A look at the shifting design tools landscape according to UX Tools surveys — Seems like only yesterday I was writing about the decline of InVision, a tool that was once the closest thing to an industry standard for design prototyping. That decline occurred largely due to the cannibalization of InVision’s prototyping features by UI design tools. …

The sad slide of the once-darling design co. — 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…

Operating “like an internal agency” is rarely the ideal. — 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. …

The way art-boards look doesn’t necessarily match reality — 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…

Why aesthetic craft is a vital skill for UX designers looking to produce the best possible work. — 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…

“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…

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…

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. …