October 8, 2024 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #477
This newsletter issue was sent out to 194,752 subscribers on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
Editorial
How do you tackle complex UX projects? Perhaps legacy-ridden products in an unfamiliar domain, with layers of stakeholders and limited resources for research? There is no single established method that would work in every situation for every company, but it’s useful to have a good selection of UX tools that we can rely on in different situations.
In this newsletter, we dive into just that — practical UX methods, templates, and activities for ideation sessions and product sprints, from storyboards and brainwriting to 6 thinking hats, journey mapping, and concept testing.
Last week we (finally!) launched How to Measure UX and Design Impact 🧭, a new 8h-video course on how to establish, measure and report UX metrics and design KPIs — for senior designers, UX researchers and design leads. Jump to the details.
On our end, we are just about to kick off SmashingConf NY — and we can’t wait to see you in person and online:
- SmashingConf NY 🇺🇸 (Front-End & UX, Oct 7–10) (last tickets!)
- SmashingConf Antwerp 🇧🇪 (Design & UX, Oct 28–31) (last tickets!)
And let’s dive into the wonderful world of UX tools and methods, everyone! We hope you’ll find them useful!
— Vitaly
1. UX Strategy Kit
Have you ever heard of “World Café,” “Two Truths And A Lie,” or “The Aliens Have Landed”? All three are methods to help you run ideation sessions and product development sprints. The team at Merck KGaA created a UX Strategy Kit jam-packed with practical ideas that provide a foundation for your UX workshop endeavors.
From defining the core strategy and a proven problem statement to generating ideas and building a prototype, the UX Strategy Kit accompanies you through the complete product design process. Each method comes with instructions, a FigJam template, and a presentation to take your team through the workshop step by step. (cm)
2. Tools For Better Thinking
Am I solving the right problem? Which option is the best one? What are the long-term consequences of my decision? Thinking tools can help designers find answers to the questions they ask themselves on a day-to-day basis. A wonderful overview of such tools comes from Adam Amran.
Untools is a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions, and understand systems. From the Minto Pyramid to the Hard Choice Model, the tools cover systems thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, and communication. A guide helps you choose the right tool for your needs. One for the bookmarks. (cm)
3. Universal Design Playbook
Universal design methods can help you be more inclusive in your design process, both within the context of the design workshops you’re running and how you interact with your users. To support you in developing a mindset of inclusion, DTU Skylab released the Playbook for Universal Design.
The playbook is a collection of methods to plan and facilitate universal design development in every step of the process, for short workshops or longer work sessions. Each method includes everything you need to get up and running quickly: a short tutorial, step-by-step instructions, inclusivity tips, materials needed, templates, and accommodation tips for different abilities. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Cascading Style Systems: Resilient & Maintainable CSS dev
with Miriam Suzanne. Oct 14 – 18 - Interface Design Patterns UX Training (Autumn 2024) ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 1 – Dec 2 - Advanced Design Systems workflow
with Brad Frost. Nov 12–20 - Figma Workflow Masterclass design
with Christine Vallaure. Nov 13–22 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Dec 2–11 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Dec 4–12 - Jump to all workshops →
5. Anatomy Of Design Workshops
Empathy mapping, value proposition, customer journey — the number of workshop types out there can be scary. But even if they might seem like rocket science at first sight, they aren’t. As Slava Shestopalov shows, all workshops are atomic and anyone can easily grasp the nature of any complex workshop by learning its elementary parts and key principles.
In his post, “Anatomy Of Design Workshops,” Slava explains in detail how every workshop can be broken down into its constituent parts: the foundational activities that compose every workshop and variables that adjust the foundational activities to your use case. Slava also dives deeper into what the famous “double diamond” means in practice and how canvases help decompose and convey complex ideas. A must-read for anyone who runs design workshops or is planning to do so. (cm)
6. A Toolbox To Support Your Team’s Creative Journey
Committed to making change happen, the digital creative business school Hyper Island relies on an approach to learning that focuses on collaboration and creativity. To help teams adopt a more creative and collaborative approach in their day-to-day work, too, they published the free Hyper Island Toolbox.
The Toolbox includes more than 100 methods and activities that you can start using today. Whether you want to explore group dynamics, are looking for better ways to collect feedback or share concerns, or want to gain clarity about which ideas to develop further, the toolbox helps you find the right tools to support your team’s creative journey. You need to register with your name and email to get access to the complete Toolbox or check out the free Tool of the Month. (cm)
7. New Video Course: How To Measure UX And Design Impact
Ready to dive deeper? Well, we have something very special coming up for you: Our brand-new video course “How To Measure UX & Design Impact” with Vitaly Friedman. Meet a 8-hour long journey to UX metrics and design KPIs, sailing in unchartered waters every now and again.
From establishing team-specific design KPIs to translating ambiguous objectives into practical design goals and making sense of OKRs, SUS, UMUX-Lite, TPI, KPI trees, feedback scoring, gap analysis, and Kano model, the course is filled with plenty of examples to help you measure UX. Jump to details.
8. UX Deliverables Glossary
Deliverables are an essential tool for any UX practitioner. They document what work has occurred and communicate ideas, research findings, and the context of a project. To help you navigate the different kinds of deliverables and quickly clarify key terms and concepts related to them, Huei-Hsin Wang compiled a UX Deliverables Glossary.
The glossary documents and explains more than 60 key terms — from Affinity Diagram to Wireframe. Each description includes links to related articles from the Nielsen Norman Group in case you want to dig deeper. A useful resource you might want to keep close. (cm)
9. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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