748 articles on Design & UX.
Working in the area of UX sometimes feels like a crime drama. Can’t believe it? Then look at these fun parallels between modern UX practices and a classical TV detective.
Dan Mall distills decades of experience navigating the design world into ten pieces of advice for tackling complex tasks, preventing burnout, and fostering continuous learning.
Educators Lisa Highfill and Meredith Greene are taking a student-driven approach to lesson design in Figma—creating a more inclusive, engaged classroom experience for all types of learners.
In this article, Ganesh Dahal explains how the features have evolved since reusable blocks were officially released in WordPress 5.0 — and how the two have converged in WordPress 6.3 to form a powerful feature capable of allowing content creators to sync content and design patterns consistently in pages and posts.
Figma’s editorial newsletter about how products take shape—and shape our world.
Oakland, California-based CROP Organization wants to forge a better path for those facing the challenges of reentry.
Pratik Joglekar takes a philosophical approach to remind designers about the lost joy within themselves by effectively placing massive importance on mindfulness, introspection, and forward-looking. Without joy, the work we do would feel meaningless. To prevent it from happening, check out a few ideas that would help rediscover that spark of joy.
Design Manager Juli Sombat sheds light on how a need for more cohesion led Spotify’s design systems team to approach components in a new way.
The so-called “Double Diamond” is a great way of visualizing an ideal design process — but it’s just not the way most companies deliver new projects or services. Andy Budd proposes a new “Double Diamond” idea that better aligns with the way work actually gets done and highlights the place where design has the most leverage.
Discover how to improve the user experience of nested menus and tackle a minor yet common issue with them when the user’s pointer leaves the menu item for a moment, and the nested menu goes away, requiring the user to re-hover and try again. A well-known concept called the “safe triangle” solves this problem.
Brian Chesky saved Airbnb by leading through design, and he thinks this is just the beginning of the revolution. Five industry experts weigh in.
In part 2 of the series, Hannah Milan reviews various accessible text over images techniques for designing your content, including framing the image, soft-colored gradients technique, text styles and text position, solid color shapes, and use of colored backgrounds.
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky talks about design’s catalytic potential for business and the central role it played in Airbnb’s post-IPO growth story.
At Spotify, . Most of these tests follow a standard design, where we assign users randomly to control and treatment groups, and then observe the difference in outcomes between these two groups. Usually, the control group, also known as the “holdout” group, retains the current experience, while the treatment group experiences a difference: a new feature, a change to an algorithm, or a redesigned us
In this piece, we dig into the decreasing gap between design and code, increasing semantics, and one of Figma’s newest features: variables.
Best practices for bridging the languages of design and development.
Xapo was founded as a Bitcoin service provider and developed into an online bank. During this transition it needed to reassess its software estate and establish an architecture capability to guide its future. It took on ideas from Domain-Driven Design, Team Topologies, and the Architecture Advice Process to develop an Architectural Advice Forum. This led to greater alignment of its software delive
With an estimated one in every eight individuals worldwide surpassing the age of 60, who are actively adopting online shopping, the need for user-friendly interfaces tailored to their needs becomes apparent. Explore the guidelines to help you design inclusive products for all, particularly for an older audience and your future self.
In this article, Andy Budd, curator of UX London and Leading Design conferences, outlines some of the things that make a potentially amazing presentation, as well as a few big gotchas. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to get a speaking slot at a conference, this article is for you.
A look at how we improved the readability of code on GitHub.
As of today, the world’s 50 top airlines have all agreed on the same flight search pattern. Yet the path to booking the right flight remains frustrating and confusing. Is there really only one solution? Explore the thought experiment which turned the seemingly untouchable pattern on its head and offered new food for thought.
How can we create products and experiences that don’t cause harm to the planet and to the people who use them? What do we need to consider to make more sustainable design decisions and reduce the carbon footprint of our websites? In this post, we compiled valuable resources that will get you familiar with the principles of sustainable design.
The design process is messy. You might be following a structured approach, but too often, it takes a life of its own. And before you know it, you are designing in chaos, with last-minute changes and missed deadlines. So, what’s the “perfect” design process?
The Wikipedia team shipped a redesign of the ubiquitous and one of the [most visited websites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites) on the web. Alex Hollender and Jon Robson led the work and generously discussed the effort with us in a thorough, wide-ranging interview that covers the design, development, and processes that went into the project.
Learn about our new interface, and how we're making Figma better for developers
Figma and Google for Education are doubling down on the promise of bringing design and technology tooling to K12 students across the US and Japan
It’s been said “you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we ask what is a design manager? What does it take and how does it relate to the role of Designer? Vitaly talks to Slava Shestopalov to find out.
The accessibility-alt-text-bot leaves automated reminders in a comment when a user shares an image without providing meaningful alt text.
Unleash the power of creative limitation! Learn how constraints aren’t barriers but instead stepping stones to innovative design. Find out how to challenge unproductive restrictions and leverage the rest to your advantage.
While compliance with accessibility checklists is essential, it doesn’t necessarily mean a pleasant experience. That’s why live sessions can give you lots of priceless insights.
This article highlights practical design guidelines and techniques to get around frequent and painful UX challenges with tables and grids.
Musician Jesse Cohen explains how he harnessed the corporate lingua franca (and the Google Meet integration for Figma) to launch his band’s latest album.
This article provides practical tips for improving the handoff process between design and development in product development. The guidance covers effective communication, documentation, design details, version control, and plugin usage.
Based on frustrations with conventional framework-based dependency injection, I have adopted a composition strategy that utilizes partial application to inject context into modules. When combined with test-driven development as the design process and a focus on functions over classes, modules can be kept clear, clean, and mostly free of unintended coupling.
It’s easy for beginner designers to get overwhelmed and lose confidence when creating presentations, landing pages, app and web design mockups, and even cards. Laurent Baumann shares a few simple guidelines and practical tips to help you in such situations.
We received over 1,000 proposals to speak at our annual user conference this year. Researcher Andrew Hogan helps us dig into the data to see what inspires the community.
GitHub is the home for all developers and on this Global Accessibility Awareness Day we are thrilled to celebrate the achievements of disabled developers and recent ships that help them build on GitHub.
How to build FigJam files that support screen readers and an update on our continued commitment to accessibility.
Are sticky headers always a good idea? Best practices for designing sticky headers, with examples, UX guidelines and usability considerations.
Discover the accessibility features within our new navigation and code search which make it easier to use for many more people.
How Primer’s updated light and dark theme color contrast strategy resolved hundreds of color-contrast-related accessibility issues over one thousand use cases.
Learn about tools and processes the GitHub Accessibility leadership team uses for retrospectives that fully engage every team member.
Every student and teacher deserves the same access to GitHub Education offerings. We’ve enlisted GitHub’s Accessibility team to help identify areas for improving inclusivity.
The parallels between Figma's technical challenges and those in the gaming world
We’re talking about the process of design. How do you build a process to enable your best work? Vitaly Friedman talks to designer Mei Zhang to find out.
Check out our previous post — — for more about how we define APIs for design systems.
In this piece, a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) auditor shares some cookie banner error patterns that can massively hurt a page’s overall conformance. Let’s explore what to look out for with this omnipresent piece of the web interface.
In this article, Adel Khamatov shares a model of color mechanics that he came up with during research on developing UI kits and illustrates an approach to solving related problems with best practices.
In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we take a look at design storytelling. What is it, and how can it help us shape digital experiences? Vitaly talks to Chiara Aliotta to find out.
Have you ever wondered if things could have been done differently? But not sure how? Well, then, do not fall in love with the solution, but fall in love with the problem! Here’s an article to dive deep into how design thinking could do just that.
If you want to maximize conversions or collect necessary user information for other purposes, a user onboarding flow is necessary. In this article, you will learn how, with the help of Feathery, to design an effective user onboarding flow for your app.
Notifications are a key aspect of the Slack user experience. Users rely on timely notifications of mentions and DMs to keep on top of important information. Poor notification completeness erodes the trust of all Slack users. Notifications flow through almost all the systems in our infrastructure. As illustrated in Figure 1 below, a notification request…
Workshops are all about people: they involve people, are conducted by people, and aim to close the gaps in people’s communication. Slava Shestopalov shares a checklist with everything you need to keep in mind when running a workshop.
Design handoffs are inefficient and painful. They cause frustration, friction and a lot of back and forth. Can we avoid them altogether? Of course we can! Let’s see how to do just that.
Design Manager Sara Culver takes us through evolving the team's product design and writing career levels.
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask what is Customer Experience design, and how does it differ from User Experience design? Vitaly Friedman talks to expert Debbie Levitt to find out.
Perhaps more than any other person in history, Leonardo da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are just as applicable to the web today as they were in Renaissance Italy.
New selling tools and the Figma Creator Fund will help fuel the love of craft that fuels Figma Community.
