Things I hate to do as a designer but do anyway

Things I hate to do as a designer but do anyway

Matt Johnston@mattsjohnston

Sunday, October 21, 12

Things I wish I had done more of while I was in 500 Startups



User Feedback


Swallow your pride

• Ask as o!en as you can

• Ask as many people as you can

• Ask during each stage of design


What do you ask?

• Do they understand it?

• Do they like it?

• How would they use it?

• How would they like it differently?


Flow Mapping


• Map specific action flows

• Map entire site structure

• Don’t skip any pages

What pages will you have?


Resources

• MindNode Lite

• MindMeister

• Pen & paper


Wireframes


Helps focus your designing efforts on

content & layout


• Key sketches very low-res

• Keep them small - it will help keep too much detail out


Inspiration


• If nobody copied interface designs, the world would be a confusing place

• A uniform web is a useable web

It’s not copying if you call it “inspiration”


Resources

• patterntap.com

• dribbble.com

• ui-patterns.com

• mobile-patterns.com

• appvita.com

• Google, duh...


Prototyping with code


• Provides your back-end devs with markup sooner rather than later

• Encourages focus on content before graphics

• Allows for a quicker MVP launch

• Encourages use of reusable CSS components that can be styled as needed

Why?


• Bootstrap

• Zurb Foundation

Use a front-end framework


Thank you.



Design

Things I hate to do as a designer but do anyway