They say “A rising tide lifts all boats”. If you’re a designer like me, and unless you have spent the last quinquennium under a rock, you may have heard, seen, educated about, or forced into the rising tide of design systems. Design systems have become an essential tool for design teams to create consistent and …
Author Archives: Victor Zambrano
Design is communicating ideas
The word design comes from Latin designo, same origin as designate: “To mark out and make known; to point out; to indicate; to show; to distinguish by marks or description”. It is about communicating an idea, not just composing it. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/design#English
On design generalists and specialists
Recently I was asked by a junior designer the following: “As I am looking for my next opportunity, I think about how should I plan my career path. Would you suggest a designer at the beginning of the career to dedicate to one domain, or, to try out different stuff?”. This question was circling around the …
Ten Tenets of User Experience Design
These are my tenets, the ones by which I guide my design. Very high level, perhaps more guidelines than rules. 1. User Experience Design is about the user/customer User experience design is about understanding how users think and see the world, what they want to accomplish and how they would succeed on accomplishing their goals and …
Should UX designers code?
What most people might be trying to ask is: [web] designers [would benefit from learning to] code [ html and css, and, perhaps, javascript]. Answer to that? Most probably very helpful for web designers anyway. Herein the reasons.
Ten things I’d like to tell my son if he’d become a UX designer
Becoming a father has changed the way I see the learning process. Now that I have a son, I realise he might one day learn things as I did, by sheer curiosity and an avid exposure to the world of knowledge. And as I’ve seen around, he might run into popular, catchy and groupthink-based approaches that everyone else are following. …
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Every (design) experience, one (design) experience
Designing for any interactive medium is like writing a story. You choose your characters (target audience), try to describe them the best you can (personas), then imagine them doing many things around your product/service (user journeys), in many different orders and flows, living the product one task at a time. That’s most probably why it is called “User Experience Design”. …
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From defensive to impressive
Most of my work as UX designer happens within a team with lots of access to the processes, the research and even the users and their feedback. Most of the time I depend on and value feedback from my team regarding UI and process, as they help me see the pieces and parts I miss, …
It’s not the hamburger, it’s the menu (part 2)
The problem with (the discussions about) the hamburger menu is that most people start talking about the menu but end up talking about the icon. They start talking about the pattern to later dwell on justifying their use since they themselves find it useful.
Can design change the world?
Definitely so. If you really think about it, design can definitely change the world. The degree, the direction and the ethical value of that change might vary, so perhaps the accomplishment of what that phrase “change the world” usually means (as in “make a difference”) might not happen almost all the time, but change as …
