Most designers jump into their UI tools too quickly.
What typically happens when you start a new design project?
Maybe a kickoff meeting is organized. In an effort to keep things efficient, the guest list is kept small(ish). Some folks can’t attend. Ideas are brainstormed. A few do most of the speaking while others listen. Attention wanders as folks check their messages. Hopefully someone’s taking notes. When the meeting ends, the designer sets off to interpret everyone’s vision in Figma or Sketch. Maybe they look at a few products for inspiration. The designer tries a few angles. They save some of them. Someone who missed the kickoff swings in a week later with some feedback. …
A Short Guide to Working Remotely for Co-located Teams
COVID-19 is unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. Companies are taking precautions to protect their employees and (hopefully) curb the Coronavirus’s spread. This means many are closing their offices and asking employees to work from home.
That’s the right call for us privileged folk who can work from home.
But now you’re scrambling to translate your team’s office culture online. Let me tell you something:
You can do this!
Working remotely is less scary than it may feel like at first. It’s about the people and the culture, not the…
“Good design is good business!” Makes a nice sound bite, but how does design actually contribute to the bottom line?
It’s almost become a reflex at this point.
My timeline was abuzz, I clicked, I saw, I ooh-ed, and aah-ed. I scrolled up and down, viewed source, and wondered, ‘How?’
Stripe had announced the first of two new products in a week, and with that came another beautiful landing page. I mean look at this thing:
The How I used to wonder about was how they achieved the smooth animations and subtle visual details that made their landing pages come…
Design is not just about pixels. It’s also about sharing, coaching, and giving back to the community from which you’ve learned so much.
This year, I had the opportunity to be one of Stack Overflow’s first design mentors for Phoebe Leung, one of our new hires this year. I love the people part of my job and dove headfirst into this opportunity.
A good mentor is someone whom the mentee would describe as “X helped me in my career.” — Julie Zhuo
I’d never been a mentor in a formal sense, so I researched what a good mentor-mentee relationship looks like ahead of time. …
Earlier this year, I wrote an internal guide for my co-workers explaining some of the common gotchas that make coding HTML emails for Outlook so tedious. This is a lightly edited version that that article.
There are more than 400 million users worldwide using what might be the best corporate email client. Coding HTML emails is complicated, especially when it comes to making them look good in Outlook. When it comes down to creating beautiful, responsive emails, Outlook will usually take those templates we worked so hard on and render them with broken links, missing pictures, and a misaligned layout.
…
A lightly edited transcript of an AMA (Ask Me Anything) I did in the Remotive Slack community.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional background?
I’m a designer at Stack Overflow, where I create better workflows for over 50 million developers. Before that, I designed digital products in the medical industry. Since 2001, I’ve been trying to create work that’s cool enough to show my friends and honest enough to show my parents. When not in front of a screen, I enjoy exploring northern New Jersey with my wife and two kids. I enjoy playing+watching hockey and soccer, and always love a good episode of The Simpsons or Black Mirror.
What does a Principal Product Designer’s work day look like?
Product designers at Stack Overflow are involved in almost every aspect of the product process…
👋 I’m a senior product designer at Stack Overflow. This week I attended Front Utah. I chose this conference because I’m growing more interested in the business and product management side of being a product designer. Going to a product management conference seemed like overkill, so I was happy to find Front’s mix of user experience and product management. On top of that, the case study format showed what each concept looks like in practice. Each presenter talked about things that actually happened on their teams. Super tactical.
This is how I approach conferences, to learn what I need…
I joined Stack Overflow in 2016 as a remote employee. In the 15 years before that, though, I worked in the offices of my various employers. I spent the last five of those years at a windowless cubicle. When I went remote a few years ago, I set up my first proper home office. I touched upon that here, but I’ve since moved houses and upgraded my home office.
It’s time for an update! Here’s my current home office.
Location in house
I’m a home-body and like being around my wife and kids, so I opted for a home office instead of a…
A small collection of design articles that stuck out in my mind this year. I did this last year too.
How we started, what we built, and what we learned building our first email design system at Stack Overflow.
Email design systems are a way to improve the consistency of email designs and help teams scale their email production. At Stack Overflow, we’ve been building an email design system to support the company’s email production. Before I get into that, I’d like to give a little background about myself.
