The results of the UxTool’s 2020 Survey are in.

One of the biggest takeaways?

Things aren’t looking great for InVision.

What’s the damage, exactly?

Usage for prototyping & handoff is way down

In 2017 the Design Tools survey showed InVision leading its category as a prototyping tool with 60% of respondents indicating they used it.

In 2020 that share has fallen to 23% with more than half of that number only using it as a secondary tool.

Consider these two schools of thought for how a product company might structure its teams:

#1 — Project Teams

In a project organization, individuals from different departments are assigned temporarily to projects (shocker!). Project members contribute temporarily until the project is completed, usually at a pre-determined deadline. Individuals may work on multiple projects at a time and may rely on others in their department to produce their share of the work.

#2 — Product Teams

In a product-based organization, designers are distributed into product teams. These teams — sometimes “pods”, “squads” or “scrum teams” — support a particular product or product area indefinitely. They exist independently of organizational…

I notice that many people (myself included) tend to create, observe, present, and critique designs in a zoomed out state. This can be the case when looking at work-in-progress designs in an application like Sketch or Figma — or even when looking at a mock-up that’s been printed out.

With a zoomed-out view, you can easily end up seeing twice the screen real estate or more compared to what users would typically see when using the product for real. This provides a better overview of the page, but can also skew perceptions of how well the design is working in…

It’s not all that hard to come across these ideas in the UX industry:

UX and visual/UI design are mutually exclusive skill-sets best handled by entirely different types of practitioners.

A good UX designer doesn’t need to be skilled in visual design.

Companies looking for “hybrid” UI/UX designers have unrealistic expectations and should give up on finding such “unicorns”.

But this sort of thinking seems to be on the decline. Seeing as it isn’t entirely gone, I think it’s still worth laying out a few counterpoints.

So where did these beliefs come from?

It’s no secret that user experience design…

“And, in the next place, since evil is specially characterized by its diffusion, and attains its greatest height when it simulates the appearance of the good, for that reason are signs, and marvels, and lying miracles found to accompany evil, through the cooperation of its father the devil.”

— The Theologian Origen (185–254) on recognizing the Antichrist

If you’ve never heard of it before, the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise is a collection of principles and practices assembled with the goal of offering a way to “scale up” an Agile working model for large companies.

If you need it, I…

Agile software creation is pretty great. If you don’t think so, it might be because you’ve been introduced to the concept in a confusing way. Or at least that’s what I’ve come to believe based on my day to day discussions with others in the software world.

The problem is that many explanations of the concept fail to distinguish between Agile and Agile-related frameworks (like LeSS, SAFe, Scrum, etc.) and practices (writing user stories, sprints, backlogs). …

Retrospectives are meetings found in — but not limited to — the Scrum development framework where members of a product team reflect on past work and discuss ways to improve in the future. I’ve seen designers occasionally write retrospectives off as not being particularly relevant or interesting to them — sometimes to the point where they don’t even attend, but I’d argue that if you’re not very engaged (or not having them at all) you’re probably making a mistake.

A good retrospective allows a team to:

• Discuss and address things that aren’t working as well as they could be
• Discuss…