Design Details

This week, we deep dive into tips and strategies for building a better settings experience in your product. In The Sidebar, we discuss the efficacy of paginating onboarding screens. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float Float has been a lifeline for teams working remotely in 2020. It lets you keep track of who's working on what and plan your team's time, from anywhere! Float gives you an accurate view of yo...

This week, we dive into the details of having effective user research sessions, sharing tips and strategies to get more value out of customer conversations. In The Sidebar, Marshall explains his work journaling process to capture better day-to-day notes. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float Float gives you the most accurate view of your team's availability and work schedule. You can set custom work hours,...

This week, we try to answer one very simple question: what do designers even do all day? In The Sidebar, we discuss when and where to use system defaults versus creating a custom UI. Golden Ratio Patrons: Keep track of who's working on what and plan your team's time, from anywhere! Get an accurate view of your team's availability and capacity, set custom work days and hours, schedule a status to l...

This week, we weigh the pros and cons of working on a product that you love to use every day. Is it really so bad to be your own power user? In The Sidebar, we discuss steps to take when exploring vague problem areas. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float is a resource management software for planning your team’s time across multiple projects. Companies like Buzzfeed and MetaLab both use Float to plan and t...

This week, we answer two listener questions – bonus question in The Sidebar! In the first, we discuss text contrast, accessibility, and winning arguments. In the second, we work out what it means to measure success in interface design. Golden Ratio Patrons: We’re supported by Float.com, a resource scheduling tool that is visual, flexible, fast, and reliable. In the last two months, they’ve launche...

This week, we discuss a listener question about the tension between design systems and creativity. Do design systems destroy creativity, or simply get the boring parts of our work out of the way? In The Sidebar, we discuss the challenges in sharing North Star design visions across teams. Golden Ratio Patrons: Did you know that teams in more than 150 countries around the world use Float for the res...

This week, we caught up with Bobby Goodlatte and Josh Williams, two designers-turned-investors who recently announced Form Capital, an early-stage venture fund. In this episode we talk about the path to starting a fund, whether founders should live in the Bay Area, and share advice to designers who are interested in starting their own company someday. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float is a resource mana...

This week, we talk about the recently-unveiled GPT-3 AI tool and the implications of AI for design. In The Sidebar, we discuss HUD design in video games, nerding out on diegesis, skeuomorphism, and more. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float is an easy to use resource management tool for planning your projects and scheduling your team's time. Access your schedule from anywhere with a mobile app for on the g...

This week, we caught up with Cemre Güngör to talk about transitioning from design to product management, the tension between the roles of PD and PM, why products fail, and so much more. In The Sidebar, we discuss the most over- and under-rated skills for PMs. Golden Ratio Patrons: More than 3,000 of the world's top design teams, including BuzzFeed, Ogilvy, MetaLab and Hulu use Float to plan their...

This week, we attempt to answer the age-old question every designer will someday face: should I be a product manager? In this week's Sidebar, we share our first impressions of macOS Big Sur, covering our favorite changes and what we hope to see updated before public release. Golden Ratio Patrons: Are you still using spreadsheets to plan your projects? Float is a resource management software built...

This week, we caught up with Yitong Zhang to talk about what it's like to navigate the visa process in the US. We dig into the details of different work visas, the constraints they impose on designers, and what is changing in the current processes. This, plus bonus questions and cool things as always! Golden Ratio Patrons: Float is a resource management software for planning your team’s time acros...

This week, we go deep down the WWDC rabbit hole to dissect the latest design details coming from Apple HQ. We also share our spicy takes on the new macOS icons in this week's sidebar. Golden Ratio Patrons: The world’s top creative teams use Float to plan their projects and schedule their team’s time, all in one place. Schedule tasks with an easy drag-and-drop interface, make changes on the fly wit...

This week, we caught up with Maurice Cherry to talk about design podcasting, building an agency from scratch, and the current state of diversity in design. Maurice is a designer, podcaster, creative strategist, agency founder, writer, speaker, and much more. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float is an easy to use resource management tool for planning your projects and scheduling your team's time. Get a high...

This week, we share some accessibility gut checks that designers should think through before moving into high fidelity mocks. We also talk about industrial design and video game hardware in this week's Sidebar, plus we share our cool things as always! Golden Ratio Patrons: More than 3,000 of the world's top design teams, including BuzzFeed, Ogilvy, MetaLab and Hulu use Float to plan their projects...

This week, we talk about weaponizing hashtags, co-opting social media movements, and solving hard problems in product design. Spoiler: hard problems are hard. This, plus The Sidebar, some follow up, and cool things as always. Golden Ratio Patrons: Visualize who’s working on what and when, and drag and drop to assign tasks in a click. With Float you can plan your projects and schedule your team’s t...

This week, we can't record a podcast talking about pixels and software design. The world is hurting, and the best thing we can do right now is direct people to the resources and organizations that are able to have the most impact in black communities. Please consider reading, learning, introspecting, and donating this week. Support: Black Lives Matter NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Equal...

This week, we share some tips for getting unstuck when working on complicated design problems. We also share our home screen organization philosophies in The Sidebar, catch up on Tweets, and share our cool things as always. Golden Ratio Patrons: Float saves your team time, so you can get back to doing what you love! The world’s top creative teams use Float to plan their projects and schedule their...

This week, we talk about how to overcome skill gaps. What should you do if you are bad at visual design? What if you can't make icons? Should you play into strengths or develop upon your weaknesses? We explore these topics, and more!  Golden Ratio Patrons: Are you still using spreadsheets to plan your projects? Float is a resource management software built for creative teams. Add your team’s roles...

This week, we discuss the characteristics of high quality software. We do our best to organize and outline things to pay attention to that will help you ship better software. This, plus a Sidebar discussing how to handle negative feedback from customers, and cool things as always!  Golden Ratio Patrons: More than 3,000 of the world's top design teams, including BuzzFeed, MetaLab and Hulu use Float...

This week, we discuss what it means to have and develop taste. From software to fashion, styles change, trends come and go, so what does it mean to be tasteful? In The Sidebar, we discuss the hacker mindset and building for an audience of one. This, plus cool things like a handy iPhone app and a killer new VR game! Golden Ratio Patrons: Float is an easy to use resource management tool for planning...

This week, we try to figure out the right time to give up on a fight when collaborating with stakeholders who have different opinions and priorities. We also cover a lot of feedback this week, discuss new design resources in The Sidebar, and share our cool things of the week. Golden Ratio Patrons: We're looking for partners to work with. If your team is hiring, launching a new product, or wants us...

This week, we introduce a new supporter-only show segment, The Sidebar. Each week we'll be sharing a story, pro-tip, shortcut, or design-related cool thing. Supporters on Patreon will hear the first story today! We also discuss the most over and undervalued design skills, including feedback from folks on Twitter. And, of course, we share our cool finds of the week! Golden Ratio Patrons: We're look...

This week, we dig into the dregs of our portfolios to critique some of earliest design work. We try to look for indicators of taste and fundamentals, but ultimately have a good laugh about our early mocks. We'd love to see your early work too, so share it with us on Twitter this week! Golden Ratio Patrons: We're looking for partners to work with. If your team is hiring, launching a new product, or...

This week, we talk about counterintuitive user experiences that designers regularly design for in our day to day work. Let us know what we missed! As always, we catch up on feedback, tweets, and share our cool things of the week: a blog post explaining how to polish an interface, and a YouTube series about first-time reactions. Golden Ratio Patrons: We're looking for partners to work with. If your...

This week, we share our tips and tricks for staying organized in Figma, simplifying the engineering handoff, and not getting bogged down in pages hell. This, plus some follow up, cool things, and a little social distancing check-in. Sponsor: Fathom Analytics – we love it, we use it, we can't recommend it enough. Fathom is a privacy-first analytics tool that provides all the right information about...