I’ve read a lot, I’ve researched a lot. Of all the knowledge I’ve collected, these are the concepts that I bring with me every day:
Team
- Scaling design is about influence, not headcount
- Value outcomes over outputs
- In a software company everyone is a designer
- It’s fine if the product development workflow is a bit fuzzy and chaotic
- Constraints help creativity
Strategy
- The right choice depends on strategy, not aesthetics
- Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology
- Opinionated design creates the best products
- Avoid jumping to solutions before you fully understand the problem
- To design something really well, you have to get it
Quality
- Fast software is the best software
- Good products are invisible
- It’s always less expensive to fix something before finishing it
Design systems
- Figma is not your real design system
- Developers are the main users of the design system
- Design systems are libraries of solved problems
- Great design systems empower developers to design your product autonomously
User research
- Testing with as few as five users will uncover 85% of usability problems in a single test
- Users don’t figure out how things work, they muddle through
- Reduce mistakes by increasing frequency of contact with real customers
- Friction is an essential learning tool
Other
In the last few years, during my work at GreenFlux, I’ve specialised in complex apps.