Fabian Sax

Mobile design has gotten boring. Apps mostly look the same and have little to no feeling while you’re using them. On Material Design we wanted to change that, and today we've launched our solution: Material 3 Expressive! This version was a deep collaboration between design and research, tested in 46 separate research studies with over 18,000 global participants. And the findings have blown us away. Not only are participants up to 4x faster at spotting the key element on the screen when completing a task, it removes all age differences in the time it takes users to see the key action, leveling the digital playing field. And on top of that, people of all ages prefer the new design and consider it creative and modern. How did we do all of that? M3 Expressive is the culmination of the best practices of design. The use of color, shape, hierarchy, motion, containment, and typography to group like items together and bring order to the screen. It’s good, usable design that also brings out rich emotions and lets designers express a feeling alongside the function. I couldn’t be more proud of the Research team that worked on this. Congrats to Michael Gilbert, Julia Feldman, Lennard Lukas Schmidt, Martin Pielot, Hayley Lagroix, Abla Hamilton, Brenton Simpson, Nico Thornley, Viviane Herdel, PhD and all of the amazing designers, researchers, and engineers across Google who made this happen! You can read all about it in our research blog post on Google Design: https://lnkd.in/gCcRvBTa

2.343

187 Kommentare

Want to learn how to create Figma variable themes for multi-platform? 📣 Thrilled to announce Franziska Haaf and Vincent Schlothauer from REWE digital as speakers at our conference! 📌 About this session: In this talk we’ll show you how to get the most out of Figma variables. What if you could use them not just to change colours and fonts, but scale entire interfaces for different devices and platforms? Learn how to set up a design tokens architecture in Figma that will allow you to introduce additional themes and modes – whether you’re already serving multiple brands or platforms or simply want to be prepared for the future. We‘ll also show you how to keep structured, tidy UI kits and be ready for any question during dev hand-off. 📖 What you will learn: - How we’ve structured our UI kits and optimised our hand-off-ready design specs - How to set up your Figma variables structure for flexibility in terms of modes, platforms or brands - How to introduce additional themes and modes without breaking existing structures, and what pitfalls to avoid Join us and learn hands-on 📐 Into Design Systems, 3 day Conference 🗓️ May 28-30 Online ✅ Recordings, files, certificate included 👉 Limited tickets: https://lnkd.in/gnCF4zCx This is not an ordinary conference! 👉 Our conference has been rated ⭐️ 5/5 by hundreds of attendees: https://lnkd.in/dxtpFAJx We can't wait to learn with you! #designsystem #figma #uxdesign

27

AI shouldn’t be your research director, but it is a pretty great assistant. With the right prompts, tools like ChatGPT can speed up planning without sacrificing quality. Whether you’re a solo researcher juggling it all or part of a seasoned UX team, generative AI can help streamline the planning phase of research. Instead of only prompting ChatGPT with “make me a research plan,” Maria Rosala breaks down a smarter strategy: 💡 Break up your ask. → Provide Context (AI doesn’t know what you are researching, so you need to tell it) → Generate Research questions (get more than you need—some will be duds) → Request methods based on your research questions → Request inclusion criteria (but only after generating research questions and methods!) → And finally, screeners and tasks (tip: provide AI good examples to get better results) This isn’t just about using AI—it’s about managing it like you would any new team member. Give it examples. Set expectations. Then let it support you while you focus on being the human strategist. Read more about using AI to help plan research in Maria’s article: https://bit.ly/3ZTxnt1 For more on using AI for research, join Laura Klein in our course Accelerating Research with AI: https://bit.ly/4icMpAw #UXResearch #GenerativeAI #UXTips #ResearchOps #UserExperience #AIForUX #DesignBetterResearch

559

22 Kommentare

🧠 How To Reduce Cognitive Load In UX. How people make choice, how to make products less demanding — and dismantling some UX myths ↓ 🤔 People go through a huge number of choices every day. ✅ We’re very efficient in scanning, skimming and skipping. ✅ Users often rely on small “islands” of sections to use daily. ✅ Experts often prefer to see all options or features at once. ✅ People are happier by choosing from a small set of choices. 🤔 The biggest challenge isn’t managing too many options. ✅ The problem is how poorly organized these options are. ✅ It’s also having too many *similar* options to choose from. 🤔 Similar options → users get confused, frustrated, paralyzed. 🚫 Number of clicks/taps are poor indicators of good/bad UX. 🚫 Don’t enforce users to keep information in working memory. ✅ Avoid sliding panels/overlays: show content in split screens. ✅ Run card sorting on features, filters, attributes, menu items. ✅ Break down complex decisions in a set of smaller decisions. ✅ Flows with more pages might work better than 1 single page. UX is filled with confusing misconceptions and myths. Beware of the “3-clicks-rule” as users typically don’t mind an extra click if it’s clear and predictable — and as long as it’s not repetitive or slows down their daily workflow. Also, don’t rely on “7±2 rule” for navigation: it’s not about the number of navigation items, but how many of those we have to keep in our working memory. People don’t always use your product the way you imagined they would. In fact, it's common to see people using only small portions of a complex product frequently — almost identifying small islands of clarity that help them in their daily work, while avoiding obscure or daunting parts of the product because they haven’t managed to learn how to use them yet. But once they do learn how to use them, their efficiency grows, and so do their expectations of how customizable, flexible and sophisticated the feature should be. There, it's not about the number of features or clicks or taps or how many items they can keep in their working memory. It's about a highly accurate mapping of how people think and how the interface works. And: expert software must be complex as it must match the complexity of the real world. It requires a vast number of attributes, settings, views, panels, data points. However, complex products don’t have to be complicated in use if they make sense to end users, and they can be proficient with them. There, the worst thing we can do as designers is to oversimplify. We shouldn’t assume that people always struggle with complexity. They struggle with products they don’t understand. They also learn products and navigational paths over time, making tremendous progress in just a few days. Help users avoid confusion and make fewer mistakes, and they will use even complex products effortlessly over time. [Sources and resources in the comments below ↓]

1.075

41 Kommentare

Designers! Stop Donating Your Talent and Say NO! to Take-Home Tasks! I wrote a post looking at the shocking state of the design market 7 months ago. When it was clear that the market had fully switched to favouring employers. As a result: → Hiring processes got longer and more convoluted → Job ads got sillier → Application numbers soared → Waves of talent left the industry for good Months later, the situation has turned even seedier. Take-home tasks were initially dished out by inexperienced hiring managers. Now it's common to hear of 4-day design tasks deliberately set up to exploit and steal designers' work without compensation. There's a simple response to this: Say no! By rejecting 5-stage interviews and take-home tasks: → We stop validating broken hiring processes → We honour the value of our craft → We force employers to optimise their recruitment methods → We protect our sanity Desperation can be a powerful motivator, but consider this: If a company needs 5 rounds and free work to make a hiring decision, what does that reveal about their internal culture and how they'll value you after you're hired? The industry only gets better if we demand better!

760

150 Kommentare

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, we recently introducing a completely new section for the Nord Design System, called Community Assets. Today, my colleague Elwin van Eede wrote a slightly more detailed post about this. Elwin explains how this new feature allows feature teams to more easily contribute to the design system with full autonomy, and how on a concep­tual level you can think of it as a design system component incubator. ✨ Read more: https://lnkd.in/dmE-mHqT

56

3 Kommentare

Something feels off in UX right now 🥺 My 2026 UX Design predictions Over the last months, I’ve had the same conversations again and again. With designers. With teams. With leaders. “Should I learn AI?” “Is my role still relevant?” “Am I falling behind… or overreacting?” Here’s what I’m seeing for UX in 2026 👇 1️⃣ Interfaces are dissolving With Generative UI, interfaces are created on demand. No more fixed screens. UX shifts from designing flows to defining systems, constraints, and intent. 2️⃣ UX research is scaling radically AI can analyze thousands of open-ended responses, run deep research, and surface patterns in minutes. The role of designers and researchers is changing: less execution, more sense-making, validation, and decision-making. 3️⃣ Designing for AI is no longer optional AI products learn from users. That makes them powerful and incredibly confusing if UX is missing. Trust, explainability, recovery UX, and mental models are now core design work. “Just type something” is not a UX strategy. 4️⃣ AI agents change how systems behave AI doesn’t just respond anymore. It plans and acts on behalf of users. This breaks traditional UX patterns. The key question becomes: When can a system act on its own and when must it stop? 5️⃣ Vibe coding removes technical barriers Ideas turn into prototypes and products at near-zero cost. The real bottleneck is no longer code, but judgment. UX shifts even further toward problem framing, direction, and quality control. 6️⃣ Roles matter less. Ownership matters more. Job titles lose their edge. Execution becomes cheap. What matters is who takes responsibility, who makes decisions, and who asks the uncomfortable questions. 7️⃣ Personalization is entering uncomfortable territory AI systems are building long-term memory about users. Helpful at first. Creepy the moment people realize what the system knows. UX must make data use visible, adjustable, and understandable. Not more data. More choice. My biggest takeaway: 2026 is not about designing faster. It’s about deciding better. UX is moving away from interface design toward intent, systems thinking, and responsibility. If you work in UX and ignore AI, you won’t be replaced. You’ll slowly become irrelevant. If you stay curious, critical, and intentional about how you use AI, this is one of the biggest opportunities UX has ever had. P.S.: I also recorded a podcast episode (link in the comments) where I go much deeper into these shifts, with concrete examples and reflections from my own work. If you want the longer version beyond a LinkedIn post, feel free to give it a listen.

989

89 Kommentare

Sometimes being a UX/XAI Designer means having too many thoughts at the same time. ➡️ Should I start another course? ➡️ Should I finish the one I already started? ➡️ Maybe I should test a new AI tool? ➡️ Or read more about design strategy? The problem: it’s easy to feel stuck when everything feels important. The solution: I try to choose one small step each day. One new thing to test. One lesson to finish. One article to read. This way I keep growing without feeling lost. Because progress in design is not about doing everything at once. It’s about moving forward, step by step. #UXDesign #DesignThinking #AItools #UXCommunity

17

4 Kommentare