When designing an app, everyone looks at how other apps do it today. However, incumbent apps operate in a different context: they already have habit formation and many of their aggressive growth hacks have been eliminated due to public scrutiny.

Instead, using Internet Archive and old blog posts, find older screenshots & marketing materials when the incumbent app hit their inflection point (e.g., Snapchat in 2012) and construct a narrative on why they did what they did. You’ll be surprised by how explicit they were with their value proposition.

If your target audience is non-tech, dark mode will probably ruin your conversion rate.

Take your web app UX to the next level with this one revolutionary technique:

make the back button actually go back

In this episode of "your website doesn't need to be perfect"

Introducing: Rock Auto.

SimilarWeb estimates it gets 19m visits/month and $50-70m in revenue.

You can have the best design in the world.

The best product. The most innovative features.

But if your copywriting sucks...you suck.

It's like having the world's best restaurant with a moldy, unreadable sign and front door that opens the wrong way...

Protip: People don't like error messages, they like suggestions on how to fix the error.

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around." – Steve Jobs, 1997.

The primary rule of user interface design is that users won't read a single god damn word you put on the page.

This article is a memo that will remind you about the things you need to design before sending your app to AppStore/GooglePlay.

After 2 decades in the tech and design industry, I can say that all designs come back around. Over and over.

Loved by management consultants, a 2x2 diagram is a simple—some might say simplistic—way of looking at a problem. You consider each of the various factors in your problem and choose two that are important and that can be classified into discrete values.

I’ve never once had a meeting at 3 am. Not once.

My iCal is apparently unaware of this. If I type “3” into the time box on my calendar, it blithely defaults to “am”.

Designing means ・Thinking ・Analyzing ・Researching ・Documenting ・Discussing … ・Designing UI ・Testing ・Iterating

Adjusting a design to fit real world constraints isn’t a “compromise”—in fact, completely the opposite—it’s the essence of design.

design is too important to be left to just designers

"a designer who doesn't understand the language of engineering is like being an architect that doesn't understand gravity."

Optimize your UI for the most common use cases, not for the worst case scenario.

The Division's motto: "Design is about removing, not adding."

Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.” ~ David Craib

Amazing designer. Intelligent. Kind.

Choose two.

"No matter how cool your interface is, it would be better if there's less of it." - Alan Cooper

The less you explain, the better the design.

When you go into a restaurant and you see a sign that says “No Dogs Allowed,” you might think that sign is purely proscriptive: Mr. Restaurant doesn’t like dogs around, so when he built the restaurant he put up that sign.

If that was all that was going on, there would also be a “No Snakes” sign; after all, nobody likes snakes. And a “No Elephants” sign, because they break the chairs when they sit down.

The real reason that sign is there is historical: it is a historical marker that indicates that people used to try to bring their dogs into the restaurant.