How Tools Have Shaped the Role of the Designer A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to deliver a talk at Shift in Split, Croatia. Shift is a developer conference, so initially I thought it would be entertaining to talk about what it's like to work with an engineer, from a designers perspective.

We recently hosted a critique at Facebook with a student from Cornell, Jon Lee. There's something that I really liked about Jon in our brief interaction. He's self-aware. He already knows that he's got room to improve in terms of visual design.

For any app or web application, nothing will ever happen without some initial and ongoing input from the user. It is, therefore, critical that product designers, developer and product managers understand the best ways to allow them to do so. In this article we'll examine key factors that improve data input by focusing on text fields.

Speaking to a colleague sometime back, I hit on a funny conversation. He was the project manager and I was supposed to be the UX guy in that project team. One fine day, we met, and after showing me a UI mockup of a product section which had some graphs and data - he said, very frankly and in a rather inquisitive manner, " Can you add some UX in this part?

Website for the podcast Dissection, produced by JK Design

The word "process" appears 44 times in our roles doc  - our reference for evaluating designers - and only increases its prevalence as a designer grows in seniority. So, why is having a unified process important? And, what does BuzzFeed's design process look like?

8 Common prototyping pitfalls An increasing number of designers prototype on a regular basis, with a lot more interested in incorporating it in their design process. And rightly so - prototyping is very useful for exploring swift product solutions. Prototyping can significantly speed up the process in a savvy team, although it can often go wrong.