To solve an age-old design debate, consider what your user’s next step will be — I was dragged into an age-old debate when I drastically misunderstood an old prototype. I would not show my user 3–4 devices: I needed to show more than 500. As a result, I asked the question many of us have in the past: pagination or infinite scrolling? These were the…

Understanding design failures are just as important as what to design — One of the most important things you can learn from competitors is what not to do. Whenever you join a new company or project, your team members might name-drop a few competitors in the same space. …

How to make sense of all the documents your team might pile on you — I figured out a better way to familiarize myself with redesign projects when I started one in December. When you’re asked to redesign a project, your manager (or the team) might give you a stack of documents to get you up to speed. Sometimes, it’s everything you need to understand…

White space is essential but is often hard to talk about with your team — I revisited my design fundamentals when one of my colleagues asked about the best way to justify white space. We all knew that white space is a vital part of our design, but he had to figure out a way to talk about it with the rest of the team…

Advanced Figma features to help developers understand your design — “If you can write that down, it would save me so much time.” A developer told me as we walked through my Figma prototype. The Development team was running into issues when implementing my prototype. These weren’t large-scale design issues that required extensive design documentation to fix. …

They’re probably more than aware of where users are struggling — Customer Support can be one of the most significant untapped resources for user feedback if you know what questions to ask them. I learned this when I couldn’t interview users for a product I was designing. I was designing an application meant to assist cancer patients after their diagnosis. When…

Hamburger menus often end up as a navigation dead end — The more I’ve gotten used to designing mobile websites, the more I’ve realized that hamburger menus are like junk drawers. Hamburger menus are often thought of as a one-stop shop for mobile navigation: the hamburger menu is the most straightforward and low-effort approach to mobile navigation. …

Complex home page issues can often be addressed with quick user testing — Sometimes you can get so engrossed in the other parts of a website that you forget about the user’s first step: the home page. Surprisingly, a home page can often turn into a dense and hard-to-understand page because it’s valuable real estate. …

Think like an architect to get your team on board with a re-design — When you start a re-design, one of the best things to do is to understand what currently exists. Sometimes, you might realize that your product might be suffering from feature bloat: something started well-meaningly, then ideas kept being added on until it became unwieldy. In these cases, you don’t just…