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Leverage assumptions to fill in the gaps
What's inside: Assumption-based design, progressive step UX, question storming, pyramid principle, AI in FigJam, gulf between design and eng, and more.
Newsletter • November 24, 2023 • 5 min read
Hey folks,
Here are the top 10 things I found worth sharing and your UX tip of the week.
UX tip of the week
Leverage assumptions to fill in the gaps between data and your solution.
Most people don’t know how to articulate what they want.
When you’re designing solutions, you’ll have to accept that you won’t always have all the information to execute.
Instead of going back and forth, which wastes everyone’s time, create a brief in your head, fill in the blanks with assumptions, and design something you can show. 80% of the time you’ll be 80% there.
Read more from Emy Alegre.
Top 10 things worth sharing this week
Erika Hall shared thoughts on how to effectively lead question brainstorming instead of idea brainstorming.
Leverage the pyramid principle by Barbara Minto to structure communication in a way that makes it easy for readers to understand and act on. Read the original Minto Pyramid Principle.
Vitaly Friedman compiled practical tips on designing the best progress steps in a UX workflow and additional resources on the topic: stepped progression, multi-step wizard, task list pattern, wizards design recommendations, and loading and progress indicators.
Daniel Tuitt ruminated about how we might implement systems thinking in service design. “When you look at ambiguity, do you have an action plan to make sure that you can go forward and make sense of the world?”
Figma introduced AI features in FigJam. Generate prompt-based templates or diagrams, summarize content from a group brainstorm, automatically sort and group stickies by theme, and more. “Lower the floor and raise the ceiling.”
Oen Michael Hammonds shared three key lessons to help designers overcome the modern dilemma — only pushing pixels around in Figma: [1] focus on user problems and outcomes, [2] enable diverse teams’ perspectives to generate multiple possibilities, and [3] learn by doing.
“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.” — Don Norman (ref)
Check it out: Polywork AI lets you automate your LinkedIn profile to generate a personal website.
Keep the Universal Principles of Design on your desk so that its fast and easy to revisit 100 concise principles to apply in active projects and conversations.
"The most crucial mistake in the collaboration between designers and engineers happens when we conflate this division of tools with a need for a strong division of labor.” Rune Madsen ruminated on the gulf between design and engineering.
Thanks for reading!
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Sincerely,
Gerren