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Articles by Nick DiLallo
I Am the World’s Most Annoying Website
Welcome. So excited you’re here. I’d love to tell you what I’m all about, but first I’ll need to access your camera and microphone. Don’t overthink it. I just want to give you the best experience, and that means being able to see and hear you at all times. Next, please accept all 217 cookies. I know it sounds like a lot. But hey, some of them aren’t even mine. Sixteen are for my parent company. Two are for a marketing vendor that closed in 2017. Click ACCEPT ALL.
What I’ve learned writing for billions of users
What I’ve learned writing for billions of users Insights from products that grow and grow. Press enter or click to view image in full size A few years ago, after running a complex global product launch, I wrote down everything I learned. To track my own ideas. To make sense of things. I’ve kept adding to it ever since. I’ve worked on products used by a handful of people and products used by a meaningful percentage of the planet. The second kind taught me things the first never could.
AI interfaces and the role of good writing
Define your audience And do it before you write. The first step of writing is understanding your reader. This decision will influence the way you write. It’ll also influence your feature set and product roadmap. Different audiences need different things. An AI fact-checking tool for journalists will look very different than one for biology students. Press enter or click to view image in full size Understand who you’re writing for and how they’ll use your product.
Writing the onboarding experience
How to help a product introduce itself. Digital product design is about teaching users what to do. This is the interface. Here’s how it works. Go over there and you’ll find what you’re looking for. It happens right from the beginning. The first screen of any product will set expectations and introduce interaction patterns. A combination of good design and good writing will make the product make sense. But sometimes an interface needs a little instruction. Enter: the product onboarding.
Every design team needs writers
When people ask me what I do for work, I tell them I’m a writer. It’s not my job title. But it is my craft. It’s the skill I bring to digital product design teams. Yet the label, while true, always feels incomplete. It doesn’t really capture the scope of what I do all day. I’ve been thinking more and more about how writers fit in on different design teams. So many companies and agencies limit the opportunity of writers. They don’t let writers run big projects.
Advanced techniques for writing good interfaces
Feeling stuck? Here’s how to keep moving forward. Good UX writing takes time. Time to simplify phrasing, make interactions clear, and craft every sentence in the product. But there’s only so much you can do when you’re rewriting. Sometimes good UX writing also involves rethinking. Is this screen doing what it needs to? Are users clear about that? Do we even need this part of the onboarding that people are gonna want to skip? I’ve found that rewriting the same thing over and over can be a dead end.
Advanced techniques for writing good interfaces
Feeling stuck? Here’s how to keep moving forward. Good UX writing takes time. Time to simplify phrasing, make interactions clear, and craft every sentence in the product. But there’s only so much you can do when you’re rewriting. Sometimes good UX writing also involves rethinking. Is this screen doing what it needs to? Are users clear about that? Do we even need this part of the onboarding that people are gonna want to skip? I’ve found that rewriting the same thing over and over can be a dead end.
Advanced techniques for writing good interfaces
Feeling stuck? Here’s how to keep moving forward. Good UX writing takes time. Time to simplify phrasing, make interactions clear, and craft every sentence in the product. But there’s only so much you can do when you’re rewriting. Sometimes good UX writing also involves rethinking. Is this screen doing what it needs to? Are users clear about that? Do we even need this part of the onboarding that people are gonna want to skip? I’ve found that rewriting the same thing over and over can be a dead end.
Writing with respect
Users are people. Treat them well. How to be a good writer: Write with respect. Respect for the craft. And respect for the reader. It’s obvious. But it’s also hard to do — and increasingly rare. Lots of companies and digital products don’t respect their audience. They load their interfaces with uninspired headlines, clunky navigation labels, and an inconsistent brand voice.
Investing in your career - and in your portfolio
Shawn Park is a Staff Product Designer at Discord. Before that, he led design at companies of various stages, taking a seed-stage esports startup from start to finish at Blitz, and designing the next generation desktop client at Box. There is a good chance that you have seen his portfolio: since 2013, Shawn redesigns his portfolio every year as a way to grow and reflect on his craft. What makes you passionate about design? I believe design functions as a bridge between humans and technology.
The principles of sensory design
Sight isn’t the only way to experience the world: Senses work in tandem to guide cognition, movement, and communication. Experts posit that humans possess between 9 and 33 distinct senses, yet digital design routinely ignores neurological factors beyond sight. Sensory design principles emphasize the interconnection of human perception and prompt designers to explore non-visual solutions. Smell-O-Vision. AromaRama. iSmell.
The anatomy of a design trend
Fig. 4: the design trend map: micro design trends in user experience, visual design and industrial design (this version created in April, 2021) Key Insights: (1) Design trends can be structured in megatrends, macro trends, micro trends and fads. (2) A design trend map can help structuring design trends over time. (3) If design trend reports are done by single persons, they are typically more inspiring than those done by groups/organizations.
You look creative, but you sound like a bank
When I go into an architecture practice as a freelance writer, one of the first things I do, after agood nose around the projects, is get a sense of their tone of voice. In some cases, this has been thought about by someone; it’s easy to pick up and is consistently used, so I adopt that style. In others, there is no specific guidance, anything goes. Sometimes, I’m there to help a firm work out what their tone of voice is and put together a style guide or ‘brand book’.
Smartphone too distracting? Here’s how to reclaim your focus
In 2017, I decided I’d had enough of my smartphone and the companies that make the apps that were robbing me of my time and attention. I thought I found the perfect solution: the card phone. The card phone is what it sounds like: It’s an $18 tiny phone with no social media, no internet browser, and no email. In fact, the card phone has no apps whatsoever. It has only the ability to make phone calls and send text messages. (It even has an FM tuner too. Take that, iPhone!).
More psychological principles for product designers
In our eternal search for more psychological rudiments to keep in mind while designing your products, we came across these few golden rules that can help you on your way to designing a meaningful product.
How to write inclusive, accessible digital products
There’s one piece of writing advice I give to everyone: Read your writing out loud. Yes, out loud. Not out loud in your head. Out loud out loud. Move your mouth. Make sound. Listen to your sentences. It’s a simple technique, but it works. Listening lets you detach from your work to catch — and correct — things you might’ve missed. It’s a way of smoothing things out. Words just feel different when they’re spoken. The first goal of good UXwriting is usability.
My learnings from conducting virtual workshop
As we are beginning the new year, and looking back we realize how 2020 has changed our lifestyle. Work was majorly impacted by the Covid-19 situation; most of us have been remotely working for almost a year. This change in our lifestyle and work environments caused many companies to rethink their digital solutions. Leading to discussion for creative strategies involving multiple people. And the likelihood for a successful collaboration is best done in-person with a room full of influential folks.
5 academic research papers every designer should read
Product design is now a mainstay in the working vocabularies of companies worldwide. We’d go so far as saying that it (product designs) may now be entering the portion of its lifespan where strategic maturity and academic thought are now taking up the centre stage as the cheap tricks and skin deep strategies cant hold up to the lofty tasks at hand that product designers will have to solve in this coming decade.
How to write digital products with personality
User testing = trainwreck. We need a writer. That’s what a former coworker texted me at 11pm one Tuesday night. She was a talented product designer, and she understood the importance of good UX writing. Now, she knew she needed help. She had recently joined a well-funded startup, and her first few months had been intense. She was tasked with redesigning the company’s most important product. It was going well, she thought.
This is good UX writing
Eight principles for every interface you’ll ever write. A few years ago, someone emailed me with a question: What makes UX writing good? They knew the basics, they said. And they knew what good writing looked like. But they wanted to know specifically about UX writing. How to think about it and evaluate it, what approach to take when staring down a blank page or struggling with a new design.
Agile Won’t Get You to Done: Here Are Four Ways to Fix That
Last month, Jeff Gothelf and I were at Barcelona’s annual Llum festival, an amazing event that features light installations stretching across Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood. Some of the installations were breathtaking. Others were downright baffling. Looking at one particularly confusing student work, Jeff turned to me and asked, “How did they know they were done?” How Did They Know They’re Done? (my photo) How do you know you’re done? For artists, this is a hard problem.
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