Good design isn’t everything, and it certainly doesn’t negate the need for powerful words. However, bad design can negate even the best writing, writes Matt Siegel. Consider these three questions about your visual design: Are your images amateur and pixelated? Are your headlines painfully bright and typeset in unsightly capitals? And are your design cues […]

“When we think about mobile and creating products for mobile, people often say, ‘We’re mobile first’ or ‘We’re doing responsive design.’ At the end of the day, we’re user first,” says Drew Schutte, chief digital officer at Condé Nast. “The challenge is you’ve got to figure out what is appropriate for your brand to do […]

Adam Westbrook introduces a design thinking approach to storytelling: “the design problem is identifying and delivering the meaning of your story in the mind of your audience in the most memorable way.” After identifying the problem, come up with multiple solutions or narratives. “It’s very easy to settle on your first idea but challenging yourself […]

Design ideas for interactives, web apps or websites can resemble ideas or mantras for how to live your life, similar to how Clay Christensen applies business ideas to measuring personal success. Having just read a Bruce Lee biography, Joseph Dickerson writes about how you can even borrow UX ideas from the famed martial artist and […]

Facebook created a free tool called Origami to enable designers to mock up animations instead of just static images. They used it to design the user interactions with Facebook’s new Paper app. By making Origami free for others, they are encouraging designers “to think about fluid interaction design rather than static image design.”

Joel Marsh’s new year’s resolution was to get more people interested in UX design, so he posted a lesson a day in January and has collated all of the lessons here, starting with basic principles for understanding users, visual design principles, and designing with data.

This piece provides a bit of theory on visual storytelling and some guides to the two most effective visual storytelling techniques currently in use on Medium: The seamless, single narrative (best for fiction) and the classic photo essay (best for non-fiction).

John Paul Titlow talks to Mike Finkel, executive director of Web products technology at The New York Times, to see how the tech team overhauled the backend to meet rapidly changing business goals and reader expectations and modern publishing demands.

The most effective way of understanding what works and what doesn’t in an interface is to watch people use it. To make a usability test most effective, “mimic the real world as much as possible and recruit representative users and ensure that each task scenario: 1) is realistic and typical for how people actually use […]

You might have heard: The New York Times redesigned its site for the first time since 2006 (New York Times) But did you know: Rob Tannen takes the redesign for a test drive and outlines his observations. “The greatest improvements are ergonomic — articles are scrollable in a single page, replacing clunky pagination,” Tannen writes. Other improvements include […]