February 11, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #494
This newsletter issue was sent out to 191,934 subscribers on Tuesday, February 11, 2025.
Editorial
How do we do good UX work with complex systems? We can use reliable UX research methods, apply smart design patterns, and establish reliable ways to measure UX impact.
But first, we need to start with the basics: brainstorming, tackling complex navigation, handling legacy systems, and running user workshops. In this newsletter, we’ll explore all these challenges.
This Wednesday, Feb 12, we’ll explore frustrating design patterns for 2025 (and how to fix them!) in a live free online workshop. Drop by if you can — save your spot!
And here’s our latest line-up of workshops and conferences we’ve been preparing:
- Smashing Meets Accessibility Free with Stéphanie Walter, Sarah L. Fossheim and Kardo Ayoub (+ Geoff Graham as MC!),
- Smashing Meets CSS Free with Adam Argyle, Julia Miocene and Miriam Suzanne (+ Geoff Graham as MC!),
- UX Design Leadership UX with Paul Boag,
- Advanced Design Systems Workflow with Brad Frost,
- Figma Workflow Masterclass Workflow with Christine Vallaure,
- Smart Interface Design Patterns UX with Vitaly Friedman,
- Enterprise UX Masterclass UX with Marko Dugonjić.
We hope you’ll find them useful — and of course, we are looking forward to seeing you online and offline, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. Redesigning Information Architecture
How can we improve the information architecture of a product to make it clearer for users? That’s the challenge that the Intercom team was confronted with. As their product grew, the information architecture struggled to keep pace, making it hard for users to find their way around and achieve their tasks. A common problem you might have experienced with your product, too.
Pranava Tandra shares valuable insights and lessons learned from how the Intercom team tackled the challenge and restructured the IA, with clarity becoming the guiding principle behind every design decision they made.
By doing so, they not only made the navigation experience more intuitive for users, but the newly-gained simplicity also meant fewer debates and less confusion about where features belong for the design team. A win-win for everyone. (cm)
2. Tackling UX Challenges As A Team
The power of the team is a company’s greatest asset when tackling complex problems and identifying new opportunities. Evan Karageorgos, Tori Holmes, and Alexandre Benitah share insights into the process the UX team at Booking.com uses for rapid group ideation. It has helped them generate hundreds of ideas for new and existing features and flows.
The approach connects UX ideas to business objectives, factors in competitive insights, and involves all crafts from the start to give teams a holistic overview of their topic. In their rundown of the process, the Booking.com team summarized everything you need to know to successfully prepare, run, and evaluate an ideation session.
The post also includes a free Miro template (password: bookingcom) that you can use in your sessions as well. (cm)
3. A Real-World Product Design Process
We’ve probably all been there before: Standing in front of a huge project, feeling paralyzed, not knowing where to start. To help us get things rolling, Ted Goas created a product design process playbook in which he describes three essential steps of the product design process: “Discovery,” “Definition,” and “Development.”
For each step, Ted suggests activities and exit criteria, i.e., things you need to have ready before moving on to the next stage. The actions aren’t mandatory for every project, of course, but rather a reference and prompt you can either use to do a task or understand why it can be skipped. A great reminder of the tools we have available and how and when they are helpful. (cm)
4. Inspiring Interaction Patterns
A delightful interaction can be the cherry on top of an already great design. If you’re looking for some inspiration, Nitish Khagwal won’t let you down. He created a series of interaction patterns that feel simple and intuitive but have that extra bit of polishing to make them shine.
Nitish’s collection of interactions includes everything from a save toggle and timeslot picker to a currency swapper, card splitting accordion, dropdown disclosure, fluid tabs, and much more. With more than 50 interactions currently published, Nitish’s work is a treasure chest for anyone one the lookout for interaction UX ideas that stand out from what we usually see on the web. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
As always, here’s a quick overview of online workshops on frontend and UX — be it around accessibility, performance, or design patterns. We hope you’ll find them useful.
With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Fixing Frustrating Design Patterns For 2025 Free!
with Vitaly Friedman. Feb 12 - Advanced Design Systems Workflow
with Brad Frost. Feb 18–26 - Deep Dive on Accessibility Testing Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Feb 26 – March 13 - Figma Workflow Masterclass Workflow
with Christine Vallaure. Mar 4–11 - Smart Interface Design Patterns (Live UX Training) UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Mar 7 – Apr 7 - Jump to all workshops →
6. UX In Legacy Systems
Making a UX impact in legacy-ridden companies where broken, outdated systems are powering critical tasks is a tough challenge. Everyone relies on these systems but nobody knows what’s happening under the hood, and over time, all the well-meant quick fixes have been adding to the existing UX debt. Now, what do we do to improve the situation? Burn it all down and start over from scratch?
As Vitaly points out, there is no one-fits-all solution for tackling legacy systems, but there are ways to make progress, albeit slowly, while respecting the needs and concerns of users and stakeholders. In his post “How To Improve UX In Legacy Systems,” he shares a UX roadmap and different migration strategies to help you find the best solution for the legacy system you’re dealing with. Precious tips that cover not only the technical but also the human side of fixing a broken yet critical system. (cm)
7. More Collaborative User Interviews
Have you ever been in a situation where you were running a user interview and, after some time, noticed that you and the customer were talking about completely different things? Laura Eiche shares an interesting approach to help you prevent misunderstandings and ensure you stay on the same page even when words fail you. To achieve that, she switches out some question-and-answer sections in the interview with small visual tasks.
Laura wrote a handy guide to collaborative user interviews in which she shares five examples of exercises that you might want to try with your customers. All you need to run them is a collaborative whiteboard app like Miro. This more workshop-like approach not only helps to prevent misunderstandings but also makes it easy to analyze the insights from your user interviews later on, as everything is already documented. (cm)
8. 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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