Juan J. Ramirez

Nobody cares about your design process or design definitions.

People simply want effective designs that drive results. Good designs that solve problems.

Trust me when I tell you that nobody cares about your methods or the level of effort of your design process.

Debates around design semantics and whether or not designers should have a particular skill are a complete waste of time.

Designers should just focus on learning hard stuff and designing good shit.

That’s what design has always been for me, and I wish more people could see it this way. 🥲

#design #productdesign #ux

If you are a designer who only reads about design, you're not consuming 95% of the information that influences your work.

Successful products are designed by optimizing for human goals and working around human constraints. This can only be accomplished when you understand fundamental human motivations.

Great designers focus on acquiring knowledge that expands their understanding of individual and collective human behavior.

This knowledge allows designers to understand the implications of their design decisions and increases their capacity to create effective and resilient designs.

Some topics that can significantly expand one's capacity to understand the world as a designer are:

• Software Engineering
• Behavioral Economics
• Psychology
• Finance
• Entrepreneurship
• Philosophy and Ethics
• Global Politics
• Art and Architecture
• Math and Physics
• Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence

When you genuinely get interested and curiously read about these topics, you start noticing that the world is a vastly extensive system where everything is connected at one level or another.

It changes how you see the world and design for it.

If you want to become a better designer, allow yourself to get excited about acquiring new knowledge outside of your field comfort zone.

Not only will it dramatically change you as a designer but also it could open the door to new unknown and fascinating ideas.

#design #ux #productdesign #knowledge #learning

Remember when Instagram changed its logo? Well, I have a story about this.

When Instagram released its new app icon in 2016, social media went crazy. People rejected this change and started writing articles and signing petitions to regain the old logo.

People with Android phones could use an icon-changing app, but iOS users didn't have anything like that. It's a classic Apple move to provide limited visual customization.

And that's when I saw my opportunity. At that time, I was working as a mobile designer for a SoCal startup, so I knew pretty much everything about phone operating systems.

I was familiar with two relatively obscure pieces of information:

1) iOS provides a feature that allows you to add a website to your home as an app icon. If you include a particular app icon asset in your website, iOS will use that asset so the bookmarked website will look like an app.

2) iOS uses a particular deep linking protocol that resembles the website protocols. If you go to safari, type instagram:// and go, the Instagram app gets launched.

I used these two pieces of information to quickly create a website that guided users through the bookmarking process on their iOS devices to enable the hack. It was very straightforward.

People bookmarked my website, giving them the old IG logo as an app icon pointing to my website. I had some small JavaScript in the website to detect if the request was coming from Safari or UI WebKit. Safari requests were from people bookmarking the website, while UI WebKit requests were from people using the bookmark.

I would then redirect UI WebKit requests to instagram://. Boom! Just like that, I had the old IG app icon back on iOS.

My hack went absolutely viral! Hundreds of online publications wrote about it. Hundreds of people reached out to me. The proxy website I built for this hack got hundreds of thousands of hits every month for several months. It was wild and super fun. I learned a lot in that short week.

The moral of the story?

When you learn weird shit and pay attention, any small action can lead to a fun adventure. 😂😅

P.S: If you're curious, here are some articles from that time.
- https://buff.ly/3TZYqhf
- https://buff.ly/3WtoRhe
- https://buff.ly/3WpdtD1

#ui #instagram #experimentation

“Developer handoff” is a term invented to hide ineffective design to developer collaboration.

The only situation where I see “developer handoff” being valid is in contract gigs where you are getting paid to produce some artifact and move on.

For everything else, high ROI collaboration between designers and developers is only possible through continuous discussion and low-latency feedback loops.

The key here is to understand that developers aren’t some extra-terrestrial beings you can’t talk to. They are clever and approachable colleagues with a lot of valuable context.

Building rapport and having meaningful conversations with your developers is more important than adding some useless red lines to a mockup.

Check my whole take on this topic here: https://lnkd.in/gK7inqHz

#design #uxdesign #uidesign #softwaredevelopment