How AI is revolutionising Product Design by prioritising behaviour over looks

How AI is revolutionising Product Design by prioritising behaviour over looks

by | Nov 12, 2024 | Blog, Product Design

As a product designer, I often use the Double Diamond model to guide my actions. Not for all projects, but I often work on projects that require this step-by-step approach. It makes the process predictable. Predictability is a good thing in an otherwise messy process.

Just like every designer worth their salt, I jumped on board the AI train as soon as it became available. I even went to Fiverr to have some software made that could help me transcribe and analyse my interviews. It worked great, but other alternatives quickly overtook it, so I use those now.

So here I am, in a rapidly changing field, surrounded by a plethora of solutions that are all good and quickly follow each other up. What a promise. Which ones to use?

Figma, the go-to prototyping tool, can be enriched with a whole heap of plugins, from those that provide design analysis and recommendations based on your design context to image generators and converting designs or components into interactive and responsive React components. Did I mention automatic bug detectors?

My challenge is to see to what extent I can become a one-man-band product designer with help of the Double Diamond model—the one that does it all, from Challenge to Outcome.

I am curious to find out if it works and, if it doesn’t, to at least see how far I’ll get.

How AI is revolutionising Product Design by prioritising behaviour over looks

Trapped by My Domain Provider: The Frustrating Reality of Canceling Subscriptions

by | Nov 12, 2024 | Blog, Product Design

Have you ever tried to cancel a subscription and felt like you were trapped in a digital maze? That’s exactly what happened to me with my domain name provider. What started as a straightforward service turned into a frustrating ordeal of endless redirects, hidden options, and relentless upsell attempts. In this post, I’ll unravel the tactics they used, why it left me questioning their ethics, and what you can do to avoid the same trap.

So h

What Are the Most Useful Product Design Frameworks?

What Are the Most Useful Product Design Frameworks?

by | Oct 11, 2024 | Blog, Product Design, UX

🔎 Can one (wo)man, with the help of AI, achieve the same as a team, and if so, should we even want that?
📝 Can one (wo)man, with the help of AI, achieve the same as a team, and if so, should we even want that?

In the ever-evolving field of product design, utilising a structured methodology is crucial for creating innovative and user-friendly products. Product design frameworks provide designers with systematic approaches to conceptualise ideas, address challenges, and streamline the product development process. These models help organize thoughts, enhance team collaboration, and ensure a comprehensive understanding of both the product’s purpose and the user’s needs. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the most effective product design frameworks, delve into the intricacies of framework design, and discuss why incorporating these methodologies is essential in today’s competitive market.

What are Product Design Frameworks?Product Design Frameworks help designers follow a planned path through the Product Design process. It has many tools, ideas, and ways to help you understand what people want, describe issues, find solutions, and alter designs. By giving designers a place to start, frameworks help them make better experiences that are more focused on the user.
Leveraging a framework allows you to apply consistent language and best practices to any project. There are numerous approaches to product and service design that help break down complex design challenges into smaller, more manageable parts. This simplification makes it easier for teams to collaborate effectively and communicate clearly.
A Product Design Framework also emphasises the importance of studying, testing, and making iterative changes. By incorporating these elements into the design process, designers can ensure that their solutions are based on real user data rather than assumptions. Ultimately, this approach enhances products and services, leading to greater user satisfaction.

The Most Useful UX Design Frameworks
A number of Product Design Frameworks have become well-known in the industry due to their effectiveness. Here are some of the most prominent ones:

1. Design Thinking
By adopting a human-centred approach, you can develop innovative and effective ideas. The process involves five steps: understand, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

  • Understand:
    Gain deep insights into the users’ needs, motivations, and challenges by engaging with them directly. This involves conducting research, observing behaviours, and empathising with users to fully comprehend their experiences and expectations.
  • Define: Clearly articulate the core problem based on the insights gathered during the understanding phase. This involves synthesising the collected information, identifying patterns and key issues, and formulating a precise problem statement that is centred on the user’s needs. By accurately defining the challenge, designers ensure that subsequent efforts are focused on addressing the right problem, paving the way for effective ideation and solution development.
  • Ideate: Generate a variety of ideas and potential solutions.
  • Prototype: Develop preliminary models or representations of your ideas to explore potential solutions. This involves creating rough drafts, mock-ups, or simulations of the product or service concept. Prototyping allows designers to experiment with different approaches, identify strengths and weaknesses, and refine functionalities or features. By materialising ideas into tangible forms, designers can better communicate concepts, facilitate discussions, and prepare for user testing.
  • Test: Solicit feedback from users by presenting them with your prototypes to evaluate and gather insights. This involves conducting user testing sessions where participants interact with the prototype, allowing designers to observe behaviours, identify usability issues, and understand user perceptions. The feedback collected is crucial for refining and improving the product or service. By iteratively testing and incorporating user input, designers can enhance the solution to better meet user needs and expectations..

This iterative process ensures that designers maintain a constant focus on the user throughout every stage, making it an invaluable framework for creating exceptional products and services. By continuously refining designs based on user feedback, designers can develop solutions that meet and exceed user needs and expectations, ultimately leading to superior user experiences and successful outcomes.

2. Double Diamond
The Double Diamond is a design framework developed by the British Design Council that divides the design process into four distinct phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. This structure provides a clear roadmap for designers in both product and service design, facilitating a balance between creative exploration and focused implementation.

  • Discover: In the Discover-phase, designers engage in research to gain deep insights into user needs, market trends, and potential challenges. This exploratory stage involves activities such as user interviews, observations, and data collection. By immersing themselves in the problem space, designers can uncover valuable information that informs the direction of the project.
  • Define: During the Define-phase, the insights gathered are analysed and synthesised to clearly articulate the core problem or opportunity. This involves identifying patterns, prioritising user needs, and formulating a concise problem statement or design brief. A well-defined problem sets the foundation for effective solution development.
  • Develop: The Develop-phase focuses on generating ideas and exploring potential solutions. Designers brainstorm, create prototypes, and experiment with different concepts. This creative stage encourages divergent thinking and collaboration, allowing teams to refine ideas based on feedback and feasibility.
  • Deliver: In the Deliver-phase, the refined solutions are finalised and implemented. This involves rigorous testing, validation, and preparation for launch. Designers work to ensure that the final product or service meets the identified user needs and adheres to quality standards. Post-launch evaluations and feedback collection are also integral to this stage.

This framework stresses exploring and diverging before arriving at answers, ensuring the consideration of all possible options.

3. Lean UX
Lean UX is a system that encourages designers to try new things quickly and make changes over time. It works especially well in Agile settings, where the goal is to cut down on waste and get as much feedback from users as possible. Some of the key ideas behind lean UX are:

  • I am working together with teams from different departments.
  • We prioritize the user’s needs over results.
  • We create prototypes to evaluate concepts and gather feedback swiftly.

This framework facilitates continuous learning and change, making it ideal for projects that require quick completion.

4. User-Centred Design (UCD)
The person who will use the design is always essential to user-centred design. It entails conducting research and testing to determine what users want, need, and do. The UCD method typically involves the following steps:

  • Do users study to learn more?
  • Create characters that symbolize the individuals you aim to connect with.
  • Creating journey maps and user scenarios.
  • We are using usability tests to make sure designs work.

UCD helps ensure that goods are not only useful but also fun to use, making users happier in the long run.

5. Agile UX
Agile UX integrates UX design with Agile production methods. It encourages designers and developers to work together, which speeds up changes and improvements. Some important Agile UX components include:

  • There are iterative design and development processes.
  • Regular feedback loops occur with users and partners.
  • We prioritize features according to user preferences and business requirements.

Agile UX enables teams to adapt swiftly to changes and continuously enhance the user experience during the app’s development.

Why Do We Need Design Frameworks?
Design frameworks are important for numerous reasons, including:

Clarity and Structure
Design templates make the process of designing very clear. Teams remain organized and focused, ensuring the completion of all necessary steps. This reduces the likelihood of overlooking crucial aspects of the user experience and maintains the project’s progress.

Enhanced Collaboration
Frameworks help designers, developers, customers, and everyone else on a team work together better. A framework gives everyone a shared language and set of rules to follow so that everyone knows what their job is. Working together leads to better communication, alignment, and, finally, a more cohesive outcome.

User-Centric Approach
Frameworks push for a user-centered approach and stress how important it is to know what users want and need. By incorporating testing and user study into the design process, frameworks ensure that products meet the needs of actual users. This focus on the person creates better solutions and makes people happier.

Efficiency and Speed
Design frameworks help speed up the design process by providing an organized way to do things. It’s simple for teams to move quickly through stages, try out new ideas, and get feedback. In fast-paced environments where getting goods to market quickly is very important, this level of productivity is even more important.

Continuous Improvement
A lot of design systems stress how important it is to keep improving and iterating. Frameworks help ensure that goods change based on what users say and how their needs change by encouraging teams to test, learn, and adapt. This iterative method makes designs that are better quality and more in line with what users want.

Risk Mitigation
Frameworks help designers find possible risks early on in the process. Teams can find problems before they become big ones by combining study, testing, and user feedback. This proactive method lowers the chances of having to pay a lot of money for redesigns or having unhappy users in the future.

Conclusion
UX design principles are essential in the digital world because they help designers come up with effective and user-centered solutions. These frameworks help teams get through the complicated design process by giving them structure, encouraging teamwork, and stressing a focus on the user.

There are different ways to do things with each style, like design thinking, lean UX, and user-centered design. You can adapt these methods to suit specific projects. When artists use these tools, they can improve their work, collaborate better, and provide users with better, more useful experiences.

A good UX design structure is not only the right thing to do, but it is also a must if you want to make products that stand out in the market today, are high-quality, and focus on the user.

Product Designer success: Top skills you need to master

Product Designer success: Top skills you need to master

by | Oct 7, 2024 | Blog, Product Design

They are now some of the most important people in a business because of how quickly things change online. A product designer does more than just make things look good. They also have control over various aspects of the product, including how consumers perceive it. Being smart, tech-savvy, and aware of what people desire are important for this job.

 People who make things hire product designers to ensure that their items look good, work well, and are simple for consumers to use. They work in lots of different areas, like science, art, consumer goods, and more. Their main goal is to use design to solve problems while keeping the person in mind. This focus on the user often stems from a method known as design thought. This method stresses getting what the user wants and trying different solutions over and over again.

What Are The Key Responsibilities of a Product Designer?

There are many things that an industrial designer does for a living. However, there are some major tasks that they always have to do:

User Research and Analysis

To make a good product, you need to know who will buy your product in order to make one. Designers of products often talk to people, do surveys, and do usability tests to learn more about how people use their goods, what they need, and where they are having trouble. It enables them to make pictures that really speak to the people they want to reach.

Concept Development

After completing their studies, product designers begin to generate new ideas. As part of this process, team members will collaboratively generate ideas, sketch these concepts, and then create models of the designs. At this point, designers often work with teams from various departments to get different points of view.

Wiring and Prototyping

To test their ideas and see how they work, people who make things use wireframes and prototypes. They illustrate the product’s assembly and functionality, including floor plans. Before putting the idea out there to the public, designers can test it with real people and get feedback.

Visual Design

How useful something is is not the same as how appealing it looks. Product designers decide how things like styles, colors, and icons should appear on a product. They aim to create a visual language that complements other elements. This will make things better for the user.

Collaboration with Development Teams 

A lot of the time, developers and engineers work closely with product designers to make sure the design is perfect. It’s important to work together to make design ideas into useful things. Designers should know what they want and listen to developers.

User Testing and Iteration

After releasing their products, product designers test them with real users to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement. This iterative process lets creators make the necessary changes to improve the product based on what real users say about it. With continuous development, the product adapts to meet the needs of users as they change.

Staying Updated on Trends

Every day, new technologies, tools, and ideas show up in the fashion world. Product makers need to know about the newest styles, tools, and best ways to do their job. With this ongoing schooling, they stay competitive and come up with new ideas for their work.

Documentation and Specification

Lastly, product designers document a wealth of information and details about their designs. Development teams use this documentation as a guide to ensure everyone aligns with the design goal. The design of a product should stay the same over its entire life, so it’s essential to have clear papers.

What is Design Thinking, and Why Is It Important?

Design thought is all about putting the customer first. We combine knowledge, imagination, and reason to solve complex problems. Understanding, describing, coming up with ideas, building a sample, and testing it are the five steps in this method.

Empathize: Learn as much as you can about the people and what they want. To do this, you can learn, talk to, and watch people. To understand what people don’t like, we need to put ourselves in their shoes.

Define: They consider the lessons learned from the “empathize” step and select the primary issue they wish to tackle. Planning begins with a clear statement of the problem.

Ideate: After figuring out what the problem is, you need to think of possible solutions. You can think of many different ideas at this stage, which helps you think artistically. You can then select the best ones.

Prototype: Prototyping involves transforming ideas into low-fidelity models for user testing. Prototypes can be simple sketches on paper or interactive digital models. The goal is to quickly test ideas and get feedback from users.

Test: Finally, real people test prototypes to gauge their reaction to the idea. This input guides the next versions, which lets designers improve their ideas based on real user experiences.

The Importance of Design Thinking

Design thinking is important for many reasons, including

  • The User-Centric Approach: It prioritizes the user, ensuring that solutions align with their actual needs. This makes users happier and more engaged.
  • Innovation: The ideation step fosters unconventional thinking, facilitating the growth of new ideas. In competitive markets, this kind of creativity is key for making a product stand out.
  • Iterative Process: Design theory emphasizes constant testing and iteration to allow for changes based on feedback. This lowers the chance of putting out a product that doesn’t live up to customer standards.
  • Collaboration: The design thinking process pushes teams from different backgrounds to work together. This method from various fields encourages different points of view, resulting in more comprehensive solutions.
  • Problem-Solving Framework: Design thinking gives you an organized way to solve challenging problems. Product creators can use this method in a variety of fields and situations, making it a valuable tool.

Conclusion

Some of the many things that product designers do are study people, come up with ideas, plan how things look, and work with development teams. Aspiring product designers can do better in this fast-paced job if they know what their main responsibilities are.

Being open to design thinking as a key method also helps designers make products that are useful to people and solve problems. It not only helps people come up with new ideas, but it also makes them want to work together and keep getting better.

As the need for successful product designers grows, these ideas will become more important for anyone who wants to work in the field. If you want to be good at design and make a difference, you should put people first and follow design thinking rules.

Master the Strategic Design Framework for Guaranteed Success

Master the Strategic Design Framework for Guaranteed Success

by | Oct 4, 2024 | Blog, Product Design

The way something looks isn’t the only thing that design is about. It’s also about making experiences count. Designing is more than just making ideas happen. It also involves aligning our efforts with the company’s goals. This is where being smart is important. If designers are adept at designing strategies, they can create products that significantly influence both users and stakeholders.

What is Strategic Thinking?

Strategic thinking means being able to look at complicated situations, guess what problems might come up, and come up with effective plans to reach long-term goals. It means thinking beyond your current tasks. In other words, creators need to know about the business goals, the market, and what users want.

Artists, not just business leaders, need to be able to think strategically. Thinking carefully helps designers make decisions that benefit the business and users. This method encourages new ideas by allowing creators to try out unusual solutions while remaining true to what works in the real world.

Strategic thinking also makes people more likely to work together. It brings together different points of view, which can help create a welcoming environment that results in more complete and well-rounded design plans.

What Is A UX Design Strategy?

In UX (User Experience), “create strategy” refers to the steps taken to plan and make decisions about how to create a product or service. It takes into account business goals, user wants, and technical feasibility when planning on providing people with a meaningful experience.

Design strategy fundamentally involves understanding the product’s intended use and the customer’s journey to it. It helps us figure out important things like, “What problems are we solving?” Who are our clients? What hurts them the most?

Having a clear design plan during product development ensures intentional decision-making and enhances the overall experience. It makes sure that everyone on the team is working toward the same goal and that they can talk to project partners about where the project is going in a clear way.

There should be room for change in a successful design plan. As new information emerges during the design process, the strategy can adapt to suit evolving user needs or market conditions. This ability to change is essential in today’s fast-paced design world, where technology and user tastes are always changing.

How Do You Create a Strategy Design?

To create a plan design, several steps must be taken, requiring both analytical and creative thinking skills. Here’s an organized way to come up with a successful design strategy:

Research and Understand The Context

Researching a lot is the basis of any design plan based on extensive research. First, find out about your target group, market trends, and your competitors. Use tools like interviews, polls, and analytics to learn about how people behave and what they like. This study is the foundation for every other step of the strategy.

Define Clear Objectives

Setting clear, measurable goals is crucial once you fully comprehend the situation. What do you want your product idea to do? Goals could include making users happier, getting more people to buy, or making things easier for everyone to access. These goals help you plan and evaluate results.

Identify Key Stakeholders

Get important people involved early on in the process. This includes team members, managers, and even those who might use the app. Their suggestions can provide useful information that changes the design strategy. Regular contact with stakeholders helps everyone work together and stay on the same page.

Develop User Personas

User profiles are made-up versions of the people you want to contact. They give data a face, making it easier to understand what users want and why they do what they do. Making detailed characters allows you to better adapt your design strategy to meet the needs of specific users. This will help you make sure that your product speaks to the right people.

Map The User Journey

To understand how people use your product, you must be able to picture the user journey. Create Makemytrip maps that illustrate the steps people take from the moment they discover something to the moment they use it. This planning process identifies issues and suggests improvements, subsequently incorporating them into the design strategy.

Brainstorm and Ideate Solutions

Once you have a decent idea of the user and the situation, you can start coming up with answers. At this point, encourage people to be creative and open-minded. To generate a multitude of ideas, consider participating in design thought workshops or sketching collaboratively with others.

Prioritize and Create a Roadmap

Prioritize your ideas by likelihood, benefit, and alignment with your goals. Make a plan that shows the order of the design tasks and important dates. There should be enough room in this plan for new ideas or problems to come up during the design process.

Prototype and Test

To test your design approach, you need to build prototypes. To try ideas and get feedback from users, make low-fidelity prototypes. This iterative process lets you improve your ideas based on how real people use them. This way, you can be sure that your design meets their needs.

Implement and iterate

After testing your design approach to make sure it works, it’s time to put it into action. Collaborate closely with the development teams to ensure the proper execution of the plan. Once the app is live, keep getting comments from users and tracking its performance. Use this information to continually improve the product.

Reflect and Learn

After the delivery phase, reflect on the successes and areas for improvement. Write down the things you learned and the new ideas you had during the process. This reflection is critical if you want to change how you plan for future projects.

Conclusion

As a designer, you must think strategically and use what you’ve learned in the real world to come up with a plan. If you understand how design strategy works in UX, you can create products that meet user needs while also helping your business reach its goals. Research, collaboration, and iteration are all parts of the strategy design process. All these steps aim to produce valuable user experiences.

Product design is a field that is always changing. A strong design strategy will help you deal with problems and take advantage of chances, leading to successful and meaningful design solutions. Learn the art and science of strategic thought, and your design business will grow.

How AI is revolutionising Product Design by prioritising behaviour over looks

Essential Product Design Skills Every Solo Designer Must Master

by | Jun 3, 2024 | Blog, Product Design

> Can one (wo)man, with the help of AI, achieve the same as a team, and if so, should we even want that?

As a product designer, I often use the Double Diamond model to guide my actions. Not for all projects, but I often work on projects that require this step-by-step approach. It makes the process predictable. Predictability is a good thing in an otherwise messy process.

Just like every designer worth their salt, I jumped on board the AI train as soon as it became available. I even went to Fiverr to have some software made that could help me transcribe and analyse my interviews. It worked great, but other alternatives quickly overtook it, so I use those now.

So here I am, in a rapidly changing field, surrounded by a plethora of solutions that are all good and quickly follow each other up. What a promise. Which ones to use?

Figma, the go-to prototyping tool, can be enriched with a whole heap of plugins, from those that provide design analysis and recommendations based on your design context to image generators and converting designs or components into interactive and responsive React components. Did I mention automatic bug detectors?

My challenge is to see to what extent I can become a one-man-band product designer with help of the Double Diamond model—the one that does it all, from Challenge to Outcome.

I am curious to find out if it works and, if it doesn’t, to at least see how far I’ll get.

How social design transformed coffee shop sales

How social design transformed coffee shop sales

by | Feb 10, 2022 | Product Design

No matter where I am in the world, the experience of getting a cup of coffee is more or less the same: you order a coffee from a menu and wait for it to be made. An anonymous person then hands the coffee over to you and you pay. You then say thank you and goodbye and you’re on your way. The coffee is fine, the experience is fine, but it is never memorable.

But when you get a cup of coffee at the coffee bar at Reed Elsevier in Amsterdam you notice that something else is going on. The two or three staff working behind the counter are always smiling and engaged. They clearly love what they do. When the cue at the counter is long, they perform a strange sort of dance to speed things up. It is wonderful to look at. When it is your turn to be served you feel they care by the attention they give you and customers miss them when they are not there.

So Wah (So) is the name of the lady who seems to make all this happen. It’s like she looks straight through you. She’s unconventional but service-minded. Her small team is disciplined and efficient. “How’s your coffee?” she asks with dreamy eyes and a big smile. “I made it especially good for you”.

Before you can answer her, her eyes are on the next person in the line. “What will it be?”

I forgot the name of the bar, but I remember the name of their biggest asset: So.

The Time Management Secrets I Learned from Cooking Every Day

The Time Management Secrets I Learned from Cooking Every Day

by | Jul 2, 2021 | Product Design

Summary

> One day I decided to cook every day so that my wife could spend more time on other things
> I have always been horrible at managing my time and burnt the food regularly
> After cooking for a few months I realised that the food never burned anymore
> Somehow I had manifested a timer in my mind that always got me back to the stove on time
> Cooking every day made me form a habit for managing my time which has a positive effect on everything else in my life
> In his book The power of habit, Charles Duhigg introduces ‘The Habit Loop’
> Companies like Pinterest, Google and Apple create user habits to keep their customers focused on their products

For a long time, I was convinced that I had some level of ADD. I often felt unable to manage my time well and was late for almost every meeting. Time was too slippery a thing for me to keep hold of so I tried to stop caring about it all together.

But it drove me crazy that I always underestimated the amount of time that I needed for a job and overestimated my ability to get the job done in time.

And then everything changed.

one day I decided to take care of the groceries and cook every day.

I focused on one cookbook from one cook that I liked: ‘PLENTY’ by Yotam Ottolenghi.

At first, I would lose track of time as I would in any other aspect of my life and the meal would fail. The more I repeated the same recipe, however, the better I got at getting the timing right. I noticed that I was getting better at ‘guessing’ how long it would take to prepare an ingredient. I understood which ingredient I had to prepare first, which one second, which one third and how to keep it warm.

And then I noticed something else.

I noticed that I got better at ‘guessing’ other things too. It was like I had a timer in my head that gave me a ‘warning’ when and ingredient was about to be ready:

  • I got better at guessing how long it would take me to arrive at a certain location.
  • I got better at planning my days
  • I got better at remembering birthdays and other events.
  • I developed a ‘Peter tingle’ for a deadline, which means that I intuitively feel how far away I am from the deadline (which is brilliant since I never let the my food burn anymore).

Heck, I was becoming good at managing my time! Without realising it, I formed a habit for timing events.

As i looked into it I found out that forming user habits is something that companies use to keep us focused on their products.

Following de rules of habit-forming can make it easier for visitors to navigate your website. Example: a visitor who goes to your website regularly will after some time know where to click so that she ends up where she wants to go. Now imagine the UX department feels that their website has poor findability and the information architecture needs an update. What you do at that point is mess with people’s habits.

Habit-forming UX design

When you start to develop an intuition for something, it often means that you are forming a habit for it. Habit-forming is a powerful tool that you can use to ‘program yourself’ (or others) to be a master at any task.

Simply put, forming a habit means that a person or animal does the same thing consistently over a set period of time. The sooner in life, we start the better we become. (Which is why there are loads of puppy courses but we don’t see many ‘senior dog’ courses).

According to a 2009 study* by Phillippa Lally at University College London, the time time to form a habit is between 18 and 254 days depending on the individual. The study examined the habits of 96 people over a 12-week period. Each person chose one new habit for the 12 weeks and reported each day on whether or not they did the behaviour and how automatic the behaviour felt. On average, Lally found, it took 66 days for people to form a habit. When you do the same thing consistently—and every day—for 66 days, you reprogram yourself so that the task feels natural. Like brushing your teeth.

Charles Duhigg’s habit loop

Charles Duhigg, the author of the book ‘The Power of Habit’, describes a habit loop as follows:

  • 1. There is a cue (the bell) that triggers the mouse (or any other animal) to perform a routine.
  • 2. When we repeat this action many times the mouse associates the sound of the bell with getting a reward.
  • 3. After a period of time, every time that the bell rings the mouse unconsciously expects to get the reward.

Atomic Habits

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear identifies ‘5 Triggers That Make New Habits Stick’:

1. Time,
Time-based cues can be used to stick with routines over and over again.

2. Location,
Location-based triggers help you to get ready and start. It’s a simple habit cue that helps prompt your routine.

3. Preceding Event,
Many habits are a response to something that happens. An example of this is the bell in the habit loop above.

4. Emotional State &
A certain emotion triggers a certain response. A person who is frustrated with a website (trigger) displays a negative response

5. Other People.
People you surround yourself with can play a role in your habits and behaviours.

His model looks like this:

There is much more to say about habit loops and how to apply them that goes way beyond this post. And if you want to know more about it and how to use habit loops in your designs (and when you shouldn’t), then go to this page where I do a user habit deep-dive.

Crafting Successful Products: A Designer’s Recipe for Innovation

Crafting Successful Products: A Designer’s Recipe for Innovation

by | Jun 20, 2021 | Blog, Product Design, UX

My recipe rant

Way back in the days that Google maps did not exist, (I am purposely discounting any other technology that ‘promises’ to help you get where you want to go) there was the TomTom. Maybe you heard of it, maybe you haven’t – in short, it was a device that you would stick to the front window of your car and it would guide you where you want to go.
Eventually the TomTom got pretty good at guiding you to your destination but in the beginning it suffered from bugs.

I remember one time when I was finding my way in Belgium and instead of telling me to turn right at the next exit, the device told me that I had missed the exit after I had passed it. That was unpleasant. I had to drive for aeons to get back on track. Another time in Spain the TomTom guided us through rice fields (I kid you not) only to find ourselves stuck in a dead-end web of sandy roads. That too was an unpleasant experience.

The same thing often occurs when I follow a cooking recipe which in my mind works like this:

I have been cooking every day for the last couple of months now and what I find with most recipes is that the amount of time that is needed to prepare the meal is mostly wrong (or at least not right for my kitchen appliances) or that the ingredients are only available in mainland China and that you should have ordered them far in advance. What I do in those cases is find an alternative recipe. Hands-down the most dreadful thing that i get when I follow a cookbook recipe for the first time is that sentence at the end of the recipe saying: “Now put in the fridge for 24 hours and cook the next day”. What?! I have guests tonight!

When I see a recipe I like, I begin making the meal in the order in which it is written down (doesn’t everybody?). So at the start of the recipe it would say first make this, then prepare that, put that to a boil until you place all the ingredients on a plate.

I still love his cooking, but are there no UX people around when he writes his books? people who can observe people while they cook and tell him all the different kinds of manners there are that people approach cooking a recipe for the first time

Nothing is new except what has been forgotten

Nothing is new except what has been forgotten

by | Jun 20, 2021 | Product Design, UX Research

Consider the image above. The left image is that of an Assyrian who lived 3000 years ago. He uses an inflated animal skin to breathe underwater. The image on the right is that of a scuba diver who is breathing under water through a tube that is connected to a metal device that contains compressed air. It’s nothing new.. it just took 3000 years to improve the idea from what is was then to what it is now.

Did you know that before the 1940s blue was a colour that was mostly worn with girls and pink was worn by boys in the United States, the United Kingdom and some other European countries?

According to Jo B. Paoletti, a professor at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, this is because pink was associated with red which was considered a strong, masculine colour and blue was considered a soft, delicate colour that was reserved for girls. Obviously, gender issues were not on anyone’s agenda back in the 19th century and almost all children wore white.

So when did it change? What happened that pink is now linked to girls and blue to boys?

The practice of linking pink with girls and blue with boys started taking shape in the 1940s and became stronger over the next few years. This change happened because of a mix of reasons, like marketing tactics, cultural influences, and social expectations. Recently, there’s been a push against these old gender stereotypes, including the idea that certain colors are meant for specific genders. More and more people are calling for children’s clothes, toys, and products to be gender-neutral, challenging the traditional views on color and gender.

And I am willing to bet you, that that’s nothing new either.

Something that strikes us as new and different today is often just forgotten by the current generation and “rediscovered”. This is true for fashion, music and movies and for other things as well such as politics or entire movements.

“Nothing is new except what’s been forgotten”

— Rose Bertin. Dressmaker to Queen Marie Antoinette