Howdy! Welcome to this week’s Whiteboard Roundup.
Now that The User Story is quieter I’m starting to plan my next moves (into helping companies build successful product teams, hit me up if you want to chat). Before I launch into the next few projects though, I thought it would be a good idea to plan a big trip.
So from mid-July, I’m heading out across northern Europe on my motorbike to explore some new countries!
I hope to hit 12 countries in 4 weeks, including France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, Czechia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark and finally Holland.
I’ll be taking a camera and my drone, so if you fancy following along I’ll be sharing the journey on Instagram and maybe even YouTube. It would be SO NICE if you would subscribe and come along with me.
Cheers.
Tom Haczewski
The User Story
News
The Power of Persuasion
A big portion of a designer’s role is to communicate ideas. It’s one of the best soft skills a designer can learn, but also one of the toughest as it relies on a deep understanding of others’ intentions and mindsets, and telling the most effective stories to connect deeply and swiftly with them.
This article by Victor Yocco in Smashing Magazine is a great explainer on increasing your credibility and introducing a few techniques to help you get your ideas across more betterer.
7 elements of web usability
Without getting into it too heavily, there are loads of ways to improve general usability on your digital platforms. If you are into website building and don’t have much time for research and iteration (I debate that heavily, but anyway), here are a few tips to help you improve your interfaces and make things easier for people to use.
Many of them are based on visual design heuristics like scale, balance and hierarchy, but you don’t need to worry about that to get started.
4 stages of AI image generation
This article has organically popped up a couple of times now, and it’s worth a read to understand how people tend to be using generative AI to create images.
It’s based on some contextual research undertaken by NN Group to understand the deeper context about how people are using AI, and probably one of the first studies of it’s type. On the surface, it doesn’t feel too dissimilar to the way we used to use the internet search engines of the 90s, but it’s interesting to see it fully mapped and laid out.
Thanks for reading.
You got to the end! Here’s some inspo for you:
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
- Walt Disney
See you next time, friends!