, artists, musicians, and other creative types who have unique perspectives on modern design.

NTMY the Show

Hosted by Tobias van Schneider, NTMY stands for “Nice to Meet You.” The show is a personal conversation-based podcast in which Tobias meets a new creative type each week. Past guests have included clothing designers, a designer-turned-comedian, and an artist. This one is a newer podcast, with just sixteen episodes so far.

Obsessed with Design

This podcast takes a broad view of design, not just focusing on web development but on all types of design. Host Josh Miles interviews a different designer in each episode with focuses ranging from illustration to branding to architecture.

The Hacking UI podcast

An offshoot of their popular Hacking UI newsletter, the Hacking UI podcast features creators Sagi Shrieber and David Tintner discussing their passions: design, development, entrepreneurship, time hacking, and tech. Episodes regularly feature interviews with some of the top designers working today.

UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy

A top UI/UX podcast, UI Breakfast is hosted by independent consultant Jane Portman. Originally from Russia, Jane brings in industry experts to share their knowledge and insights about UI/UX trends, products, marketing, and more.

User Defenders

Another great UX podcast, User Defenders is hosted by Jason Ogle. Jason offers up “inspiring interviews with UX superheroes.” The idea behind the podcast is to help newer designers learn from the best by getting at what makes these leading UX superheroes tick, what inspires them, and how they gained success.

The Deeply Graphic Design Cast

This design podcast keeps its focus on graphic design. A nice departure from the interview-based podcasts above, Deeply Graphic instead focuses on a different design topic each episode, taking a deep dive into subjects like designing with SEO in mind, working with subcontractors, and using mood boards.

Design Review

Design Review is posted twice a week and focuses on different aspects of product design. Chris Liu and Jonathan Shariat talk about design thinking, tools, user experience and more. There are already 53 episodes, and they are still making new ones.

Code podcast

Code podcast—Sounds like something for developers? It is, but they also cover some design topics as well. This podcast is a great opportunity to learn about design from a developer’s perspective with design knowhow.

Creative Honey

If you are interested in other designers’ approaches, Creative Honey is definitely for you. Great interviews, talks about design community, and a little bit of psychology. Unfortunately, they haven’t added any new episodes for a while, but there is still a lot of valuable content in their archives.

There’s a fine line between an interaction that works and one that is unusable. Interaction design principles help bridge the divide.

Well-executed interaction design plays a huge role in the implementation of great UX, and is indisputably one of the fundamentals of UX design principles.

“Unusable” means “I’m moving on,” and no matter how “good looking” the visual design—how fancy that animation is—mess up the interaction design and your UX is kaput. Get it right and you’ll be well on your way to a much better UX even if the aesthetics fall short. The product will have a much better chance of succeeding, which in turn contributes to the bottom line.

Interaction design (IxD) is defined by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) as “the structure and behavior of interactive systems. Interaction designers strive to create meaningful relationships between people and the products and services they use, from computers to mobile devices to appliances and beyond.”

“Experience is critical, for it determines how fondly people remember their interactions.” —Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things.

Following interaction design principles contributes immensely to great interaction design, which in turn will contribute to the experience.

It’s possible that all of today’s devices and tech could be replaced with something entirely different overnight, yet because of its lasting principles, great interaction design would still be achievable. Those constant principles are about what motivates people, their behavior, and how they think.

Imagine if every door handle on every door worked differently. For one you would have to push first into the door then down; for another you’d have to pull up instead of pressing down, and yet another you’d have to pull up twice and then down—a total disaster. In fact, the phrase “turn the door handle” assumes there is only one way to do it.

Nobody likes being beaten over the head by cries of “follow the rules,” but truly excellent interaction design relies on a set of standards, best practices, conventions, and rules of thumb (heuristics). It’s no squishy science, but they form the bedrock of IxD and make interaction possible with the least amount of friction. Interface standards don’t stifle creativity—they are not hard and fast rules, but foundational guidelines that help a designer establish a “usable and familiar design” base from which to innovate.

Interaction Design Principles and Best Practices

Great UI design achieves pure user delight by combining basic UI design principles with goal-driven interaction design.

Successful interaction design employs simple, clearly defined goals, a strong purpose, and an intuitive UI.

In an effort to keep interactions simple and easy, goal-driven interaction design puts nothing more than the absolute minimum necessary in front of users in order for them to complete a task.

Let’s dive into some of the most important principles (not an exhaustive list by any means)

Discoverability

Basically, if the user cannot find it, it does not exist. It must be made clear as a bell what actions are possible in a UI in less than a microsecond—for example, labeling icons as a best practice. Unlabeled icons are tantamount to throwing roadblocks into a user’s path because they’ll have to stop to decipher meaning. You’re interrupting the “flow.” And here’s a shocker… They’re not interested in learning your UI.

Signifiers

Very much tied to discoverability, effective use of signifiers ensures that affordances—the possibility of an action on an object—are clearly indicated in the UI. Signifiers provide strong clues like signals or signposts. Indicating an available interaction, they flash green lights at the user shouting, “Here I am, you can tap (click, swipe, etc.) me!” An affordance may exist in the UI, but may stay hidden because if it lacks a signifier, it remains invisible. An example might be a “hidden gestural interaction” that doesn’t reveal itself unless the user accidentally swipes left or right (to delete something, for example).

“Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.” —Don Norman (Norman, 2013)

Feedback

After signifiers, the next most important communication to the user is feedback. Feedback means: explicit information about the impact of the action. It also means constant visibility of system status, i.e., the system should make sure that:

Users are kept informed about what’s going on.

There is continuous information about the results of their actions and the current state of the product (system).

There is no confusion in the mind of a user as to the state of the product, i.e., processing, loading, searching, uploading, etc., or some other state change.

After an action has been executed, it’s easy to determine the new state.

Conceptual Models and Mental Models

Great interaction design presents all the information a user needs to create a good conceptual model of the system, thereby leading to their understanding and a sense of control. A conceptual model enhances both discoverability and evaluation of results when using the system.

Mental models—or cognitive maps—are the images in a user’s mind that inform their expectation of a certain interaction and how something works in the real world. Cognitive maps are internal representations of our physical environment, particularly associated with spatial relationships. By effectively using the user’s mental model, interaction designers can create systems that “feel” intuitive.

The designer invents a conceptual model—the design model, and this is how the designer intends the device or software to work. The only way to communicate this model to users is to implement it through a UI. Users then interact with the conceptual model and create their own mental model of how something works.

Designers can’t tell users how they intended an app to work—they need to design a UI appropriately in order to clearly communicate its purpose. In other words, make the interface easy to understand and use. Bad interaction design runs the risk of creating the wrong mental model for the user. This leads to confusion and user error because they are trying to operate the app in a way the designer did not intend.

Mappings

Mapping is the relationship between controls and their effect in the world. The principle of feedback is a close cousin of mapping because the two principles work together to create a seamless experience. Nearly all artifacts need some kind of mapping between controls and effects—in the case of interface design, it’s the relationship between a control and its resulting function. Natural mapping—taking advantage of physical analogies and cultural standards—leads to an immediate understanding. For example, a designer can use spatial analogy in the UI:To increase some value with a slider component, swipe a slider to the right,To decrease it, swipe left.Some natural mappings are biological, as in the universal standard that a rising level represents more, a diminishing level, less.

Constraints

The design concept of constraints is a way to determine how to restrict the kind of user interaction that can take place in a given moment. Interaction design constraints help efficient interaction by providing “guide rails” for users—almost like a guiding hand steering the interactions that can occur.

Constraints in design make sure only specific things are enabled, or even visible, in order to guide the user towards certain interactions. It considers size, scale, proportion, emphasis, and state, and how these, working together in harmony, help create hierarchy and consequently influence the user. Constraints put in place correctly also help reduce the chance of user error.

The opposite of constraint is when every option is offered to the user, making it difficult for them to decide what to do next. It’s the principle of choice. The more options, the more difficult it is to choose any one of them—we become overwhelmed by all the possibilities.

Great interaction design doesn’t put every available option on the interface, but restricts it to what’s most important in any given moment.

Consistency, Standards, and Heuristics

These are all related—brothers to patterns (below), if you will. To prevent user error and make an application easy to learn, it is essential that an interaction model be consistent. Consistency improves UX, general usability, and the efficiency with which users can use digital products.

Consistency means using similar elements to achieve similar tasks, and having similar functions and behaviors throughout—a consistent interface is one that follows rules, such as using the same operation to do something. Products that strive to be highly usable follow well-established conventions, standards, best practices and usability heuristics (broad rules of thumb, not specific usability guidelines).Conforming to a convention for example, may be in the way a page is laid out. Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. Therefore, a site is more likely to be profitable if it follows a conventional layout.A standard could be a breadcrumb trail (an orientation and navigation device that’s immediately recognizable), or a global navigation menu across the top of the page as on the BCC site.

Patterns and Learnability

How easily can a new user learn to navigate an interface? Nobody wants to learn a new way of doing things unless it provides a significant benefit over what came before it—yet we’re constantly inundated with untested, unconventional interactions.

Common components or patterns provide instant learnability. Once you’ve learned how to use a spoon, you will always know how to use a spoon. Same with riding a bicycle, skating… the same construct applies to the UI components we use every day: buttons, text fields, dropdown menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, spinners, sliders, icons, accordions, search boxes, etc.

The best interaction designs don’t try to reinvent the wheel, but make efficient and effective use of patterns in a new way.

Patterns not only encourage learnability, but also provide consistency (another principle, discussed above) and bring it in line with the user’s expectations of how things should work.

Visual Hierarchy and Emphasis

During their interaction with a site or an app, people are looking for the information most relevant to their search. Visual hierarchy concerns the arrangement of elements in a way that implies importance. Visual hierarchy in design influences the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees. Not everything is given equal “weight”; order is created by visual contrast between objects in a field of perception. Visual contrast (emphasis) can be achieved by size, proximity, color, opacity, and actual tonal contrast between elements.

Do not underestimate the power of visual hierarchy. It’s been very effectively used in all kinds of design for eons, in architecture and industrial design as well as print design. Check out some great poster designs. Using this technique well in interaction design, the right things seem to appear at the right time in the right way.

Great interaction designers use the power of emphasis to successfully achieve “lean and mean” interface designs that seem to work like magic.

Fitts’ Law

Believe it or not, this law comes from early studies looking at human muscle movement and targeting of telegraph operator and production line task performance, and was later adapted to HCI (human-computer interaction). It basically says: “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”

In simpler terms, it’s about how far and how large a target is, and how close it is in relation to other targets. Shorter mouse movements or taps are better—it is always faster to click or swipe a target if it is closer to your starting position. Related tasks should also be in close proximity to each other so users don’t have to dart around the screen interacting with the UI.

Fitts’ law can accurately predict the amount of time it takes to move to and select a target. A target can be a button, a dropdown, or some other interactive element on a screen. If it’s too far, too small, or if clickable elements are too close together, the efficiency and usability of the UI is greatly reduced.

Gutenberg Diagram, Z- and F-Pattern Layouts

These patterns are applicable in different situations depending on content, and are mostly used by western audiences. The Gutenberg diagram describes a general pattern that the eyes move through when looking at evenly distributed, homogenous information—mostly text-heavy sites such as blogs or news sites. The Gutenberg diagram suggests that the strong and weak fallow areas fall outside the reading gravity path, and receive minimal attention unless emphasized visually in some way.

The Z-pattern follows the shape of the letter Z. In certain cases this pattern is also referred to as a Zig-Zag pattern. The main difference with the Gutenberg diagram is that the Z-pattern suggests viewers will pass through the two fallow areas. Otherwise they still start and end in the same places, and still pass through the middle. As with Gutenberg, a designer would place the most important information along the Z-pattern’s path.

F is for fast and refers to how users read content. The F-pattern was popularized by an NNGroup eyetracking study which recorded more than 200 users reading content on the web. It found that people’s scanning patterns were pretty consistent across many different types of sites.

Why is this important? On an eCommerce site for example, to maximize scanning, you might want to arrange the most important content in a way that follows the F-pattern.

Recognition Rather than Recall

Recognition refers to our ability to “recognize” an event or piece of information as being familiar, while recall is much more of a “cognitive burden” that involves pulling related details from memory. Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch.

For example, using icons in a UI is powerful because it allows for the instant recognition of a symbol. Our brain processes (recognizes) symbols about 1000x faster than reading text. If a designer displays a standard warning sign icon in a dialog, it immediately makes the user focus and pay attention because the next action may be destructive. But if an icon is designed in such a way that forces users to recall and decipher meaning—a hand held up for example instead of the warning icon—it decreases efficiency and the usability of the UI.

Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

“You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” —Jonathan Ive.

This is one of the most challenging principles because it’s hard. The tendency is for designers and product managers to add every available option under the sun, and let the user decide the path they want to take. That’s really the lazy approach, and leads to products full of nonessential clutter.

Interfaces need to be cleared of the unnecessary elements and content that does not support the user’s goals and tasks. Designers should not only design aesthetically pleasing UIs, but also prioritize information screen-to-screen in the user flow. Using visual hierarchy and the magic of emphasis, only the essential and absolute minimum of information needed for the user to complete a task should be presented.

Michelangelo said of his work: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Designing an interaction that is minimalist, aesthetically pleasing, and simple requires the designer to understand what’s going on precisely in the moment people will be using the product, and get rid of all that’s not necessary. Performing deep user research and testing to understand how users will use the product is typically the best approach.

Error Prevention

Users are often distracted when performing a task, so preventing unconscious errors by visual emphasis, offering suggestions and the use of carefully designed constraints is key. A form of error-proofing—also known as Poka-Yoke—refers to the implementation of failsafe mechanisms to prevent a process from producing errors.

One of the best ways to prevent errors is to design a better mental model. Many user mistakes occur when the designer’s model and interpretation of how the system should work does not match the user’s mental model.

Standard design conventions help (one of the principles mentioned above) because they help users understand what actions they can take. Users that interact with your website or application have used thousands of other sites and apps, and expect common interactive elements to look and work a certain way. Error-prone situations can arise when your product deviates from those conventions.

The Future of Interaction Design

New devices, environments, and interfaces will continue to advance with new interaction possibilities. Video-game controllers are constantly evolving, and provide a diverse array of input controls, as well as haptic feedback. Gestural interfaces will mature from touchscreens that support 2D and 3D gestures—for example, gestures on iOS and Android devices—to using hand gestures in 3D spaces to interact with virtual-reality spaces, gaming consoles, and IoT devices that let us control our environment.

Even for a seasoned designer, creating a new styleguide for a given product is hard—there are a lot of possible design directions, and the process can quickly become overwhelming. Startup life is hectic, fast, and filled with clichés such as “perfect is the enemy of done,” “move fast and break things,” or “launch it now, fix it later.”

Coming up with a styleguide under such slogans and fluctuating priorities is challenging, but a must if a product’s design is to succeed in the long run.

In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about design systems, styleguides, pattern libraries, and atomic design. While these tools are very useful, using them can seem like overkill when you only want to create a few screens for an MVP or to demo an app. However, having a styleguide will not only improve your design process in general but will make your app more solid and consistent.

Let’s first talk about the main benefits of a styleguide, and then touch upon the challenging startup environment. Finally, we’ll discuss how a styleguide is always evolving as a living document.

Top Five Reasons Why a Styleguide Is a Good Idea

1. A Styleguide Makes Designs Concrete and Branding Clear

As a lone designer at a startup—which is often the case—there aren’t many opportunities to review and challenge design decisions made by others on the team. Although everyone might be working in collaboration, designs are not necessarily shared with others. This means there is only one person validating final designs.

A styleguide will provide a startup with guidance and documentation for reference. It will challenge some of the design choices made by the designer or the team because they’ll have to be validated in the global context of the app. Designing a UI component because it works well on one screen will not cut it. A well thought-out design should solve a single design problem in one situation, as well as a pervasive problem that is found on other screens of your app.

A styleguide makes the overall design style, brand guidelines, specifications, and rules available to everyone at your company. It’s only a click away. They can go to a URL to easily access an online styleguide or download a PDF. Design becomes everyone’s job—it is no longer the sole responsibility of the design team. It’s a prudent approach that will improve your product’s user interface.

2. A Styleguide Makes Your Design More Consistent

It provides a dictionary of sorts for your UI design language. You can use the same terminology when you want to communicate something you’ve already expressed. Imagine if we had slightly different words to express the same thing:

“It’s raining; I need my umbrella.”

“It’s raining, I need my umbrellol”

“It’s raining, I need my umbrellala “

It may make a language poetic, but hard to understand. Fundamentally, it’s the same idea with the UI of a site or an app. For ease of use, you should only invent a new “word” when you’re really creating something new. This way, you’re bound by a strict rule that says, “Only components which solve a design problem repeatedly throughout the product are allowed into the product and subsequently the styleguide.”

Consistency makes your product more user-friendly; a highly usable product can translate into more engagement and sales.

3. Reusing the Same System Components Makes Your App Easier to Use

As in the language example, consistency is key. Once each component is understood by the user, when used again in a different context, people will already be familiar with its behavior. When it comes to user interactions, this consistency improves the overall usability of the product.

Working with a component-based design system saves money and also makes a product easier to update. If there’s a usability issue with a component in a certain situation, it can be fixed once and all the other potential issues with that component will also be updated.

4. A Styleguide Makes Your App Faster to Develop in the Long Run

When your team is developing a common component for a screen, they’re developing a solution that they will also be using elsewhere. This saves development time—a lot of it. When your company scales, this could mean saving as much as 10x the man hours required to build a new screen.

5. A Styleguide Facilitates Production Efficiencies and Innovation

Creating a styleguide makes designs more accessible and readily available to the rest of the company. Developers and designers can prototype an idea faster and more easily. Bootstrap is often praised for making it easy for developers to create a working prototype—your styleguide serves the same purpose. It provides a reference foundation for a new UI that will be built by developers, without the design team having to create the screen first (even though the design team should QA the final screens).

The Challenges of a Startup, a Styleguide in Flux

Creating a design system in a startup environment is not as linear as it might be at a more mature company where they’re used to a more streamlined process. At a more traditional company, the design team performs UX research, ideation, and experimentation, and then comes up with the final brand styleguide. This process does not suit all companies. Startups work in an environment where their vision and the requirements for the product are always in flux. They work with MVPs (minimum viable products), incomplete versions of their apps that are used to test their idea and show its potential to users.

When it comes to creating a styleguide, this can become an issue.

In an environment that’s always evolving, a designer is usually struggling to create a styleguide that’s supposed to be somewhat ‘fixed.’ A designer might not have the time to thoroughly think through all of the components being created, even though they might still end up in the next release of the app. Facebook famously swapped their hamburger menu for a tab navigation when they matured a bit. Do you think whoever put the hamburger menu there in the first place also added it to Facebook styleguide?

You might even consider that it’s not yet time to create a styleguide. You may realize that in the long term you’re going to need one, but right now it’s more important to crank out screens for the app’s usability testing. What’s more, you’ll also need some marketing pages to promote your app. Suddenly, your design needs to ramp up, and as you’re creating screens, you begin to see the value of having a styleguide that can keep your designs and the company brand consistent.

The problem is that you don’t know exactly when it’s the right time to trade flexibility for stability. You have to decide when you should start the styleguide and when you should just focus on creating screens. An optimal approach may be to produce a styleguide at the same time you’re delivering screens—this way you may be able to have the best of both worlds.

Start with Some UI Inspiration

A good way to start, especially if you’re not a designer, is to collect examples of design styles you like, or more importantly, what you think users will respond to. Collect as many examples as possible, and put them in a folder/InVision board/Niice board/etc. They can be used as reference and inspiration along with your design sensibility. You can build on them later to create a pattern library.

For instance, when I was working on a styleguide for a company promoting artists in the entertainment industry, we wondered whether light or dark backgrounds would have a greater impact on our users. I looked at hundreds of different websites in games/movies/visual production to see how they used dark and light backgrounds.

I made a reference sheet where I highlighted the most common patterns. One pattern I identified was that companies in that industry tended to use darker backgrounds when presenting their products, but used white backgrounds in their marketing efforts, eCommerce, and shops.

You don’t have to go as deep as that, but I found having visual references helps, not only in creating a styleguide, but also in remembering some of the use cases you might need to design for. Once you feel good about the references you collected, you can start working on the visual design.

Design Solid UI Components

While working at startups, it’s harder to create components than it is to create pages—at least at the beginning. When you design a page, you often have an idea of how it’s going to be used. That’s not necessarily the case when you design a component. You’re trying to design for a specific use case, but you want it to be part of a universal design system, and you need to approach it that way. For instance, you may want to create a sub-navigation component with three buttons. You may also need it to work with four, five, or ten buttons, and it will need to work on mobile, tablet and desktop. You need to think ahead.

You want a certain level of persistence or staying power in a component. Common components shouldn’t change often, and they must be reusable in many places throughout your product. For example, if you’re only interested in an iOS app, then you want to test your component based on the number of options or the length of the content, not necessarily the screen size. The idea is that if it’s viable in the UI in many places in your app, then you know it’s a component that has the potential to be part of your styleguide.

A startup needs to start from practically nothing and then move quickly. Your boss might want a screen designed by the end of the day. That means you can’t really develop an entire styleguide and then come up with the screen. Even worse, you might be designing a styleguide with components that will never see the light of day because the vision of the company has changed. Like they say, it’s better to ship now.

Creating a great styleguide takes time, and because it will become the foundation of your design system, you want to get it right. In a startup environment, you need to work on your styleguide with everything in tandem.

The Styleguide as a Living Document

You should think about your styleguide as a work in progress. Like a startup figuring out its strategy, you’re going to figure out your styleguide as you go along. You’ll edit it and adjust it over time until it becomes the foundation of your UI. One useful approach is to start the first mockup at the same time you start your styleguide. Open two files with your favorite software (in my case, Sketch); one called page name and the other one styleguide. As you’re working on your screen design, you can start seeding your styleguide with the elements that make up your design.

As you start doing more of these, you’ll notice early on that there some components are prime candidates for inclusion in the styleguide. For instance, if you’ve settled on an icon style, then all of your icons can go into the styleguide right from the start.

I usually create a section called ‘icons done so far.’ If at one point someone needs an icon, they first have to check through this section before creating a new one.

Other obvious items to consider are colors, buttons, selectors, titles, headers, body text, etc. If you’re using a style especially for marketing, you can consider putting it in your styleguide and labeling it appropriately. It’s okay if you’re not completely settled on a particular item. You can refine the UI elements in your design system later when the opportunity arises, and update the guide appropriately. Don’t forget, the styleguide is a living document, especially at a startup.

Eventually, when I start putting layouts in the guide, I know that I’m beginning to reach a point where all components should be close to their final state. This part marks the tipping point in the styleguide creation process—now you can celebrate! A good way to celebrate such a milestone is to create a logo or icon (consider naming it) for the 1.0 version of the styleguide.

Some people go as far as printing the logo/icon as a sticker so the team has a sort of trophy. That’s also the point where I usually go back to the more traditional way of working with the guide by opening that styleguide first, and then creating a new file for whatever interface needs to be done.

Conclusion

As a designer, by creating a styleguide as early as possible, you’re making sure that your startup adheres to a higher standard of quality. It may be challenging, but it’s well worth the effort. A solid, well-rounded styleguide is not only going to help you have a better product, it will also help you reduce the cost of development.

There is a multi-trillion dollar economy opening up to technology faster than ever. It has been driven by trends that have changed the nature of how entrepreneurs will be characterized going forward; specifically, industry executives will be the next wave of in-demand startup CEOs.

In April of 2007, Apple changed everything with the launch of the iPhone. It is hard to imagine that it has only been 8 years since the release of the first truly pervasive smartphone, but there is no denying its impact has been world-changing. Beyond the creation of a new dimension of industry-driven, by location-based, services (and with it, a myriad of billion dollar companies), an equally significant phenomenon emerged. By creating technology that was intuitive to the consumer masses, every person around the world started to embrace technology as more than just a work tool. Lawyers, doctors, car mechanics and people from every sector of the economy not only had a tool for productivity, but a piece of technology in their pocket they embraced as an intimate part of their lives.

Furthermore, these new consumers could now point to a standard for usable technology. Cumbersome, enterprise legal software that won’t allow a lawyer to search cases from outside the office is no longer acceptable. For those outside of the Silicon Valley silo, conversations can be heard from construction workers sitting on a lunch break saying “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an app to …”. Unfortunately, these conversations are often too far away from Silicon Valley’s ears, which are still dominated by the talk of what will be the next WhatsApp or Instagram. Even so, a new breed of entrepreneur is emerging who see firsthand the challenges in their industry, and with that the opportunity to make a world-changing impact, and these entrepreneurs do not fit the founder archetype that many Silicon Valley investors look for.

Previous decades saw similar shifts in entrepreneur characterizations. The late 90s were about Harvard MBAs applying traditional management techniques to leverage brand new Internet technologies. The “aughts” brought on the “22 year-old Stanford Computer Science” graduate applying technology to a low hanging industry. Now, in this decade, we are seeing a new wave of entrepreneurship driven by industry executives with deep product backgrounds leveraging technology to disrupt a traditionally non-tech industry.

For the past 2 years I’ve had the opportunity to see this shift firsthand as the managing partner of Silicon Valley Software Group (SVSG), a firm of CTOs focused on helping companies with their technology strategy. SVSG has seen entrepreneurs ranging from movie producers, lead singers of platinum album rock bands, travel executives, and hedge fund managers all trying to figure out how to leverage their domain expertise through technology. After a number of similar engagements, a few observations have emerged

In each venture, a product-focused entrepreneur saw the adoption of technology among their peers in a particular industry and, with that, the opportunity to create a product focused on that industry.

None of these entrepreneurs had notable tech experience.

Hardly ANY of these high profile individuals had relevant connections with the Silicon Valley community.

This last observation is of particular importance!

The combination of growth capital, multidisciplinary talent, and mentors sharing best practices around how to create hyper-growth businesses are often taken for granted by those who are part of the ecosystem. However, the disconnect between Silicon Valley natives and outsiders is shocking. Many of the companies SVSG has come across have no ability to raise strategic capital at first because their businesses are too risky when considering common pitfalls they are more likely to fall into compared with their Valley peers. Concepts as commonplace as the lean startup methodology are welcomed as sage insight to these new entrepreneurs.

One of the next technological revolutions on the horizon is the emerging platform of the Internet of Things (IoT). The core of its promise is a world where household appliances, cars, trucks, trains, clothes, medical devices and, much more would be connected to the internet via smart sensors capable of sensing and sharing information.

As its presence in our lives grows, the Internet of Things (IoT) will be fundamental to most things we see, touch, and experience—UX design will play an important, if not essential, role in that advancement.

From healthcare to transportation—from retail to industrial applications, companies are constantly searching for new ideas and solutions in order to create new experiences, deliver greater value to customers, and make people’s lives easier and more efficient.

If you think you don’t know what IoT is, you’ve probably already experienced it and just didn’t realize what it was. Home automation hubs like Google’s Home and Amazon’s Alexa, the Nest Learning Thermostat, Philips Hue lightbulbs, Samsung SmartThings, Amazon Go, and fridges that monitor their contents all fall into the IoT category.

Flo, smart residential water systems that monitor water efficiency, leaks, and waste

The next wave of IoT will connect millions of devices across the globe and make homes, cities, transportation, and factories smarter and more efficient. Real-time data produced by hundreds of IoT sensors will change the way businesses operate and how we see the world.

The skills needed in this new paradigm will shift from component thinking to whole systems thinking; from one screen to multiple touch-points. Most IoT systems will be connected to an app, but this will eventually evolve into a multi-interface world, some of it yet to be invented.

Designers must adapt to new technologies and paradigms or risk becoming irrelevant. Experiences that we design for are shifting dramatically—think AI, VR, AR, MR, IoT, and any combination thereof.

Utilizing live streaming data collected from millions of sensors, designers will be tasked with crafting experiences turning that data into something useful via an interface (a mobile app, smart TV, smart mirror, smartwatch, or car dashboard).

There will be huge opportunities for designers in the industrial Internet of Things. Organizations of all types and industries are investing heavily in this space, making IoT growth projections astronomical—to the tune of 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

IoT Is Already Here

An example of an IoT ecosystem available today is an internet connected doorbell that has a video camera, speaker, microphone, and motion sensor. When a visitor either rings the doorbell or comes near the front door, the owner receives a notification on their mobile via the app. The owner is able to communicate with the visitor via the speaker and microphone; they can let the visitor in via a remote controlled door lock or instruct a delivery person to leave the package somewhere safe.

SkyBell is a smart video doorbell that allows you to see, hear, and speak to the visitor at your door whether you’re at home, at work, or on the go.

Implications for UX Design

These new experiences will require new modes of interaction—modalities yet to be designed. Touch will evolve and expand. Gestures and physical body motion will become a more natural way of interacting with the digital world around us.

The IoT space is ready for exploration and designers need to investigate the potential human interaction models, how to design for them and find ways to unlock value. The focus will no longer be on singular experiences, but instead those that represent a broader ecosystem.

Designers will become involved during every stage of the design process as it will become more about designing the entire product experience.

They will need to share creative authority during the whole development cycle and effectively influence the outcome of the end product, working in collaboration with an industrial designer—for example, on what that IoT doorbell looks like, how it works, the video and sound between the two parties, and the unlocking and locking of the door.

Five Critical Aspects for Designers to Consider in the IoT Era

1) Prepare for Evolving User Interactions

Just as touchscreens introduced the pinch, finger scroll, and swipe, we’ll soon be introducing other ways of interacting with IoT systems. We can expect that hand gestures will continue to be used, but we’ll begin to see even more natural movements, such as tiny finger movements, as options for controlling devices in our environment.

Google is already preparing for a future where hand and finger movements will control things in our environment. Its Project Soli is an interaction sensor that uses radar for motion tracking of the human hand.

IoT will no doubt be integrated with VR. With VR, our movements mimic those of the real world. Moving our heads up, down and around allows us to explore the VR world in a natural way. We’ll be able to control our environment through commonly used arm, hand, and finger movements.

Merging the VR experience with IoT opens up many new possibilities. Imagine an Amazon Go VR version—a self-serve grocery store in a VR world where a customer “walks in” and collects items into their virtual shopping cart by picking up their choices from the store shelves with natural hand movements.

For designers, feedback and confirmation are important considerations in this new paradigm as are many of the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Many of these “rules of thumb” will live on:

Visibility of system status

Match between the system and the real world

User control and freedom

Consistency and standards

Flexibility and efficiency of use

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

2) Rethink and Adapt to Interactions of the Future

As we create the UIs of the future and new modes of interaction, we’ll need to make sure we keep in mind the users’ expectations. Designers will still need to follow usability and interaction standards, conventions, and best practices. By evolving from what is already known, the potential of new technologies can be harnessed—innovative UIs can be designed while still maintaining enough familiarity for them to be usable.

In the not-too-distant future, our daily lives will be imbued by micro-interactions as we move from device to device and UI to UI. There will not be just one, but many interfaces to interact with in a multitude of ways as people move through their day. An interaction may begin at home on a smart mirror, continue on a smartwatch down the street and on a mobile in a taxi, and then finish on a desktop at work. Continuity and consistency will play an important part.

As IoT continues to grow and evolve, we’ll encounter never-before-seen devices, new methods of interaction, and many varieties of associated UI. Those of us who design in these new environments will need to strike the right balance between the familiar and the new.

3) Design Contextual Experiences

IoT will achieve mass adoption by consumers and businesses when products are easily understood, affordable, and seamlessly integrated into their lives. This means we need to expand beyond personalization, and begin to infuse context into the experience.

Designing for context has the potential to permeate experiences, making them more meaningful and valuable.

As we design contextual, holistic experiences that will harness the power of IoT, we need to understand that being inconspicuous, far from being a bad thing, may be the goal. When the IoT product knows you, knows where you are, and knows what you need, it will only make itself present as needed. Things will adapt to people, and before we know it, become fully integrated into their daily lives.

As we design UIs for this new paradigm, we’ll need to understand that the human-computer interaction will be dynamic and contextual—and it will change constantly. At times we’ll need to allow for controls, while at others the systems will simply relay data with notifications that are useful in that moment. Each view will be intelligently displayed in the context of that very moment via the most appropriate channel and device. This contextual design would be micro-interaction driven, timely, and purposeful.

4) Design Anticipatory Experiences

One of the most promising characteristics of IoT is the ability to predict and adapt to situations. The old model of singular actions driving singular reactions is evolving at a rapid pace.

It’s going to be more about the output without much need for input.

“Magical experiences” will be born out of awesome combinations of AI, machine learning, computer vision, sensor fusion, augmented reality, virtual reality, IoT, and anticipatory design. Rumor has it, Apple is investing heavily into AR.

We will be surrounded by a growing number of intelligent IoT systems that will automatically do things for us in a predictive manner. For example, after using it a few times, the Nest learns our habits and adjusts intelligently without us needing to get involved.

We’ll begin to see systems that will become increasingly predictive. A simple gesture, movement, or word will initiate a series of useful events. There will be a chain of events that aren’t initiated by people at all, because the system will learn and optimize its actions based on a treasure trove of data. These events could be initiated by a person’s proximity, the time of day, environmental conditions (such as light, humidity, temperature, etc.), and previous behavioral data.

More than ever, deep user research will play an important role in designing experiences that are anticipatory and contextual. Defining personas, observing user behaviors, and empathy mapping—just to name a few UX techniques—will become crucial in crafting sophisticated user experiences that will feel almost “magical” to people.

5) Most Importantly, Make It Useful!

We’re seeing tremendous advancements in the field of IoT and the role that design will play in it is about empowering people in ways that were not possible before. The demand for deeply satisfying, quality experiences will increase with high expectations and standards.

While all of the above is important, we must never lose sight of the fact that it’s about making people’s lives easier. Designing “moments of delightful surprise” in this new paradigm—along with deep empathy for the user—is a skill designers will need to develop. As we look towards an even more connected digital future, connecting us to “intelligent things” in meaningful ways will allow for more efficient interaction, more productivity and, hopefully, happier lives.

Designers will need to design IoT-driven experiences that are contextual, helpful, and meaningful—optimized for people, not technologies.

“Experiences” will trump “things.”

The next step is for designers to become involved, and design the most seamless user experiences for the Internet of Things. Technologies must evolve into “optimizers of our lives.”

Originally known as a throbber, a loading animation is used to indicate the progress of data recollection or interface rendering. While you could once get by using a dull progress bar to indicate this, those days are gone.

Today, a well-crafted animation leveraging CSS, jQuery, or simple animated GIFs is an opportunity to enliven your interfaces and add personality to your product.

Thoughtful animations can entertain your users while they wait for your content to load. A good loading animation helps manage expectations and improves the user experience by maintaining interest.

In this tutorial, we’ll use Sketch to create basic shapes and Principle to quickly create simple custom loading animations. (Both of these apps are for Mac.) You’ll learn how to create the colorful loading animations used by Trello, Flickr, Slack, and more.

The usability testing method is self-explanatory and involves inviting users to test product prototypes. This is one of the most common types of tests run by companies that conduct UX research.Nowadays, usability testing is almost a requirement for web and mobile app designers. It involves watching users actually navigate your apps and recording their reactions and statements as raw data for the design team to analyze. Large companies can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on usability testing, but the process doesn’t have to be super expensive in order to yield useful results.For companies operating on limited budget, pushing out a working product may be more important than quality UX research, but not taking the time to do useful research may have negative effects on the success of your product or service.This is what compelled me to tackle the problem in this blog post, and I am confident a lot of people in the UX field often face the same challenges:UX user research is no longer an exotic field, reserved for cutting-edge products and services, usually launched by big companies.UX research is a must, even for small companies and startups; but, these organizations often lack the financial and technical resources needed to conduct in-depth user research.These small players have to find innovative ways of levelling the playing field, allowing them to remain competitive in the face of strong competition from bigger companies.In this context, user research has to be cost-effective and time-effective.Lastly, a more down to earth reason: There simply aren’t that many quality UX research resources online, and there are even fewer resources covering UX research from the perspective of cash-strapped outfits.Below, you’ll find a few methods that will help you conduct user research on a budget.We are living in the Age of the Customer, and user experience (UX) is leading the charge in design of web and mobile software products. UX has become an integral part of software design, resulting in a paradigm shift in user research.

Therefore, modern business must move past the old advertising methods that scream corny slogans in big bold letters: “Try X. We are the Best!”

The obvious problem with this outdated approach is that there are too many comparable products out there that also claim to be “the Best” in their respective product categories. To survive in a market oversaturated with competition, companies must invest in developing their websites, apps, services, and other customer touch points around overall user experience.

The best way to assess your customer’s experience with company websites and apps is through UX user research.

The Case For Low Cost UX User Research

There are plenty of methods for conducting user research; however, many of these methods are resource-intensive and can be slow. In other words, they tend to be expensive and take a while to implement.

For companies operating on limited budget, pushing out a working product may be more important than quality UX research, but not taking the time to do useful research may have negative effects on the success of your product or service.

This is what compelled me to tackle the problem in this blog post, and I am confident a lot of people in the UX field often face the same challenges:

UX user research is no longer an exotic field, reserved for cutting-edge products and services, usually launched by big companies.

UX research is a must, even for small companies and startups; but, these organizations often lack the financial and technical resources needed to conduct in-depth user research.

These small players have to find innovative ways of levelling the playing field, allowing them to remain competitive in the face of strong competition from bigger companies.

In this context, user research has to be cost-effective and time-effective.

Lastly, a more down to earth reason: There simply aren’t that many quality UX research resources online, and there are even fewer resources covering UX research from the perspective of cash-strapped outfits.

Below, you’ll find a few methods that will help you conduct user research on a budget.

Desk Research

In the old days, in order to conduct adequate research, companies had to go out into the field to collect data. Now, there’s an entire world of research information available at your fingertips. If you want to get a head start on user research, bypass traditional primary research and look for secondary researchWhile there aren’t that many UX-related resources online, the psychology of user interactions with computers and digital content is a growing field of study. With a little creativity, it is possible to find good information about user behavior and decision-making from a variety of industries.The key takeaway here is that you shouldn’t limit research to user behavior to your specific industry. Browsing data collected and used by other industries could answer some of the same questions you may have about your audience.

Usability Testing

The usability testing method is self-explanatory and involves inviting users to test product prototypes. This is one of the most common types of tests run by companies that conduct UX research.

Nowadays, usability testing is almost a requirement for web and mobile app designers. It involves watching users actually navigate your apps and recording their reactions and statements as raw data for the design team to analyze. Large companies can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on usability testing, but the process doesn’t have to be super expensive in order to yield useful results.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing involves showing users two different options and asking for feedback on each of them. Ask users for a list of pros and cons for both prototypes, ask them to gauge the overall experience, ask them to focus on certain aspects of your product that could benefit most from additional research.

UX designers will take this data and modify prototypes to eliminate flaws or use these pros and cons to make a new hybrid prototype for another round of user testing. The Handbook of Usability Testing does a great job of discussing usability testing and A/B Testing.

Online Questionnaires

Working with a great designer or design team can be an invaluable asset to any team. With clear communication channels, and free-flowing co-operation, the designer should give you everything you need to speed up the building process and limit questions and confusion as much as possible.

What can you, the UX developer, do to ensure that the product you have built is delivered in a timely manner without sacrificing the quality of the user interface and user experience?

My answer: Get your designers involved from day one, and keep them involved throughout the entire UI/UX development process. Make sure to establish clear communication lines and consistent messaging between developers and the designers.

Do You Have Everything You Need?

The worst thing that can happen during the implementation of any UI is __lack of communication between the designer and the developer __(unless they’re the same person). Some designers think their job is done once the PSD is sent over. But, that’s just wrong! You must create an always-on communication workflow that lasts beyond the delivery of the PSDs.

Projects where the designer just submits the design files, and the developer just implements them, are the projects that just fail.

In many cases, it will take time before the designers see the actual UI/UX design implementation. To their surprise, the build is often completely different from the initial submission. (This happened to me more than once. I have sent over source files with complete descriptions and interaction prototypes, but when I finally saw the project, months later, it had a different layout, different colors, and no interactions in place.)

Some designers might hate me for this, as this design workflow requires a lot of “extra” work on their side. However, creating and delivering full assets and information, in an organized way, is better for the project and the team as a whole.

If a developer has everything that they need in front of them, it will speed up the process. A clean PSD is just not enough.

What do you need to get the job done effectively and efficiently?

These are the assets that a developer should expect from the designer to bring a UI/UX design to implementation:

Resource file - The designer should place every element of the app in one file. This file should contain buttons, checkboxes, header styles, fonts, colors, etc. Basically, based on the information in this file, the developer should be able to recreate any interface from scratch. It’s much easier for a developer to export any element from a single PSD, than to search multiple files for it.

Assets - Make sure that developers get all the required assets, as source files should not be touched anymore.

Interaction prototypes - Days of “static screens” are long gone. Using smart interactions and animations, to smooth-out UX design workflow and implementation, is a common practice now. But, you can’t just say “this will slide in from the left” to a developer. The designer should create the actual prototype of that interaction. The prototype should include information like speed, velocity, etc., and the designer is expected to specify each of these values.

Naming convention - Request a file naming structure to keep things organized. It’ll make it easier for both of you to navigate files. (No one likes to have things hidden in a background folder.)

HDPI Resources - We live in “hard times”, with the huge density of the screens. Make sure that the designer will deliver images in all of the required resolutions, so your application will look crispy everywhere. Note: use as many vectors as possible; it’s going to help you a lot (svg).

If you do find something else missing during the implementation, don’t be afraid; ping the designer and ask for it. Never skip, and never skimp! You are members of the same team, and your job is to deliver the best possible product. If a designer fails, you fail as well.

Work In-Progress

Utilize your designers during the UI/UX development process. Don’t keep them in the sidelines expecting them to just “push the pixels.” A designer sees possible innovations even before the implementation starts. To take advantage of this, keep them in the loop. Provide them with access to see, and test, the work in progress. I’m well aware that no one likes to share unfinished projects. But, it is much easier to make changes in the middle of a build than at the end. Doing so may save you time and prevent unnecessary work. Once you give the designer a chance to test the project, ask him to compile a list of problems and solutions, and suggest improvements.

What to do when a developer has an idea that would change the look of an application? Discuss it with the designer, and never allow a developer to modify the design, without consulting the designer. This design workflow will assure that the build stays on track. A great designer has a reason for every element on the screen. Taking a single piece out, without understanding why it’s there, could ruin the user experience of the product.

UI/UX Design Project Management

Designers think that developers can bring a design to life in one day, or even in one hour. But, like great design, great development takes time and effort. Keep your anxious designer at bay by letting him see the progress of the build. Using external project management software, to make sure every revision is accounted for, is a great way to make sure you don’t miss important information discussed in an email conversation or a Skype session. And let’s be honest: sometimes changes and activities aren’t even communicated until they happen.

Whatever solution you use, be sure to choose one workflow process that the whole team will adopt and consistently use. On our team, I tried to push Basecamp because that’s what I was using, but our front-end developers thought it had limited features. They were already using other project management software to track bugs, progress, etc., such as JIRA, GitHub, and even Evernote. I understood that project tracking and management should be kept as simple as possible, so I migrated my UI design workflow to JIRA. I wanted make sure they understood my workflow and progress, but I did not want them to feel like design was another thing to manage.

Here are a few suggestions for a project management tool:

Basecamp - Tracks the progress of the design and development related tasks, and easily lets you export tasks. It also has a simple mobile client.

JIRA - A fully customizable platform where you can easily set up custom boards for different areas. For example, organize boards to track activities such as back-end, front-end, design, etc. I think the mobile client is a bit weak, but it is a great solution for bigger teams and includes a bug tracking feature.

Email - This is great for setting up a conversation or sending images. But please be careful if you use email for feedback. Things can easily get lost.

You can also try Trello and other project management software, but the most widely used in our industry are Basecamp and JIRA. Again, the most important thing is to find a project management system that everyone can use on a consistent basis, as otherwise it’s a moot point.

UX Design And Development Come Together

The designer and the developer are a powerful combination. Be sure to brainstorm UI and UX together as often as possible. Developers should be willing to help a designer conceive ideas, while a designer should have at least a basic knowledge of the technology that is being used.

Figure out the design workflow together. Don’t just blindly implement what your designers create. Be proactive, and create something that looks beautiful and has a great user experience, by taking advantage of your two different perspectives. Designers think outside of the box and see crazy animations, ideas, pixels, and buttons, while developers see the technology, speed bumps, and limits.

In my experience, every designer is crazy about pixels and interesting concepts. But sometimes, a designer gets to a point when they have an idea, but the developer pushes back and says, “This isn’t going to work well once it’s implemented. There will be performance consumption issues”. Recently, I was looking to implement a modal window with a blurred background, but this blur caused heavy loading times. To solve this problem, the developer suggested using a regular, full color overlay, which loads faster and retains image quality. Designers, pay attention: Don’t compromise the user experience for the design.

Feedback Loop

Feedback from the designer is crucial, and it has to happen as often as possible. It’s probably the most time (and energy) consuming thing that you will do. But, you need to adopt it to be able to deliver perfect results. Here are couple of UX and UI design worklow tips on how to make your feedback perfect.

Be visual - Feedback needs to be as specific as possible. The best way to make it accurate is to take a simple screenshot and highlight a problem you want to fix. It would be even better if you had a pictures of a current implementation vs how it is supposed to look. Visual communication will eliminate 50% of the questions.

Be descriptive - Feedback should be accurate. You can’t just say “move this button up”. The designer must specify how many pixels a button should move, what padding should be used etc. Always include an explanation of the problem, and the appropriate solution for it. It’s going to take a lot of time, but it’s worth it.

Be patient - Keep in mind that the designer and the developers do not share the same focus. If developers don’t fully understand a designer’s idea, it can lead to confusion and bad decisions. In every case, both sides need to be patient and willing to help the other team members. It’s really tough sometimes, but it is a soft skill that every designer and developer should learn.

It’s pretty obvious that these things needs to be combined together to make them into a suitable design workflow. But, what tool can actually help you deliver the feedback?

Email - I’m not afraid to say that this is still the most common platform to deliver the feedback. It is totally fine to use it, if you will follow couple of simple rules.

Collaboration tools - To be honest, I’m not a big fan of collaboration tools. But, they have a big benefit. They help you to keep feedback in place. Asking and answering questions is fast, and it stays there forever.

First, use single email thread for your feedback. Don’t put every individual tweak to a new email with a different subject.

Second, create the list of fixes. Try to sit down and think about every tweak or fix you noticed.

And lastly, don’t send huge list at once. Try to break it down to smaller individual lists and go part by part.

Skype (Hangouts) - Voice is really powerful tool for the feedback. You can immediately ask and answer questions. But, make sure to take notes and sent over the follow up message (email) after the call.

Here are some of the great tools:

Feedback annotation:

https://redpen.io/

http://collabshot.com/

http://www.designdrop.io/

Collaboration tools:

http://www.invisionapp.com/

https://basecamp.com/

Conclusion

Establish a system and UI/UX design workflow that keeps the communication lines open throughout the design and development process. This will allow you to implement great ideas, forecast potential problems, and prioritize important issues.

The digital design profession has always been international, yet there are still difficulties in overlapping cultural spheres. The global market presents new challenges for designers to address language barriers and ethnic nuances.

How might foreign users infer different meanings from presented data or metaphors? What accepted standards might be perceived differently in other markets, such as banner placement or selecting menu items?

Most designers assume that designing products for foreign markets only requires a language translation, switching currencies, and potentially updating a few fields. However, cross-cultural design can be much more complex.

Because I’m from Australia and most of my clients are in Asia., I thought I’d already be good at this. However, a Russian client approached me recently, and I quickly realized I had taken cross-cultural design for granted. Not only was I designing a product for a specific cultural condition that I didn’t quite understand, but I also found the cultural divide between the client and I to be a significant barrier to my workflow.

The 3 dimensions of cultural design sensitivity

Designing for global markets predates digital industry. Cross-cultural design research is rooted in the work of two individuals: Fons Trompenaars and Geert Hofstede.

Trompenaars is widely known for “The Seven Dimensions of Culture,” a model he published in “Riding the Waves of Culture.” The model is the result of interviews with more than 46,000 managers in 40 countries.

Rather than distinguishing cultures simply by language, Trompenaar established these seven differentiating qualities.

Universalism versus particularism: Do people place value on rules, laws, and dogma? Or do they believe the world to be circumstantial?

Individualism versus communitarianism: Do people believe in personal freedom and achievement? Or is the group greater than the individual?

Specific versus Diffuse: Are work and personal lives kept separate or do they overlap?

Neutral versus emotional: Do people make great efforts to express their emotions or are they kept in control?

Achievement versus ascription: Are people valued for what they do or who they are?

Sequential time versus synchronous time: Some people like events to happen in a striated sequence. Others believe that the past present and future are an interwoven continuum

Internal Direction Versus Outer Direction: Some cultures profess to control nature and the environment, while others believe the opposite.

Hofstede also contests conventionally narrow views of language and culture.

Everyone knows that our spoken accents develop based on where we grew up. Less spoken about, though, is that how we feel and act is also a type of accent influenced by our locale.

Because Hofstede’s research was entirely conducted by IBM, Hofstede’s research may be more easily translated into market applications.

The cultural dimensions represent cultural tendencies that distinguish countries (rather than individuals) from each other. The country scores on the dimensions are relative, as we are all human and simultaneously we are all unique. In other words, culture can be only used meaningfully by comparison.

How do users respond to authority?

Hofstede placed every country somewhere on his power distance index (PDI), which measured how societies accept power inequality. Some cultures expect information to come from an authoritative position, whereas others believe less in expertise and certification.

Thus, the implications of this for digital design are that expressive and authoritative language or imagery may perform well in high power distance locales. Yet, users in low power distance countries might negatively respond to this and prefer to see a relation to more popular imagery, or daily life.

Do users see themselves as individuals or a part of a group?

How might you motivate a user in an individualistic culture versus a collectivist one?

Does your product promote individual or collective success?

How do you reward users?

Some societies place importance on youth, whereas wisdom and experience are valued elsewhere.

Hofstede measures this on the individualism vs. collectivism index (IDV). Countries with high numbers on the index are more individualistic.

How comfortable are users with uncertainty?

Cultures that rely less on rules and rationality respond to emotional indicators. But a society that is uncomfortable with uncertainty prefers clean and distinct choices. How might these different groups respond to rules and restrictions?

For example, Germany scores high on the IDV index; therefore, it typically avoids uncertainty. This means that products designed for Germany must give users a rational sequence of decisions to make. Whereas, countries that are lower on the scale can allow users to find their way, or explore through an interface.

How to manage cross-cultural workflow

When I was hired by the Russian client I mentioned earlier, the product they wished to create was relatively straightforward.

They were in need of an app that could notify contacts when a user came into personal danger.

If a user felt that they were being followed, or approached by a dangerous individual, they open the app, press the main button, and if after 10 seconds a pin was not entered, the contacts – or bodyguards – would be notified.

Fortunately, the client provided wireframes and user flows so my job was entirely focused on UI and visual design.

Alphabets

Immediately, I was stunned by the Russian alphabet the client provided in the user flow.

I simply didn’t have a Cyrillic keyboard, and I thought I might have to copy and paste from Google Translate if the necessary text wasn’t already in the user flows.

Solution: I took the time to produce a comprehensive document of all of the phrases the app needed and asked the client to review it, not only to translate it, but also to ensure that all of the nuances were appropriate.

Tools

Interface designers will always argue over the Sketch vs. Adobe debate.

But all preconceived notions go out the window when you realize that certain languages provide program limitations. For instance, not all fonts work for different alphabets, and each application processes fonts somewhat differently.

I learned, during the same project, that some fonts in Photoshop could translate to Russian text, whereas the same font in Sketch would revert to a system font, and disrupt the layout. Whether this is an OS or software issue, I am unsure.

Solution: There will always be some trial and error when determining which font or program to use.

I found myself sticking with Sketch and working to find a font that translated. My first choice though would have been to be able to use the font I initially chose for aesthetics.

Sometimes we have to compromise.

Words are Graphics

Legendary Graphic Designer Paul Rand taught us that the form of words creates graphic shapes just like any other element.

We communicate with typography using the shape, distribution, weight, and spacing of characters. Thus when changing languages, your graphics intentions may change along with the language. This becomes quite a challenge when you are unfamiliar with an alphabet.

Good typography plays a big part in the visual design and is one of the most important elements in an interface, and I particularly like to work on kerning, line breaks and give emphasis to certain words, among other things.

But how do you do it on your own when you don’t understand the language?

How should you adapt a sentence, or create expressions, without knowing even the basics of a particular language?

Solution: This was the one step that still required some heavy back and forth between the client and I to ensure that everything was communicated correctly.

We had to be sure of the nuanced metaphors to be communicated, not just grammatical rules.

In hindsight, this wasn’t quite ideal, but for the scale of the project it worked.

I couldn’t have afforded to hire my own copywriter, but if you have the budget, I highly recommend hiring one to increase efficiency.

Demographics

A well-understood principle of interface design is to consider user demographics, as it influences consumer decisions and actions. But, it can be difficult to understand the culture of a remote society.

Demographics are especially important when designing the brand for a new product. Symbols and metaphors are highly dependent on users’ perceptions.

This part of the process required several rounds of revisions. For example, my client and I had very different perceptions on the use of radar, whether it was for monitoring or locating.

The theme changed to relate to family instead – a concept I’ve found is shared equally across cultures.

Solution: if you’re not familiar with a particular culture, research and discover what might work. Many symbols hold multiple meanings across cultures. For example, the American OK hand sign is very insulting in Brazil.

Cross cultural design is challenging

This project was especially challenging.

It made me see beyond conventional notions of demographics, toward broader issues and specific tool changes.

Now, I know that languages can create challenges for the use of symbols and themes, not just in speech and writing. I also no longer trust Google Translate for the particular nuances required in UI/UX design.

TAKE MY MONEY!!!!....... But give me good design!

This meme describes my journey perfectly...and for awhile I was that cat. I never believed or understood when people used to say everything happens for a reason & timing is everything, to me, we were the ones in control of what happens in our life and the time it happens in. Until you get older and life starts slapping you around like a bitch in jail do you realise that every little thing that has happened in your life had a reason and time and it all comes nicely together when the timing for you to take action is right.

 Born and raised in Australia I recently took the initiative to move to Lebanon, eventhough that might sound like the worlds worst decision for someone to make at the peak of their career and at my age..the fact that everyday I am asked “WHY??” and ofcourse the Quoke (question/joke) “Did you kill someone.. are you on the run?” by dumbfounded people, which is a perfectly understandable question considering how majority of citizens in the country want to get out! My answer doesn’t really leave them with much to go on with, the fact that I willingly moved here and wasn't forced into it.

I wasn’t a stranger to Lebanon. My parents are Lebanese and we would usually come over in summer for three weeks or so to see the grandparents so I knew the country very well in terms of culture, history, and language - actually at home we were raised very Lebanese (had every kitchen utensil thrown at me, sending you to school with a zaatar sandwich so the kids asked if you're eating dirt etc etc) but this time when the plane landed it was different, it wasn’t a three week holiday of tolerating relatives, bad drivers and lack of common sense dealings and protocol, this time the plane landed in what would become my home base. 

                                   Career     Friends    Stability

When making a big shift in life alot of things cross your mind, you can either tackle them or cave into the comfort zone and remain where you are. For me, the above were the major points that stuck with me.. In no particular order, Ill discuss my view on each one. 

Friends everyone needs them. Everyone wants them. They influence who you are and your social circle, the saying “you are who you hang out with”  is very true! Friends can become family, whilst family can drift away. Growing up I did alot of moving around, in total I have been to 7 schools growing up and when that happens you develop certain skills where you need to learn to adapt quickly and become really good at communication to make new friends and to keep the old ones that you have. Moving didn't mean I was going to lose my friends especially in this day and age with advanced technology and the easy access to travel it just meant when they came to visit they would experience a new part of the world and culture they weren't previously exposed to. In life, you’re going to miss alot of people, and the harsh reality is you can’t be with everyone you miss you. 

Stability is a human basic need if you refer to Maslows hierarchy of needs. Is Lebanon as stable as Australia?? No! and you don’t need to be a political science/economy major to figure that out but once again that's the charm of this country, you literally live everyday like it could be your last. 

Career wise everyone warned me I would be committing career suicide by doing this move, not just on a monetary basis but also in terms of career progression and business etiquette and professionalism. As someone who has a solid network of contacts and mentors in Australia and having successfully launched a business with partners and shareholders, taking the decision to pursue a self funded venture would probably come across as the dumbest decision anyone can take. I care about my career alot, to me my career and advancing it are everything, I love belonging to a team of coworkers where we help each other grow and advance and push our skills. I believe that If the company you work for isn't growing then neither are you and that's why in every position I have held I have put in more than my required job description because that's how you push yourself and challenge what you know. Ever since I can remember I always wanted to establish myself within the Middle East market, and this was the perfect opportunity for me to gain knowledge and experience so to me It was viewed as a new learning curve and exposure to a world I haven’t dealt with before. Everyone is connected today, and your network and contacts - eventhough they are in another country still come in handy, therefore, your location doesn't determine your success... Your push and drive to strive do.