Depending on your journey as a designer, you may be used to the freedom that graphic media allows: to create overlaps/overlays or to elaborate compositions and grids that fill all the paper with pretty organized photos and texts. However, why is it so hard to build a web page with this same freedom? Fortunately the capacity to build these layouts have been improving and what’s best: it is so simple that you can start using it right now!

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The year is 2017 and despite all advances in software development methodologies, many product teams still tend to separate – or even dissociate – the design process from the development workflow.

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We are living a new today, every day, filled with new tools and paradigms. Often, we catch ourselves trying to apply yesterday architectures on new technologies, and that can end bad. One of these cases is BEM – a CSS naming convention – which solves a problem that we maybe don’t have anymore.
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Nowadays, images are an indispensable part of the web. However it wasn’t always like that. Only in 1993 the Mosaic browser would introduce images along with content in web pages. Some formats, like GIF and JPEG, already existed in that time and others like PNG and SVG, would only appear in the 90s. Images are used for multiple purposes, like showing pictures, branding, illustrations, charts and many other things.
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Building a product is no easy task. It’ll take months of planning, design and engineering work, but with dedication, hard work and the right professionals by your side, it can be accomplished. However, how can you know if you’re building the right product? Dedication and hard work alone won’t be enough. There’s another factor to consider on the equation: if it solves a real problem for real people. Many startups often decide to go straight to the building phase and end up missing some important steps of the product development process, such as validating their business idea with potential customers and analysing the market. Let’s go over some things to take into account when setting a product strategy.

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If you are not considering the user experience when designing a new mobile application, it’s time to start thinking about it. One of the most important things to have in mind when you design a mobile app is making sure that it is useful and intuitive for the users. If it’s not useful, it won’t have a practical value. At the same time, if the application is useful, but it takes too much time and effort to be used, people won’t engage with it.

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Defining the personas that represent the audience of a product is a very important step of the design process. There are many methods out there to help us figure them out. But the question is: do we empathize with them the way we should?

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As a software developer, I know how hard it is to contain the urge to start coding as soon as we can. After the first sprint planning, our fingers – uncontrolled, hungry creatures – want to start smashing the keyboard, translating our ideas into code fastly and furiously.

Despite how great we feel while developing, it’s always a good idea to take a step back, especially when building something that could be used by many different users – like an API is. A. In this post, I’ll show you why and how to design a properly-thought API.

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By definition, user engagement is exactly what the name suggests. For a mobile app to work well, users should understand its main value proposition to then keep using it repeatedly until it becomes an essential part of their life.

According to eMarketer, nearly 200 billion apps will be downloaded in 2017. In contrast, currently about 25% of downloaded apps aren’t used more than once. Creating an engaging user experience is increasingly becoming essential as brands develop their mobile presence and hope to meet user expectations. Based on this data, how can we change the upcoming scenario for 2017? By tracking user engagement metrics and using these to create solutions to possible problems.

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When developing an interface, I used to be really attached to the visual part–perfect layout, distributed weight of objects, adequate alignments and counted pixels. I had been considered once an overly-meticulous designer, always checking thoroughly if the developer was implementing the project with a high fidelity to the delivered mockups. Until then, I thought this was enough to be a good professional–after all, Design should be all about visuals

This line of thought, established by previously working at companies where accepting crazy estimates was part of the job and the main goal was to please clients (the ones who were paying) made me forget what Design is really about: methodologies, tests and process. Following the latter vision makes you leave aside personal taste, opinions and assumptions to focus on metrics and the real client: the end user. Not always what we believe is the most pleasant look leads to the best results, and that starts to make sense when you have a logical explanation powered by metrics.

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