Fashionxmas :: Elegant Fashion Designs Looks: Start your designs with a concept

Start your designs with a concept — and more UX links this week

A weekly collection of UX links, brought to you by your friends at the UX Collective.

The best designers I know always start a project with a concept (or conceptual model). What's your design concept for this project? How do you envision people interacting with your product? What model are you trying to emulate in your UI?

"A conceptual model is a representation of a system, made of the composition of concepts which are used to help people know, understand, or simulate a subject the model represents." — Wikipedia

But other designers go straight into crafting what the interface will look like, before defining a solid vision on the conceptual model for that system.

The result?

Interfaces that are conceived and designed on autopilot — interaction patterns that aren't strategically aligned, user paths that don't follow a clear logic, screens that are inconsistent and do not ladder up to a consolidated metaphor or concept.

Continue reading

The Inside story of Reddit's redesign →
Reddit has been redesigned after more than 13 years and 330 million users. There's a new Reddit, and it's all grown up. By Arielle Pardes.

In defense of Design Thinking, which is terrible →
A counterargument on all the skepticism about the merits of the "design thinking" approach to problem solving. By Khoi Vinh.

Designing new ways to give context to news stories →
When scrolling through Facebook's feed, it's difficult to judge the credibility of an article. How is the company's design team trying to solve for that? By Jeff Smith.

Website personalization planning →
Website personalization is a proven way to engage audiences more effectively. Here's a detailed guide on how to start. By Jennifer Leigh Brown.

Beautiful and functional interfaces: bridging the two worlds →
Beauty is subjective. Aesthetics is often intended to compensate for something or appeal to the sensual aspect of perception. By Moses Kim.

From the community

Stop using other people's design systems, by Alex MacDuff
Creating a comprehensive user research report for your team, by Alina Cvetkova
Design ethics aren't someone else's problem, by Craig Phillips
Why small teams win: scaling meaning before scaling teams, by Adrian Zumbrunnen
How being a speech pathologist prepared me for a career in UX research, by Bethany A. Riebock
UX sketching challenge: 100 days of visual library building, by Krisztina Szerovay

News & ideas

Wake has been acquired by InVision
A pretty detailed breakdown of why Fortnite is so wildly popular
This app can translate sign language into spoken English, and vice versa
Here's a quick (and mind-blowing) animation showing Pixar's new technology to emulate real-world skin elasticity
This little experiment shows that even the text you copy and paste in your browser can leak personal information about you
Fragmented Memory is a triptych of large woven tapestries that blur the lines between photography, data visualization, textile design, and computer science
A quick look at Google's design process, toolset, and workflow

Tools & resources

Form: Framer's new feature integrates 3D-graphics in your prototype
Stackswell: bringing CSS smarts to Sketch
What's My Day Rate? helps you calculate how much you should charge for freelance work
Humans Strike Back: podcast by Hotjar focuses on putting people first in your design process
Craft 3 is a new and 3x more efficient version of the Craft CMS
Blot is a blogging platform with no interface
Storyboarder makes it easy to visualize a story as fast as you can draw stick figures
Crypton: a cryptocurrency trading bot based on machine learning

A year ago…

Design principle: Consistency →
Consistency is one of the design principles that we like to violate frequently. I am also guilty of doing that and I am not proud of it. Going all creative and artzy can easily break this design principle.