Taylor Vanden Hoek on Atomic Spin

Internal PDF Links Zooming In or Out? Set the Zoom Level

Adding links in a PDF is a great way to create interactive docs or simple prototypes but can create weird zoom level issues. Here's how to fix it!

UX/Design Techniques

App User Experience Review: How We Feel

How We Feel has a very strong user experience, prioritizing focus, privacy, accessibility, social good, retention, and context.

UX/Design Tools

Six Great Icebreakers for Remote Meetings & Workshops

A good ice breaker should bring people together. Try these non-traditional icebreakers for remote workshops (or meetings of any size).

UX/Design Practices

Adapting Design Thinking Methods to a Team’s Cultural Dimensions

When you bring design thinking to a hierarchical, competitive, risk-avoidant culture, who needs to change? Sometimes, there's room for everyone to adapt.

UX/Design Techniques

Four Sources of Creative Inspiration for a New Design

Here are a few of the activities, questions, and thought experiments I try when I'm starting a new design and looking for creative inspiration.

UX/Design Practices

Informing Design with Context Scenarios

Context scenarios act as a bridge between deliverables in the planning phase and the wireframe or design. Utilizing them can help with team alignment and will further the design pr

UX/Design Techniques

How to Facilitate a Remote Workshop

I recently facilitated a successful remote Design Thinking workshop. Thanks to a lot of preparation and a knowledgeable, engaged team, we had great results.

UX/Design Techniques

Six Principles for Planning and Facilitating a Workshop

With these methods, designers can create engaging workshops that bring people together to solve problems in just a couple of hours or over a few days.

Project & Team Management

4 Simple Questions to Get Your Team Started on the Right Foot

Listening to our team and seeing the project from their perspective is powerful. This activity gives us common language to talk about what's exciting, important, or ambitious about

UX/Design Techniques

Engaging Users in Research without Opening Pandora’s Box

How to facilitate focused user testing or research sessions while avoiding the pandora's box of software product feature requests.

Personal Optimization

Creating a Fast, Easy Daily Log with Bear & aText

Keeping a daily log can be tedious. Here's how I use Bear — plus shortcuts from text expander aText— to easily record everything I do during the day.

Planning Your Project

What Software Design Is & How it Makes Software Much, Much Better

With good software design, applications are built with purpose, backed by buy-in from users, and supported by a plan for continuous improvement.

Taylor Vanden Hoek

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