- Copying inspiration, not the design.
- Guidelines and suggestions, not rules, in design.
- The basic design process: research, analyze, ideate, and test.
- Emotions drive decision-making.
- You’re never 100% correct, or 100% wrong.
- Always assume you’re wrong.
- A/B testing with real-time users, like Booking.com does.
- Good design does not rely on agreement from developers.
- Design should be independent, not data-driven.
- Beware of people claiming to care about user experience without researching it.
- Customers can’t tell you what they want, they just don’t know.
- Conduct “dogfooding” user testing with your own staff, like Apple and Microsoft do.
- IKEA is a source of design inspiration.
- The competitive analysis considers cost, uniqueness, aesthetics, reviews, and usability.
- Creativity involves removing unneeded elements and adding valuable ones.
- Your design must be unique in some way, even if it doesn’t make sense.
- Brainstorming requires suspending judgment and being in a non-threatening group.
- Warm up with a creative game before brainstorming and avoid criticism during the session.
- Don’t get attached to any one idea, most will be discarded.
- Most successful solutions are existing ones with a unique angle.
- Success comes from generating and testing many ideas, not from confidence in one.
- Use a feature matrix with a graph plotting the cost or difficulty to implement against the value to users.
- Consider every feature from multiple perspectives.
- Don’t assume users see everything, they don’t.
- Decide what users will see first and second.
- Design for how users recover from mistakes.
- Keep the design simple, using minimal graphics.
- The goal of industrial design is to make things look natural.
- People decide quickly if they like your site, based on usability and trust.
- Some users like complicated things.
- Good design is minimal and functional.
- Many people prefer products that do only a few tasks, try categorizing them.
