Pixels of the Week – November 17, 2024

My curated weekly-ish online newsletter, where I share interesting articles, tools, and resources I found during the week. You can expect content about UX, design, user research, accessibility & tech, but also some processes, some inspiration, sometimes books, and a couple of videos and podcasts. Also, don’t forget to, subscribe to the newsletter to get notified, you will get the weekly links directly in your mailbox, and be notified when I publish other articles.

Now: what I’m currently up to

In case you missed my talk on User Diary Studies for Floxies, you can catch the replay on YouTube.

I’ve launched my User Testing Starter Kit, with test script templates, consent form templates, a checklist to prepare the sessions, some Miro and Figjam templates for collaborative note-taking and a help sheet full of advice and resources.  Which means: newsletter subscribers will get a promo code next Monday! You can still subscribe via the form on the subscription page (or in the footer of this article.)

Most popular content this week

Frame0 a free hand-draw style wireframing tool (a little bit like Balsamiq), with many pre-defined elements you can just drag and drop in the middle of the canvas. You also get a preview mode to share your ideas. Nothing interactive (yet?) but, it’s a nice free tool for ideation. You can also use it to draw different types of diagrams (UML, flowcharts, ERD, etc.) when working on information architecture. Bonus: you can also sketch directly hand free (if you are using a pen tablet for example)

Interesting articles that caught my attention

UX research and psychology

• Designing for Decision Making: The Psychology of Choice (12min) an introduction to different psychology principles that play a role in choice making for users. Dr Maria Panagiotidi also brings some practical application with examples to help simplify decision-making (limited options, default settings, progressive disclosure, etc.).  She also warns about the ethical considerations, and the thin line between helping users make a decision, and manipulating them with deceptive patterns.
• The Intersection of Design and Psychology – Crafting User-Centered Experiences (12min) a very high level introduction to psychology principles that influence design decisions, but that can also be used to manipulate them, with a couple of examples. If you need to help someone understand that design is beyond pushing pretty pixels, you can send them this one.
• Overcoming participant recruitment challenges in UX research (12min) it’s hard to recruit users when you are on a low budget, and / or when the user target audience is hard to find because they are in a rare population (low IR, incidence rate), or general unwillingness to participate in research. Thomas Stokes built a nice framework, with tips to help you recruit users in 4 scenario (low and high IR, low/ high budget).

AI, juniors and future of design

• Who will train tomorrow’s designers? (13min) In the growing crisis in design talent development, junior roles are vanishing due to AI handling entry level tasks and hiring freezes. This means that the industry risks losing knowledge transfer, from current senior, to those juniors who can’t find a job. But also, innovation and out of the box thinking, form juniors who often come with interesting fresh perspectives. So, we need more that ever to support those juniors, to create mentorship and early career programs to keep creative thinking in the field . An interesting essay by Carly Ayres.
• AI is Eating Journalism, Education, and Creatives (8min) Journalism, education, and creative fields are on the brink of being devoured by AI. The curtain may soon fall on these industries as we know them, as automation threatens not only jobs but the very integrity of these professions. By Dominic Ligot
• The Future of Design: How AI is Shifting Designers from Makers to Curators (6min)  According to Andy Budd, as design systems and LLMs advance, designers’ roles are shifting from hands-on creation to strategic leadership, focusing on curating high quality, vision, and brand alignment. They are also taking on key roles in ethical discussions, and address quality standards. So, less pixel pushers, more strategic? From what I’ve seen around me, the current state of design in many countries and companies is still very low maturity. It’s been getting worse in the last couple of years. Many people still think designers are here to make things pretty. A lot of layoffs also happened in design teams because, stakeholders think it’s more important to hire devs / sales people, than designers (and then devs end up doing the design, but that’s another problem). Most companies also don’t really care about ethical discussions, they just want to ship something “good enough” to make money to keep the company open. That’s the reality of the market at the moment. And yes, it’s sad. So, I wonder what this curator designer role will look like in low maturity environments, where a LMM generated design might be “good enough”. Where’s there’s no real high level vision, just some “ship it fast so that we can make money to pay the bills”. I kind of fear that those leaderships positions will never happen, because, you need maturity that is nonexistent in many places for that. I know many designers will adapt. But I also fear that, in low maturity areas, a lot will struggle.

Curiosity cabinet: non-design/tech rabbit holes I enjoyed

Wall-E as Sociological Storytelling (15min YouTube video): a video essay using Wall-E’s Axiom star liner (and the board game Monopoly) to illustrate how social systems operate in our culture. For example, when an author talks about toxic masculinity: it’s about the social system behind this, not individual people. Yet, men in the room often take it as a personal attack.

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Embroidery sculpture Youmeng Liu’s Instagram brings embroidery to the next level. Is it embroidery is the new is it cake. I said what I said! The coconut just blew my mind, and also, it looks soooo flufffyyyy!

Useful tools & resources

Inclusive Mindset Workbook a Figjam template with exercises to help your teams create and design more inclusive products. It has reading materials and exercises, split in 3 phases: understand why inclusive design matters, build an inclusive mindset, and make it your practise.

Dotted Maps Generator in case you need to generate a world (or country) map with little dots that you can export in PNG and SVG

Bioart a free collection of figures, figures, presentations, and illustrations with 2,000+ science and medical art visuals. Very useful if you are a teacher, or work in such niche domain and needs inspiration or illustrations

Conversations on Quality What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. This is collection of video interviews, of different designers, trying to answer the question “how do we build quality products”. (you can also check the full playlist on YouTube directly)

Tutorials

WebAIM: 25 Accessibility Tips to Celebrate 25 Years: if you don’t know where to start to make your site and documents more accessible, those tips could help!

Latest news in the industry

Mattel apologises after Wicked movie dolls mistakenly link to pornography website on packaging yup, II would love to see the analytics at wicked, the adult site, following the whole “Whoops, someone messed up at Mattel and put the link to an adult entertainment site instead of the movie site on the doll packaging”. Some SEO people must be very happy, haha. And, of course, those packing are becoming collector and are sold on eBay now, because, humans are humans.