Phoenix Design News

You probably already know roughly what haiku is—a Japanese form of poetry that roughly follows a pattern of 5-7-5 syllables (or, more technically, morae)—but you might not be aware of some of the more subtle constraints of this exceptionally restrained style of...

When I think of the people who were the most influential role models in shaping my approach to business and life, I keep coming back to astronauts. I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for astronauts. You see, I’m an emotional guy. I cry easily at movies. My blood...

There’s definitely some logic to the underlying philosophy of the “mobile first” approach to design, but there are also some hidden problems that cause even experienced designers to make some fundamental user experience mistakes. Doing it wrong serves only to reverse...

This is a hamburger menu: It’s called a “hamburger” because it it looks roughly like a bun-meat-bun sandwich. (Others have insisted that it looks much more like a triple hot-dog, but they’ve thus far been unsuccessful in winning the public’s hearts and minds.) The...

There are few forces as formidable as designers and developers working together. When they’re working effectively, they hardly need anyone else. Entire companies have sprung up around strong designer+developer teams, and these collaborative teams have built many of...

You take your car into the mechanic. They’ve told you it’ll take about an hour to fix, so you sit in the waiting room half-watching Fox News and flipping through an old issue of Car and Driver until they finish. Half an hour passes. Forty-five minutes. An hour. An...

Let’s say a company comes to our firm interested in hiring us. We’ll call them SynergyCo. They make about $100 million/year in revenue selling a niche software product. They’ve had their market cornered in the past, but now some startup competitors are making trouble...

Customer research is fundamental to the design process. It’s been well established that relying on assumptions alone leads us to make biased decisions that often fail to reflect the reality of the customer’s needs and wants, leading to poor results (including reduced...

I’ve worked on a lot of enterprise software projects over the years, and one of the common patterns I’ve observed is a surprisingly high tolerance for poor user experience. If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle farm, you’re probably all too familiar with the baffling HR...

I recently spoke to the seniors in Arizona State University’s Visual Communication Design department, and was asked the same question I’m asked almost every time I’m speaking to design students: “What do you look for when hiring designers?” (I should mention that I...