How to pretend you’re a great designer

Don’t know how to justify your excessive use of animations, clever copy, or generic cute illustrations? Just throw the word “delight” in the mix! Talk about how you understand the user’s psychology–how you’re creating an experience people will love. Who cares if your solution is not functional, expensive to build, or if there’s no data to back up your intuition. Remind everyone that you’re building a lasting and emotional connection with the user.

UX Tools to Improve Your Workflow

Designers have their own favorite tools for wireframing and prototyping, for doing user research and for organizing information in your projects. But there are a number of less noticeable tools and plugins that we use everyday that can give us a boost in productivity and collaboration — as well as resource libraries that can come in handy when you’re starting a new project.

Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines

This article describes a new user interface model called inductive user interface (IUI). Also called inductive navigation, the IUI model suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand. This IUI model is emerging in various Microsoft projects, most notably Money 2000. This article provides an introduction to IUI, rather than a firm, comprehensive set of guidelines. (25 printed pages)

Atomic Design

This book is a work in progress. You can read more about the project here, sign up to the newsletter to receive project updates and resources, submit issues on Github, and track the progress of the project here.