Prioritize Software Features by Mapping Complexity & Value with a Feature Matrix

Narrowing down potential features at the start of a project can be a challenge. After a project kickoff, there are often so many exciting ideas that making heads or tails of them can be paralyzing. Should your team find themselves in this situation, an adapted quadrant mapping exercise might be a great tool. It’s less […]

Adobe/Macromedia Flash: Thank You for Your Service

When I was in college from 2004 to 2008, Flash was arguably at its prime. It was an amazing, eye-candy-filled cesspool of terribleness. At the time, it was hard to see all of its shortcomings. It was a blank canvas where you could create whatever you wanted — and that was the problem. Flash lacked […]

Design Thinking Toolkit, Activity 23 – Crazy 8s

It’s time to ideate, so bust out some paper, put your origami skills to use, and get your brain to run wild with Crazy 8s! Primary Goal To ideate/create multiple ideas or solutions When to Use As a jump start for ideation Time Required 20-40 minutes Number of Participants 1-10+ Who Should Participate? Any members […]

How to Build Flexible, Reusable, Complex Components in Figma with Autolayout

The problem with complex components is that they don’t usually adapt well to design variations. They aren’t flexible. The profile card shown below has many different elements; editing or even removing one would be nearly impossible in a prebuilt component. In an application like Sketch (or even early on in my experience with Figma), I […]

3 Ways to Be a Designer that Developers Love

Being a designer on a software project can be difficult. There’s a lot of nebulous space to work through. Who are we building this product for? What is our value proposition? How will we elicit delight? What minimal product should we start with? On top of all that, there’s also the question of, How do […]

Exploratory Testing a Long-Running Project? Switch it Up

I’m working on a couple of long-running projects at the moment. One advantage of this situation is that I’m really familiar with the projects and all of the interactions and states they can be in. One small disadvantage is that it’s easy to fall into routines when testing. What do I mean by routines? I […]

Design Thinking Toolkit, Activity 22 – Cover Story

It’s time to think big and envision a grand future for your project or organization. Cover Story asks participants to suspend reality and dream up a story worthy of the cover of a major publication. Primary Goal To dream big about future goals When to Use As a jump start for ideation Time Required 20-40 […]

3 Ways to Remove Gender Bias from Early UX Design Phases

The first step to designing a solution is understanding whom we’re designing for and what problem we’re solving. In a Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach, this means research, personas, and journey maps. We’re gathering knowledge about users’ goals, frustrations, preferences, responsibilities, and expertise. Documentation about users often includes things like their name, age, gender, and marital […]

Styling Modern Web Applications – CSS Frameworks vs. Component Libraries

When building a new web application, there are quite a few decisions you have to make. Will it be rendered by a server and sent to the client, or will it be a feature-rich SPA? Which JavaScript framework should be used (if any)? React? Angular? Vue? Ember? But one decision that’s often overlooked is how […]

Is Sketch Still King? My First Impressions of Figma

I love Sketch — it’s my go-to for wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and even prototyping. I’ve become as proficient as I can, including mastering nested symbols and utilizing JSON data connections to populate real data into static designs. But I recently started helping a client’s design team build out their design system. The problem? They exclusively […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

UX & Design