When talking about job interviews for a UX position, we often discuss how to leave an incredible impression and how to negotiate the right salary. But it’s only one part of the story. The other part is to be prepared, to ask questions and to listen carefully. Below, I’ve put together a few useful resources on UX job interviews — from job boards to Notion templates and practical guides. I hope you or your colleagues will find it helpful. The Design Interview Kit # As you are preparing fo...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Friendly note: get a friendly UX bundle for Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 and Measuring UX 🍎 — with live UX training coming up. Jump to table of contents. So you need to design a new AI feature for your product. How would you start? How do you design flows and interactions? And how do you ensure that that new feature doesn’t get abandoned by users after a few runs? In this newsletter, I’d love to share a very simple but systematic approach of how I think about designing AI e...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Friendly note: get a friendly UX bundle for Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 and Measuring UX 🍎 — with live UX training coming up. Jump to table of contents. In many products, setting notification channels on mute is a default, rather than an exception. The reason for that is their high frequency which creates disruptions and eventually notifications fatigue, when any popping messages get dismissed instantly. There is a good reason for it: high frequency of notifications. In usabil...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
10% of people are left-handed, yet most products aren’t designed with them in mind. Let’s change that.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
You can find techniques for UX strategy in Measure UX 🧭 — with live UX training later this year. Jump to table of contents. We see many debates about designers being replaced by AI. About designers having to relearn their craft entirely to work with AI. And of course if you don’t learn how to use AI, other people who do use it well, will replace you. But personally, I don't think either of it is true. And here are a few reasons why. AI Is Unreliable Software # First of all, don’t ge...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Little sad truths that many of us experience in our careers, and why we choose to stay around nevertheless.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
In many companies, data, findings and insights are all used interchangibly. Slack conversations circle around convincing data points, statistically significant findings, reliable insights and emerging trends. Unsurprisingly, often conversations mistake sporadic observations for consistent patterns. But how impactful is the weight that each of them carries? And how do we turn raw data into meaningful insights to make better decisions? Well, let's find out. Data ≠ Findings ≠ Insights. Short...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Helpful PDF worksheets and tools to get the design system effort up and running — and adopted! — across your organization. Don’t be afraid to sparkle a little brighter in life.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Think about your past projects. Did they finish on time? Did they get delivered without cutting corners? Chances are high that they haven’t. Perhaps they got delayed, moved, cancelled, “refined” or postponed. As it turns out, in many teams, shipping on time is an exception, rather than the rule. Things almost never go according to the plan — and on complex projects, they don’t even come close. So how can we prevent it from happening? Well, let's find out. 99.5% Of Big Projects Overr...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
How do you organize your files and assets? What folder structures and organization systems do you use? Happy organizing, everyone!| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
When you design an interface, which pronouns do you usually use to address your users? Do you write “My account” or “Your account”? “My drafts” or “Your drafts” — or only “Drafts”? And does it actually matter? In this newsletter, we’ll shine some light on the different meanings that pronouns carry, so you can choose the one that best reflects the personality of your product. Shaping Personality With Pronouns # Pronouns might seem like a fine little detail. But the pron...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
When it comes to URLs, there’s a common assumption that most people don’t pay attention to them. That people don’t even notice URLs, don’t remember them, and that they can always re-find what they are looking for anyway. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. People do still read URLs in search engines every day, and although AI is changing user behavior, URLs continue to play an important role for the user experience. So, what makes an effective URL? Let’s take a closer loo...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
We all have our opinions about infinite scroll, and usually not very good ones. This has a number of good reasons. With infinite scroll, the sheer number of options is often overwhelming. There is no easy way to navigate between the “old” and “new” segments in the list. We don’t have any control about when and how many items appear. We can’t really bookmark a location and return to it later. The scrollbar keeps jumping. The footer is hard to reach. And there are plenty of accessib...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
With AI upon us, companies have recently been turning their attention to “synthetic” user testing — AI-driven research that replaces UX research. There, questions are answered by AI-generated “customers”, human tasks “performed” by AI agents. However, it’s not just for desk research or discovery that AI is used for; it’s an actual usability testing with “AI personas” that mimic human behavior of actual customers within the actual product. It’s like UX research, just......| Smart Interface Design Patterns
User journey maps are a remarkably effective way to visualize user’s experience for the entire team. Instead of pointing to documents scattered across remote fringes of Sharepoint, we bring key insights together — in one single place. Let’s explore a couple of helpful customer journey templates to get started, and how companies use it in practice. AirBnB Customer Journey Blueprint # AirBnB Customer Journey Blueprint (also check Google Drive example) is a wonderful practical example of h...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
When I start any UX project, typically there is very little confidence in the successful outcome of my UX initiatives. In fact, there is quite a lot of reluctance and hesitation, especially from teams that have been burnt by empty promises and poor delivery in the past. Good UX has a huge impact on business. But often we need to build up confidence in our upcoming UX projects. For me, an effective way to do that is to address critical bottlenecks and uncover hidden deficiencies — the ones t...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be able to communicate brand values. The Many Roles In UX # Successful candidates must neatly fit within established roles, and excel at tools and workflows that are perceived as the best practice in the industry — from user needs to business needs, and from the problem space to the solution space. Dependi...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
With decision trees for notifications, errors and alerts, loading patterns, calls to action, truncation, overflow and design system contributions.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Practical guidelines on how to design time-critical products to prevent errors and drive accuracy.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
The goal of the content design is to reduce confusion and improve clarity. Yet often it’s difficult to pin point a problem as user feedback tends to be not specific enough. But: we can use a few simple techniques to assess how users understand and perceive content. Let’s take a look. As designers, we need to address doubts and concerns before they even happen. Perhaps even without FAQ. Quick mock-up. Content testing is a simple way to test clarity and understanding of the content on a pag...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Complex data tables are difficult to get right. They always come along with filters, sorting, customization options, batch actions, cell states, pagination, and a huge amount of data. Their purpose is to help people find insights, by comparing data points across rows and columns. Yet navigating a table is often painfully slow and frustrating, especially on mobile. Let’s explore practical techniques and useful Figma toolkits to help users find and compare the right data faster, without relyi...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Sometimes design conversations take slightly more time and effort than needed. One of the frequent conversations is circling around badges, pills, chips and tags. How are they different? What purpose do they serve? Which ones do we need in our design system? And how to choose the right one? Well, let’s find out. A collection of badges and tags from Base design system, by Uber. Badges vs. Tags # We distinguish between static and interactive UI components. Some of them communicate and visuali...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Newsletter pop-ups are everywhere. You’ve just landed on a website, yet here it is, a shiny newsletter pop-up, asking for your email address for reminders, updates or an exclusive 15% coupon code. People hate it, businesses love it. But does it work? As it turns out, it’s complicated. Often newsletter pop-ups are highly ineffective for businesses and frustrating to customers. By Michal Malewicz. The Many Shades Of Emails # According to email statistics, on average people have 1.7–1.9 di...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
UX challenges of 2-page logins forms, what problem they solve and an alternative design with a slightly better UX.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Both hiding and disabling features can be utterly confusing to users. And for both, we need very, very good reasons. Let’s take a closer look at what we need to consider when it comes to hiding and disabling — and possible alternatives that help enhance the UX. Show What’s Needed, Declutter The Rest # You’ve probably been there before: Should you hide or disable a feature? When we hide a feature, we risk hurting discoverability. When we disable it without any explanation, we risk that...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
As designers, especially in large enterprises, we often might feel misunderstood and underappreciated. It might feel like every single day you have to fight for your users, explain yourself and defend your work. It’s unfair, exhausting, painful and frustrating. Let’s explore how to present design work, explain design decisions and get stakeholders on your side — and speak the language that other departments understand. Business language and design language are often misaligned. That’s...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Digital sustainability is often seen as a technical concern for engineers. We speak about optimization of assets, and web performance, and server efficiency. In fact, we rarely explore sustainability from the perspective of design and UX. But what if we did? Let’s explore a few practical techniques to reduce waste, focus on what matters and declutter what doesn’t — that you can apply to your work right away. Design For Sustainability Checklist, a helpful reminder, put together by the IB...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
When talking about job interviews for a UX position, we often discuss how to leave a good impression and how to negotiate the right salary. But it’s only one part of the story. The other part is to ask questions and to listen carefully — to discover red flags early, and figure out if a company is a good fit for you. Best interviews include questions from both sides. A wonderful illustration by José Torre. Most importantly, it’s a good idea to ask yourself what exactly you need to know ...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
Children start interacting with the web when they are 3–5 years old. How do we design for children? What do we need to keep in mind while doing so? And how do we meet the expectations of the most demanding users you can possibly find: parents? Well, let’s find out. Embrace Playing, Encourage Small Wins # Designing for children is difficult. Children tend to lose focus and motivation. They quit when they get bored, and they move on if they can’t get anywhere quickly enough. They need ste...| Smart Interface Design Patterns
UI components and design patterns, from dashboards and design systems to data visualization and presentation decks — all in one single post.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Good redesigns are evolutions, not revolutions. Useful guidelines on when and how to redesign, how to avoid pitfalls and how to help users embrace the new design.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Guidelines and pointers for mobile design for iOS and Android — with useful resources on layout, grid, colors, typography, icons and components for iOS and Android.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Getting a buy-in for UX research is often remarkably difficult. Here’s how to flag assumptions, manage objections and explain the value of UX research.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Good research is always rooted in the past, not in the future. NPS isn’t a reliable metric, it has plenty of drawbacks and there are better alternatives.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
UX is not just what happens when everything goes as planned. It’s also what customers experience when things break unexpectedly. Let’s see how we can be better prepared for situations when things go south.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How one-pager with 10 sections can help avoid confusion and frustration in the design process.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Practical techniques to explain your design decisions, argue about their impact and protect them from design by committee.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Collections of freely available photos and illustrations of diverse people, available for private and commercial use.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
The “Double Diamond” process rarely works well in real projects. Here’s how the design work actually gets done in small and large organizations, and where design has most leverage.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
UX guidelines on how to open internal and external links without breaking user’s flow and causing frustration.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
UX guidelines for designing for autistic people, with do’s, don’ts and things to keep in mind.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Naming is hard! How do we name and organize design tokens in our design systems? Let’s take a look at some do’s, don’ts, guides and examples to get started.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Useful free eBooks for UX designers, interface designers and product designers — on everything from accessibility and typography to management, IA and content strategy.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Practical guidelines on minimum color contrast for better legibility, along with helpful tools and useful resources.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
One billion people aged 60+ live today, and it’s growing faster than any other age group. Here are some key points to consider to design experiences that are more accessible and inclusive for older adults.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Useful resources for design managers and UX managers to get started, with bitter lessons, things to keep in mind and do’s and don’ts.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Depending on our color combinations, people with colorweakness won’t be able to tell them apart. Here are key points for designing with colorbliness — for better, and more reliable color choices.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
So you are looking for the next step in your UX career. Where do you move? Climb the in-house or agency ladder, join a startup or product, move into management or go freelance? Let’s review some pros and cons of each.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Navigation often feels extremely slow and frustrating. We can change that with smart breadcrumbs, navigation shortcuts and navigation billboards — so users can move between pages faster. Let’s see how.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
For dyslexic users reading might take longer, especially for large blocks of heavy text, with italics, capitals and flashing images. Let’s explore some useful resources and design considerations for dyslexic users.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Case studies are often seen as documentation. But they can be more than that — digestible, thorough stories that showcase skills, values and process. Here are some examples to refer to when writing one.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Are you struggling to make a strong case for the impact of your UX work? Do your design initiatives clash against the company culture Here are a few actionable tips to get a better standing and boost UX maturity.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Design process is messy. You might be following a structured approach, but too often it takes a life of its own. And before you know it, you are designing in chaos, with last-minute changes and missed deadlines. So, what’s the “perfect” design process?| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Are sticky headers always a good idea? Best practices for designing sticky headers, with examples, UX guidelines and usability considerations.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Practical guidelines to prevent rage taps and rage clicks with accessible tap targets for icons, links and buttons — on desktop and on mobile.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Guidelines for designing a better drag-and-drop UX. With practical guidelines on accessibility and design states.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Design handoffs are inefficient and painful. They cause frustration, friction and a lot of back and forth. Can we avoid them altogether? Of course we can! Let’s see how to do just that.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
When conducting user research, we need to be strategic about how we ask questions and how we run the test. Here are some useful points to keep in mind.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How do you make progress as the only designers on a team that’s heavily focused on features and technology? Here are some pointers to help.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How to work out if a team is right for you, and what it's going to be like to work in that company, or with that team. A quick guide.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Always show autocomplete suggestions on focus, use tap-ahead suggestions and provide autocomplete filters.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Too often, our individual goals and plans are left far behind the company’s goals and product development roadmaps. Here are some things to keep in mind to avoid surprises down the line.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How to design an effective time zone selection that is easy to scan and understand, with a UX checklist and useful resources.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Fantastic design systems with great guidelines, examples, do’s and don’ts, decision trees and flow charts.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Well-designed meetings can be a valuable and productive part of work. By following some simple guidelines meetings can become less frustrating and more efficient.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Useful Miro templates, workshops and themes for UX designers — from kick-off meetings to user journeys, problem solving and retrospectives.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
The best FAQ is the one that doesn’t exist, as long as we answer user’s questions where they have them. UX guidelines to keep in mind when designing an FAQ page.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
With metrics to better capture user experience and improve key design attributes over time.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
We all have our opinions about infinite scroll, and usually not very good ones. This has a number of good reasons.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Do we really need a hamburger icon? Probably not. A simple “Menu” button never fails. It has an information scent. It’s universally understood.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
We don’t need date-pickers and drop-downs for birthday input. Surely it can be much simpler than that, so let’s figure it out.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Useful AI tools for portraits, editing, illustrations, video, headlines, CTAs, doodles and textures.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Navigation doesn’t have to be hidden behind a menu. If it matters, we need to show it and do so prominently.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
No wonder users abandon our sites: we often show wrong things at the right moment. One of the critical designer’s tasks it to ask the right questions at the right time. We just need to understand what that time is.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
It’s not just about bright orange stars: here’s everything a customer needs to build trust for a product.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
What’s the role of a PM? What’s the difference between product managers, product owners and program managers? Let’s figure it out.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
You've just signed up for a service, yet here it comes — the disruptive, annoying, attention-demanding onboarding tutorial.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
If navigation is important, we need to show it — especially on mobile. Let’s explore a few simple techniques to make it work.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Eventually, labels get too lengthy, web forms start breaking and we have to fix dates, word order, pluralization, photos and gender pronouns. Let’s explore some things to keep in mind when designing multi-lingual UX.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Too often it’s difficult to tell what is a link, and what isn’t. Let’s explore a few usability guidelines with link underlines, focus, active and visited states, and link accessibility.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How difficult can it be to design a bulletproof language selector? We need to avoid redirects, decouple our presets and allow for overrides. It doesn’t sound too complicated, but it can be.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Filters can be complex and intricate, especially in enterprise environments. Let’s figure out how to make them slightly less annoying and slightly more usable.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
As humans, we are incredibly bad in estimating work. We tend to be way too optimistic, and as a result, keep running behind schedules, often delayed and often running multiple projects at a time.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
When errors should live above input fields and why toast error messages usually aren't a very good idea.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How can we make disabled buttons more inclusive? When do they work well, and when do they fail on us? And finally, when do we actually need them, and how can we avoid them? Let’s find out.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
In usability testing, high frequency is the most common complaint, yet every single product desperately tries to capture a glimpse of our attention, sending more and more notifications our way. Let’s see how we could make the experience around notifications slightly better.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Helpful strategies, templates and articles to create design critiques that are respectful, constructive and strengthen the team.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
A few little copywriting tools that might help you find just the right words, or at least get inspired and come up with a better copy.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Too often dealing with filters can be frustrating. Let’s get them right. That means never freeze the UI on a single input, provide text input fallback and never auto-scroll users on a single input. Here’s why.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
In UX, we can use navigation queries, evaluation journeys, A-Z index and tap-ahead autocomplete to help users get where they want to be, faster. Let’s find out how.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
How do we design pricing plans on mobile? We can get away with a few friendly accordions, tabs and by focusing on key highlights and differences between the plans.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
With the “Back” button, users often get confused, frustrated and annoyed. Here’s how we can design better back button UX in our interfaces.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
We all have our opinions about carousels, and usually not very good ones. This has a number of good reasons. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t design a better carousel experience.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
When it comes to navigation on mobile, we often think about hamburger menus, full-page overlays and good ol’ accordions. However, there is one interesting design pattern that has been showing up recently — and could be used for navigation, filters, overlays, or even language selector: the vertical split pattern.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
Inline validation in web forms is useful when it works, but frustrating when it fails. Too often it leads to an endless stream of disruptive error messages or dead-ends without any chance of getting out. Let’s fix it.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com
With things to keep in mind, strategies and practical techniques to convince stakeholders to support and promote accessibility efforts.| smart-interface-design-patterns.com