Design Details

This week, we talk about the real struggle of finding the time to do North Star design. It’s complicated! In The Sidebar, we try to find the digital equivalent of a Norman Door.

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• Ana Mak
• Jackie Chui
• Kyriakos Spiliotopoulos
• Stacy Holmstedt
• Chris
• Aislinn Kelly
• Eric Stahl
• Nathan Lindahl
• Tim von Bischopinck
• Joshua McDonald

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we try to decide what is the “Norman Door” of digital design.

• nosam7 asks: What, if anything, would you consider the "norman door" of the digital space?
• What are Norman doors? A Norman door is a poorly designed door that confuses or fails to give you an idea whether to push or pull. It was named after Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things which explored the phenomenon.
• Don Norman wrote The Design of Everyday Things.

• Domenico Flauto tweeted at us: To me, invisible design is all about removing friction and making the interaction (or trigger) blending in with your subconscious. This creates a "wow moment" the first time, but then gets taken for granted
• Fabio Giolito followed up to our notes about motion sensors as invisible design: About lights with motion sensors. Our apartment had them when we moved in, but I had to ask the landlord to remove it after one night because we have cats.
• Gus Johnson, Every Cat At 3AM
• Nancy Zuo tweeted: another invisible experience I thought of is going back to eating seeded grapes after eating seedless grapes

John Cafazza asks: With a typical day being filled with heads down work, review sessions, and all the things necessary for shipping new features, how do you and your larger design team find the time and headspace to design for the future of your product? A proverbial North Star vision for the entire Product.

• Brian shared The Sinner, an anthology series that examines how and why ordinary people commit brutal crimes. Not a whodunnit, but a “why-“dunnit.
• Marshall shared Ready Player Two, the follow up to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. If you want some 80’s nostalgia candy, this is for you.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
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Byeee!

This week, we talk about “invisible design” – those products and experiences that go unnoticed when present, but would be immediately noticed if absent. In The Sidebar, we react to the new Tesla Model S refresh.

• Ben Patton
• Grzegorz
• Danielle Schechter
• Havana Nguyen
• John Cafazza

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we react to the latest Tesla Model S refresh.

Following up on last week’s conversation about phygital experiences:

• Harish Shivaraman DM’d us: Ledger's hardware crypto wallet has just 2 buttons that you can interact with and they've got Mac and iOS apps for buying, selling cryptocurrencies.
  • NYT piece on lost passwords locking people out of Bitcoin fortunes
• Divya Tak tweeted: One other company which has a good phygital experience is Airbnb. Not sure if it fits the discussion but their experience does move out of just the app. – we can’t believe we forgot this example!

Kevin Fernandez hit us up in the DMs: Hey guys! I loved today’s episode ( maybe because my name got mentioned 😎 ) but also because you’ll touched on some great topics. One which really peaked my interest was services/products that are invisible but make a difference in everyday life. I would love to know more of these services/apps/products that are out there. I think it would be a great topic for a future podcast!

Our definition of invisible experiences: experience that go unnoticed when present, but would be immediately noticed if absent.

• Doug DeMuro reviews cool cars and shares interesting features at the high end.

• Brian shared Tempo, a hyper minimal email client with great UI details and helps you beat your email habit with batches.
• Marshall shared Jujutsu Kaisen, an anime with a compelling story about supernatural curses.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Byeee!

This week, we talk about designing experiences that weave between meatspace and screens. In The Sidebar, Marshall gives a deep dive into using modifier keys to level up your Figma productivity.

• Sherri
• Kevin Fernandez
• Veronica Jefferson
• Brian Mireles
• John Brady
• Jade Tuckey
• Cathy Guarino
• Will

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we dig into the power of modifier keys in Figma, sharing our tips and tricks for making the most use of ⌘, ⌥, and ⇧.

• PixelSnap 2
• xScope by The Iconfactory.

• We declared bankruptcy on our GitHub issues. If you have a question or topic you’d like us to discuss on the show, open a new issue!
• Divya Tak tweeted: isn't the philosophy of just shipping but not focusing on details is what leads into lazy products which are feature clustered but soul less? In my experience we can't expect to focus on just utility and make products that people love.
  • Really good point: we don’t view these as mutually exclusive ideas!

Flyingjuggernaut asks: Your thoughts on designing for phygital and omni-channel experiences?

Some good examples that came to mind:

• Maps
  • Watch or CarPlay
• Exercise
  • Peloton
  • Apple Fitness+
• Shopping
  • Amazon
  • Starbucks
• Audio
  • Sonos
  • AirPods
• Medical
  • OneMedical

• Brian shared Hades, an absolutely gorgeous rogue-like dungeon crawler from Supergiant Games. Truly addicting, incredible learning curve design, and super satisfying gameplay - it’s only $25!
• Marshall shared Hush for Safari, a simple add-on that blocks those pesky cookie tracking nags on the web. This is also available for iPhone and iPad for free.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Byeee!

This week, we dive into scope creep: how to deal with it, how to avoid it, and how to build its inevitability into our workflow. In The Sidebar, Marshall shares some Smart Office tips for working at home.

• Kyle Conrad
• Julia Chuanyan Wu
• Eli Horne
• Kjartan Kennedy
• First Name Last Name
• Tri Nguyen
• Avni Levy
• Keli
• Natalie Krick
• peng zheng
• May Chen

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, Marshall outlines a smart home setup for people who are working at home with a significant other.

Jessica Perelman asks: How do you deal with random and out of scope ideas from stakeholders?

• Brian shared:
  • And Then There Were None, a wonderfully delightful mystery from Agatha Christie. If you read this, follow it immediately with the 2015 miniseries by the same name.
  • WandVision is kicking off Phase 4 of the MCU. The first few episodes are...weird, but good. Give ‘em a watch if you like Marvel.
• Marshall shared:
  • If you were into Marshall’s past recommendation, Robert Parker, you might also enjoy Kavinsky
  • Night Candy by Mattie Maguire – 80’s elevator music?

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Ten little soldier boys...

This week, we catch up with Priyanka Kodikal, a design manager leading consumer design at WhatsApp. We talk all about her journey as a designer, and what it's like building WhatsApp. In The Sidebar, we answer a simple question: should designers learn Figma in 2020?

• Belinda Hui
• Nuzi Barkatally
• Eugene Fedorenko
• Mike Griffin
• UX Vietnam
• Sam Carden

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we answer a listener question from our Twitter DMs: Would it be a good idea to begin transitioning to Figma as my primary design tool, or do you think it matters as long as I'm producing quality work and shipping features at my current job? Would learning Figma help future-proof me? I just need to be sold on the idea and I figure you two would have good insights as Figma users.

• Divya Tak tweeted: one of the things that I feel like why it's easier to praise someone who just does the work is because creative professionals have a myth that "doing the work" is enough. So we find it easier to praise those people. And I also think (this is a bit darker) but it's easier to be not threatened by someone who has 100 instagram followers but makes art everyday, vs someone who makes art once a week but each piece gets over a thousand likes.
• Michael Knepprath tweeted: the bit about your writing voice changing - I try to fight this every time and mostly fail every time, I think. I want my posts to feel like longform tweets!

This week we caught up with Priyanka Kodikal, a design manager leading consumer design at WhatsApp. Before WhatsApp, she was a designer at Facebook Groups and Ads, a product designer at Evernote, and spent the years before working in the non-profit sector.

In this interview we talk about Priyanka's path through companies and teams to eventually land at WhatsApp. We discuss the design culture of WhatsApp, how they build products for so many different kinds of people around the world, why WhatsApp looks the way it does, and so much more.

Follow Priyanka on Twitter and share a tweet if you enjoyed this episode!

• Jan Koum talks about the WhatsApp journey

• Brian shared Shape Up, a product development book by the team at Basecamp. If you are interested in learning more about product strategy, this will probably be useful for you.
• Marshall shared The Pedestrian, a creative 2.5D side scrolling puzzle platform. You enter a wild 3D world playing as a character on a public sign. It's short, but only $20!
• Priyanka shared two things:
  • bon appétit's website, which is just lovely and has a really neat search flow that returns possible recipes given a set of ingredients you have on hand.
  • Steve Jobs' lost 1995 interview, a 70 minute bootleg of an old interview with lots of product and design wisdom.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Keep it simple!

This week, we talk through our playbook for shipping personal projects. In The Sidebar, we weigh the tradeoffs of building an online persona. Should designers thought lead?

• Adrian Corscadden
• Martin Maričák
• Polina Sogolov
• Tereza Kavinska
• Eric Eng
• Kuldar
• Kelly Hagan
• Jameson Bryant
• Maxym Nesmashny
• Matt Kubota
• Adam Haas
• Zachary Schwartz
• yang shuo
• Gavin Nelson
• Hoodnun
• Shaun Smylski
• Jai Mitchell
• Alex Long
• Alona Sanbira
• Herculano Campos
• Pip Nguyen
• Natalie Tongprasearth
• Ray Canapini
• Be Le
• Ben Ewing
• Damian Bilski

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, Karl asks: Where do you both land on the idea of having a web presence that is focused on showcasing your opinion versus showcasing your work?

We reflect on our 2020 goals, and think about the year ahead. Listen to our 2020 goals episode from a year ago.

• 2020 goals:

  • Marshall: ship a SwiftUI app, update personal website
  • Brian: Write more, revenue generating side project

• 2021 Goals:

  • Marshall: Be more like Ted Lasso whenever possible
  • Brian: Shifting creation:consumption ratio

• Keaton Taylor asked for an example of the variant grid in Figma that Marshall uses. Here's Marshall's sample file.
• Gabriel Valdivia made concept show art, among many other podcasts. We dig!

Michael Knepprath asks: Do you have a checklist you run through when launching new products or features? Also, is Product Hunt as important as it used to be for this?

• Check out lily dex on the App Store!

• Brian shared Darkroom, a fantastic iOS, iPadOS, and now macOS application for editing your photos.
• Marshall shared the iFixIt Pro Tech Toolkit, a wonderful set of tools for getting into the meat of your electronics.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Bonsoir!

This week, we compiled all of our cold opens, stingers, and outtakes into a single 2020 Clipstravaganza! This is our final episode for 2020 – thank you everyone for listening and supporting us this year. We'll catch you in 2021!

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Bonsoir 2020!

This week, we talk about the skills and tools that designers can learn to become future-proof. In The Sidebar, we share our impressions, tips, and best practices for using Figma Variants.

• Jesper Andrell
• David
• Nikita Khapankov
• Keyla Rodriguez
• Tanner Woodworth
• Josh
• Miles
• Jason Zurita
• John Thachil
• Katherine R
• Ross PW
• Timothy
• Grady Congdon
• Jon Wood

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we do a deep dive into Figma's recent release of Variants. We talk about the interface itself, best practices, and tips for making the most of Variants.

• Followup: Gabe Valdivia's tweeted a thread with more points about how to think about job tenure in tech.
• Figma Variants
• Cartesian product
• Not yet live, but this preview of a Figma plugin to generate missing variants looks fantastic.

• Katherine tweeted some solid praise for our Patreon - thank you for supporting the show!

This week's listener question comes from Loucas Papantoniou on GitHub: Design has matured as a discipline, there are a lot of good people in the industry, we've design systems, better processes, but it also becomes more commoditized. In what skills do you think an experienced designer should invest now to be 'Future-proof' in the next few years? For instance 3D and AR/VR are expected only to get more and more popular, AI and machine learning are already very much in demand, etc. What do you think? On what do you invest yourself in nowadays?

• Brian shared Talking to Strangers, the newest book from Malcolm Gladwell. Here's your teaser: Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.
  • Spaghetti Sauces video
• Marshall shared Dr. Garuda on YouTube, a fascinating channel of montage-style videos of clay masterwork. The creations are wildly good and the videos showing the process are inspiring.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Bonsoir!

This week, we talk about tips and processes for shipping a high quality UI. In The Sidebar, we discuss the Silicon Valley trend of job hopping every few years.

• Matt Crowley
• Yannick
• Megan Learn
• C. Anderson
• John Tyrrell
• Matt Makaran
• John-George Sample
• James Bartlett
• Kramer Canfield
• James Smet
• Katu Muadinohamba
• Sophie Bond
• Graham Bushell
• Renata Venturini
• Alex Binder
• Johnny Terlaje
• Jason Yoo

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we answer a listener question: how long should you stay at a company before moving on? We weigh the tradeoffs of specializing in an industry, the downsides of Silicon Valley job-hopping culture, and more.

• Sam Mason asked if we will ever see Apple introducing custom icon packs. Probably not!
• Priscilla Then asked if we would record the show on video. Probably not, but it's an interesting idea we could maybe do as a one-off someday!

This week we answered a listener question sent to us in the direct messages: Should designers perform UI reviews after dev implementation, or should QA be responsible for that?

• Brian shared Robbie Tilton, a creator making fascinating digital toy concepts. Go to that Media tab on Twitter and enjoy!
• Marshall shared Miles Morales, a stunning Spiderman game that Marshall actually decided to play (and not just watch). Strong endorsement!

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Bye bye!

This week, we talk about the tradeoffs and considerations of designing for consistency. In The Sidebar, we share tips and strategies for starting a podcast.

• Ashish Negi
• Alyssa Zhang
• Tiffany C Yu
• Aleksandra Strączek
• Richard Picot
• Sam Olendi
• Kamil Lafere
• Jackie Carr
• Joaquin Kunkel
• Fabian Valkenberg
• Belén Lozano
• Ruobing Chen
• Ryhan Hassan
• Jesse Box
• Thomas Bishop
• Oscar Newman
• David Bill

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar, we share tips and strategies for starting your own design podcast. We need more!

• Jay Sowell brought up a great point on Patreon about the current shortcomings and limitations of widgets in the Apple ecosystem. We speculate about their future.
• Tobias Gärder tweeted: After an unexpectedly easy transition to android from forever iphones I actually tried to switch to PC a year ago, nooot as easy, but been on it since. First hard to find hardware that felt good enough (went for Surface Laptop 13") but Windows.. yikes.
• We have more design tricks to save people from themselves:
  • Divya Tak mentioned a pattern where users have to confirm the name of the thing they are deleting, like when you delete a repository on GitHub.
  • Havana Nguyen mentioned three:
    • "Don't show me posts like this" tips on content sites.
    • "Did you mean today or tomorrow?" helpers for when you set an alarm near midnight.
    • The simplified "driving mode" players on apps like Audible and Spotify.
  • Jordan Morgan showed an example of a confirmation toast after a drag and drop interaction. It reminded us of the new iOS 14 pasteboard toast.

This week we talk about the tradeoffs and considerations when designing for consistency. Specifically, we talk about Google's recent icons redesign and the new Big Sur rounded square shape for app icons.

• Nick Keppol dissects the history of app icon shapes on Inspecting Yosemite's Icons.
• Google's new logos are bad
• Sketch uses transparency in their new Big Sur app icon.
• Android supports adaptive icons that allow OEMs to choose between circles, squares, or squircles.
• How to build a memory palace

• Brian shared Omniverse II, a buck-wild Line Rider track that David Lu created over 11 years.
• Marshall shared Good Sudoku, a beautiful and simple sudoku app for iOS and iPadOS.

• 📻 We are @designdetailsfm
  • 🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin
  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
  • 📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]
• 🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
• ❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
• ⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes

Bye bye!