dsawler

Every time I think of something I have to do, I put it in my Todoist Inbox.

Every night I go through my Inbox and decide what needs to get done tomorrow. I assign a 'tomorrow' date for those tasks in my Inbox. Then, I go to Google Calendar and timeblock when I'm going to complete those tasks. After I do this I journal about my day and come up with more things that I want to get done and the process repeats every day.

Hey, thanks for writing this.

Your article talks a lot about the nuances of the app (prototyping animation, specifically) but I'm curious how you were able to distill the experience down to 2 primary use cases - did this come from research, data, customers saying this is what they intend to use the app for?

Did you test any of this with your existing customers? If so, how did you go about that process?

Depends where you work. At a large-ish digital creative agency you're probably stuck in PS creating 100 comps. At the small-ish digital creative agency I'm at the visual designers still use PS because that's where their comfortable but we talk about changing that all the time. I'm an interaction designer and use Axure for very detailed prototypes or some front-end framework (Foundation) for quick things.

As an interaction designer I really liked watching this. I don't work for a startup but this is often how quick internal reviews go with a project team member at my company, as well; discovering unique scenarios you need to design for while talking through other issues.

I imagine users going directly to a site like barackobama.com or xcandidate.com would be more inclined to read, not skim. It might be as simple as "this guy is running for President, maybe I should read this stuff."

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I don't know if I agree with this. I think it's important for different members of the (small) team to interview someone they potentially, and most likely, will be working with. I'm a designer, but I would want to talk to someone interviewing as a PM, analyst or dev, since that makes up my team on any given client project.

These IF programs, like leangains, do not require you to fast during the day and only feed at night... it's up to you when you would like to do it; That's the beauty of it.

LPTHW, without a doubt. I've tried everything out there - codecademy, udacity, coursera, codeschool, khan, etc. Nothing has taught me as well as LPTHW -- probably from just repetition of exercises alone.

I don't understand how people are still designing for the web in an image manipulation application. There are so many other tools out there today to get you to a design much quicker than Photoshop.

I think "great design can't be tested" is wrong. All design has consequence. If I make an add to cart button on an ecommerce site purple, I can test that to see if it performs better than the red add to cart button. Yes, these decisions (of choosing red or purple) can come from a designer understanding his/her audience, but should never be just taken at the designer's word... it should always be tested to make sure the designed solution is the right one.

I don't like to separate visual from UX. UX is top level, while user research, visuals, information architecture, for example, are branches. You cannot design UX, only design for it.

If I'm working on user research I need to understand the people (user groups) who use the product and how they use it. If I'm working on interaction design, I need to understand how each interaction takes place, what problem it's solving, what that means for the user, and how it effects anything else. If I'm working on visuals/graphics, I need to design the product/features/interactions in an aesthetically pleasing way that still targets the user groups.

But is a web designer a visual/graphic designer as well?

This. Exactly. I was really confused. I've been trying to learn JS on an off for about a year. When I was shown the new CS program at Khan Academy today, I was instantly confused because...I was drawing pictures using processing.js. So..was I learning javascript or was I learning this processing.js that runs on top of javascript? As a beginner, I think it's super important you clarify this.