Design Team Dot Blog

How Slack invests in big little details through Customer Love Sprints Most businesses say they love their customers. Slack is no exception! But what does that mean practically? How do we actually express that love? One way is to add big, new features. These are effective, essential, even, when it comes to how enterprise software …

What I learned about creating safe spaces that help our teams grow and thrive

When we fail to tap into our inner creatives, we engage less with our work (bad for us) and end up shipping less innovative solutions (bad…

The trends, insights, and surprises that we saw in Figma and FigJam this year

A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam

The 7-color palette and themes that power our new analytics experience

For most of design history, designers defined their roles in society by adding the designed object to their titles: furniture designers…

Google UXers share their dream digital escapes and the virtual treats they're bringing with them

What we learned from 15 days of prototypes

We’ve added new integrations, tools, and features to help your team work together better.

An alternative to ‘fake it until you make it’ for personal development

Collaborating with Pantone to bring more color to work and life

InVision’s 2022 trend report paints a picture of the new hybrid world for designers, featuring expert commentary from places like monday.com, Teladoc Healthcare, Uber and Unveil.Social — plus our 2021 reader survey, featuring results from +1,400 readers in more than 12 different job roles, across 20+ industries.

Meta’s head of content design shares what’s ahead for the field.

Communication between functional groups is challenging in any organization. We all speak slightly different dialects when it comes to how…

4 proven approaches to leveling up your designs and moving faster

In the summer of 2020, amidst the global pandemic and a contentious social landscape, it seemed like every day there was another story on…

A look into our new brand system, designed collectively by brand and product teams from across the company

Today is International Persons with Disabilities Day, which provides an opportunity to further reflect on IBM’s contributions to…

Accessible experiences don’t design themselves. If designers don’t annotate their designs with accessibility properties and behaviors then…

Working within an agile framework focused on fast and iterative deliverables, how can designers create opportunities for Design Thinking?

How my Indian joint family prepared me for my career at Google

In May of 2021, IBM hosted its first-ever internal design conference: SPARK. This three-day virtual conference was organized by IBM…

Close your eyes and imagine yourself using Slack. What are two phrases you’d use to describe that experience? Whatever your phrases are, hopefully they’re at least somewhat synonymous with “Don’t make me think” and “Be a great host.” These are the two of five organizational product principles that we live by when it comes to …

This November, Meta honored the cultures, traditions and histories of Native American people in the U.S. The theme — “be a good relative”…

If you align with the brand guidelines, customer needs, and the needs of the bot — you’ll create a great personality.

Congratulations, you started a new career. You’re relieved to finally be done job hunting. It’s the only marathon with a moving finish…

A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam

A curated guide by our UX team for beautifully-designed gifts available from Shopify stores

The use of time-space narrative and storybooks in Shopify’s Live View redesign

In my last article, I wrote about the system of UX design in India from an experience at the Student Service Design Challenge 2021. In this…

Why we reorganized Shopify.dev around developer goals, not information type

In UX Writing, the difference between good and great work can be as simple as moving beyond last-minute games of ‘find another word for X…

In January of 2021, I found an opportunity within IBM to be the design coach of a team of design students competing in the annual Student…

For a design practice as large, dynamic, and specialized as ours, we must adopt a mindset of continuous learning, and create the actual…

How we built an experience design team with half product designers and half advertising creatives — and why it worked.

Are we really impostors, or have we been gaslit into thinking so?

Avoid re-work with these universal definitions

You’ve probably heard the phrase “good design is invisible.” Well, that statement is certainly true of Spotify, where it’s the design…

When you are the only one of your species in a group, it can be empowering, but also quite lonely…

User Experience Engineers are creative all-rounders who bridge the divide between engineering and design

Gloria Osardu Ph.D, Manager of UX Research and Design at Amazon, joins Sr. Media Producer Justin James Lopez for a chat about her path into the world of design and research. Let's hear her story!

Introducing updates to comments in Figma and FigJam

Ten years ago, a publisher offered me a contract to write a business book with the working title, Handcuffed to Aliens: The People…

Three fundamental mindset shifts our design team made that set us up for success

A Q&A with Gavin on the FigJam widget he built and what he's working on next

How the Marketing UX team designed an accessible landing page for the ‘Born for Business’ docu-series

Our new Build with Intention Toolkit helps harness design to identify ethical risks and drive opportunities to include and advocate for…

A Q&A with the Figma engineering team

How a science and math education solves design challenges

In my last post, I touched on some of the conditions that make pervasive excellence in design possible. Now let’s unpack the first one…

4 takeaways for starting small to effect change through language

Story behind the making of the award winning IBM Master Data Management product experience.

Okay, to state the obvious: dogs are not people. People are — generally speaking — more intelligent, less furry, better at conversation…

A cross-discipline collaboration to ethically leverage AI and improve in-person shopping experiences

Before I started designing for native mobile applications, I was developing responsive web apps. Back then, if we had met at a happy hour…

A Q&A with Tekeste on the FigJam widgets he built and what he's working on next

AI, in and of itself, creates a new genre of work for designers, and along with that, comes great opportunity.

Human conversation is varied, complex, and contextual. How can we teach machines to seamlessly chat with us?

We’ve made big design and UX changes to Watson Assistant so that it’s more user friendly, less complicated, and easier to extend and…

How our fresh new designs help you focus on creation and collaboration

Vicki Tan has leveraged her background in psychology at companies that have changed the way we travel, think about our mental health, and access music. Now an associate principal product designer at Spotify, Vicki is using her background to change the way she thinks about her work, too.

A Q&A with Tru on the widget she built and what she's working on next

Safe folder is a secure app for users who share phones, but the result is a solution that has benefits for everyone

Easy-to-follow guidelines can make accessibility part of your everyday design process

A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam

Before I joined IBM this summer, I asked the former GM, Phil Gilbert, how we were doing with design.

Behind every data point, there is a human being. Our job is to translate those numbers to create connections with customers.

Introducing interactive components and a handful of smaller improvements

How the Fluent Design System helps us evolve and grow better together

Story behind the 2021 w3 Silver Award win for Red Hat Marketplace.

Introducing a way for collaborators to temporarily join meetings and workshops

How to avoid draft designs being used in production

The product design team at Medium has been working on updating our design system, our guide for how we build Medium. I’ve been thinking…

Announcing changes to help you bring more people into FigJam

Leveraging the power of breakthroughs and challenges—"ahas" and "uh-ohs"—to create a more balanced, healthy future for all

Here’s what you can do — right now –– to avoid it right now

Being immersed in Slack’s highly collaborative culture and an even closer-knit team, saying no to meetings used to be slightly terrifying. But when I realized my calendar wasn’t always working for me, I had to make some adjustments to my thinking and my RSVPs. Whatever’s at the heart of your own “meeting decline guilt”—the patriarchy, …

While athletes from around the world competed for a spot on the Olympic podium this past summer, IBM Design found international success of…

How we empower engineers to build real-time data views

Explore the Facebook app’s new brand design system and strategy’s role in bringing it to life.

Explore the Facebook app’s new brand design system and strategy’s role in bringing it to life.

The role of storytelling in design strategy

Lessons learned from the creation, challenges, and constant iterations of the remote UX Mentorship Program at Shopify

The backstory of why we built branching, and how it came together in Figma

Marcsene Torchon, Design Researcher, tells his story on how he transitioned from a social worker to an entry-level role as a designer.

Judy Wert has guided many leaders through navigating career changes, and she stopped by season six of the Design Better Podcast to share her perspective.

How to ask better questions to propel your design forward

IBM Virtual Private Cloud Infrastructure with Interconnectivity and Red Hat Marketplace recognized as 2021 Stratus Award Winners

These new Freehand features will help you stay better connected with your colleagues and see better workflows as a result.

Google’s Head of Product Inclusion & Equity shares an excerpt from her recent book

Research roadmaps can be one of the most valuable assets for a UX researcher. They help you gain alignment and communicate your priorities…

Atlassian Design System designers spend considerable time thinking about how the system is used and how we can make it better.

Continue to celebrate the #PowerofBlackDesigners

I’ve worked on AI projects for years — building out interfaces to make automation adoption easier and working on it’s UX to ensure its not…

We recently announced the rollout of audio and video clips in Slack, which allow anyone on Slack’s paid plans to send audio, video, and screen share messages. With clips, you can quickly capture an idea, celebrate team wins, or present your work in a more personal way. Clips are transcribed, captioned, and searchable, so they’re …

New to Freehand: Timer, add live content, all your comments all in one place.

Two Pinterest researchers share what they’ve learned along the way

For most, if not all, of us working in the tech industry–we have gotten very used to working remotely. In our always-on, always-connected…

Ben Evans, PayPal’s director of product inclusion, shares his method on challenging biases.

The features, fixes, and capabilities we've added to Figma and FigJam

The Honorary IBM Design Scholar

Why the future of business chat is still human and a blueprint for your research plans

When you work for a large company like IBM, it’s easy to feel like you’re just another cog in the wheel. I wanted to stand out, to shine…

For the redesign of the Fresh Finds playlist collection, Editorial Design collaborated with partner It’s Nice That. To speak to the nuances…

Onboarding remotely? It doesn’t have to be scary. Senior UX Writer, Nicole A. Michaelis, has put together her quick tips for onboarding…

We are hiring user researchers and leaders. Come join us and help enterprises do more with their data!

During 2020, Atlassians channeled their fear, frustration, and focus, and joined in on the 30 days of creativity during COVID. The premise…

Tried-and-true advice from Google designers, researchers, and managers

“What is your vision?”

As product designers, we are responsible for empathizing with our users. And we’ve developed a number of tools to help us do just that—we…

Learn about how Elsewhen helped their clients, Spotify and Inmarsat, improve their productivity through collaboration in Figma.

Learn more about what to expect, and apply to attend

Oen Hammonds, IBM Design Principal, dishes out advice on how designers can make the leap by filling in skills gaps and how to present…

Learn how designers ensure user experiences are seamless and trustworthy across channels and devices

How to structure your next UX review to get actionable feedback —plus a Figma template to try

Design team earns a 2021 European Product Design Award

There are plenty of comprehensive pieces on the practice of product design out there—our own Kyle Turman has written an excellent post on the Pillars of Digital Product Design—but there’s a crucial layer of thinking that can sometimes elude the design process itself, partially because it’s so obvious that it’s hiding in plain sight. “Of …

Here’s a story. Let’s say you start as a designer working at a software company. Your team moves fast. You get scrappy and learn by…

Understanding and working through the difference starts with effective leadership, says Scott Berkun, the author of How Design Makes the World.

Tips from the Figma security team to help other teams secure Systems Manager and protect their most sensitive data

BMO Financial's design system powers and connects a growing subsystem network, scaling organization to benefit the global company.

How a discipline-wide struggle to find the “right title” mirrors our day-to-day work finding “the right word.”

Introducing audio and cursor chat, two new ways to communicate without leaving Figma and FigJam

A look at the creative process and career journey of Pinterest’s photo editor.

There’s a sense that when design thinkers and customers get along it’s good for their working relationship. Actually, this feeling of…

How Figma can help during this back-to-school season

When was the last time that you used a product that left you with a smile — whether it be the overall product experience or a small…

Why build community at a company? It makes people happy and helps them do better work. And when challenges arise, a strong sense of…

Why build community at a company? It makes people happy and helps them do better work. And when challenges arise, a strong sense of…

A four-step guide to take you from interested to interviewing

How students at Design the Future used FigJam to solve challenges for people living with disabilities

Best practices from professors at the Fashion Institute of Technology on how to construct a virtual classroom in Figma

The features, fixes, and capabilities we've added to Figma and FigJam

A cautionary research tale from an Atlassian researcher. . .

Inviting all builders to create the first plugins and widgets for FigJam

Experts from Asana and InVision Freehand share how you can use their tools to help organize, track, and manage your cross-functional work.

Learn the five copy principles that help us write great Marketing copy in the Slack voice and tone.   Part 1 in a series    Words give meaning to your marketing materials: if the brand is the lifeblood of your business, words are the atomic structure that make up that lifeblood. When copy—that is, the …

IBM Cloud Satellite, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog, and IBM OpenPages with Watson win one of industry’s most prestigious design awards

Meet Sofia Dewar, Experience Researcher at Asana based in San Francisco.

On behalf of the IBM Design Leadership Board and as its chair, it is my honor and privilege to announce our newly appointed 2021 IBM Design…

In May of 2021, IBM hosted its first ever internal design conference: SPARK. This three-day virtual conference was organized by IBM…

Curious to learn how design and innovation help Ford stay ahead of transformative trends, we brought Sandy Fershee, lab director at D-Ford Detroit, on to season six of The Design Better Podcast.

How our product design team uses FigJam

What would it take to design a future every 14 days? Who needs to be involved and where do we begin?

As part of InVision’s Picture the Future series, InVision’s Jeff Chow recently sat down with Clint Williams, principal product manager at Microsoft Teams to talk about simplifying workflows, getting your entire organization collaborating for a more human-centric way of working, and how Teams and InVision have unlocked a new level of visual collaboration across their teams.

First day excitement and jumbled thoughts: Will everyone like me? I love what I do, what can go wrong? Everything can go wrong! I can’t…

Four Figmates share their advice, learnings, and reflections on joining Figma

Demystifying the elements that make up great conversations.

A deep-dive into how we provide access to internal applications

A research template to test solutions for people with disabilities

How to go beyond asset libraries and build systems for people.

Six ways to prototype AI experiences

This is an installment of our blog’s recurring series, Design x Design. Members of the Pinterest design team — designers, researchers…

This is an installment of our blog’s recurring series, Design x Design. Members of the Pinterest design team — designers, researchers…

Earlier this year, we held a panel session to learn some best practices for creating a successful User Experience Program from members…

A top-five countdown of the Freehand templates that have illuminated and improved your daily cross-functional communications, context on how teams across InVision have gotten the most out of them, and a few tips to help you create better outcomes regardless of where you are.

Glad you asked! This question is especially relevant to me right now, as I’m currently learning a new prototyping tool here at Slack. 🙃 Whether you’re trying to learn a technical skill, a new industry tool, sharpening your visual design chops, or leveling up a soft skill like public speaking, the only way to get …

The road to building FigJam, and how things continue to change across design and product development

A data-first approach and how to execute it in two steps

As the world of healthcare is constantly shaped and evolved by emerging technologies, systems and processes, and the very environment that…

How I get stakeholder attention and buy-in using video project updates

No-one wants a content designer, until they get one — and then they want a content designer all the time and on every project! It’s true…

A compilation of recent improvements that enhance your workflow in Figma

The new Desktop app has rolled out, replacing one of Spotify’s oldest and most loved clients. As a Design Team, it’s often difficult…

This month, we’re excited to share Figma libraries in DSM and new protoype features!

Chris Kemp, the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a start-up creating an affordable space launch platform, has some advice on getting large, diverse groups of stakeholders excited about your vision.

A look at their daily habits and weekly syncs

Designers share how they created Instagram’s #BlackDesignVisionaries grant program artwork: by starting with a capital ‘B.’

Designers share how they created Instagram’s #BlackDesignVisionaries grant program artwork: by starting with a capital ‘B.’

The IBM Patterns Design Education team had to pivot from an immersive, in-person program to entirely virtual in a matter of weeks. That…

As someone who used to teach design at an online code and design school, I’ve answered this question many times. That tells me many people wonder this—so if you’re one of them, you’re not alone.  Short answer to the first question: YES. It’s 2021. For better or worse, you can learn and do (almost) anything from …

A chat with the sales team about what they've learned and what they're looking forward to

“Fish forget they’re surrounded by water, and you’re in DEEP water… be kind to yourself and remember your context.”

Microsoft’s new emojis

How I learned to stop worrying and start dreaming

Tips for staying creative and collaborative, while having fun

How the re-design of the store ownership transfer workflow focused on immediate user value, and still scales gracefully.

How we co-created Atlassian Design System’s new values and principles with a team of over 30 designers, engineers, and content designers.

An interview with the team who built the digital card came

How we built a single product for over a billion people

Design systems deserve well-documented guidance, but defining this isn’t always straightforward. Here’s how to design lasting UX patterns.

Want to run your best and most inclusive design sprint yet? Use these five practical tips from Jay Melone, innovation designer at New Haircut, and Richard Banfield, VP of design transformation at InVision.

Facebook’s VP of Product Design and Responsible Innovation on how we design for social settings, which present dilemmas with complex…

Facebook’s VP of Product Design and Responsible Innovation on how we design for social settings, which present dilemmas with complex…

We have opened an office in New York City to better connect with Figmates and users

Many of us care about diversity, but how do we push beyond awareness to effect real change?

Take action to unpack complexity

I wish I could tell you that I had a flowchart to show you precisely when you should switch to management. There’s no simple answer — in my career, I’ve transitioned between roles as an individual contributor (IC) and a manager four — four! —  times. Yep, that’s IC to management to IC to management …

The team at News UK shares their experience creating a design system across print, online, radio, and TV

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, co-chair of the Design Tokens W3C Community Group, shares his thoughts on the opportunity tokens give designers, how to implement them at any scale, and why they can be transformative for a product team.

Eureka moments don’t just happen—you have to cultivate them intentionally

Imagine this: you go to wash your hands before dinner at a local restaurant, and place your hand beneath the new automatic soap dispenser…

Be engaged. Feel empowered. Get excited.

Thinking about running a diary study? Check out how we used Confluence to host our research.

This is a really good question—without any right answers! It depends on what you want right now in your career. Ask yourself: What kind of impact do you want to have, be it on products or people? Would you prefer to gain deep expertise in one area, or broad expertise in multiple areas? How much …

If you’re thinking about this question early in your career, good for you! As a young designer, you’re likely eager for a job that pays you well and lets you do what you love, all while building your portfolio and design skills to set you up for more exciting opportunities in the future. The dream!

How to build a Design education program 
for creative work

An in-depth look at how our newest theme was designed for the latest high-performance web standards

Miro Superuser shares his digital best practices for empowering everyone to share ideas.

Flowcharts can be used generally to get your ideas out (like mind mapping), or to document a specific process, flow, campaign, or project. Here’s how to get started with flowcharts, how to create them in an online flowchart maker like InVision’s Freehand—and more.

How to create better products by looking at the competition.

Google UXers divulge their wildest travel dreams and what they’d pack in their virtual carry-ons

We have closed a new round of funding led by Durable Capital Partners

Facebook’s director of sound design on empathy, collaboration, and human connection

Facebook’s director of sound design on empathy, collaboration, and human connection

According to RISD’s 17th president Rosanne Somerson

How creating internal data products helped me evolve as a designer

Design tokens are here to bring you closer to perfection, allowing you to manage all of your common properties from a single source and then distribute them to all of your applications and designs.

Advice for mentees on building an effective relationship

You won’t know until you try.

Twelve Black designers voice their experiences, reflections and visions for the future.

Normally around this time of year, a handful of Atlassian Creative team members are emerging from the depths of an underground bunker beneath a convention hall in Las Vegas. No, this isn’t the…

Empower your chatbot to handle difficult conversations with ease

How I work with developers and product teams to ship faster

Tips from the research and marketing teams at Figma

Transform the way your team works together with our uniquely versatile whiteboard

How our team celebrates and syncs in the file

In observance of Pride Month, Alex Chen discusses the political history of the gender binary and how understanding it unlocks our ability to innovate for a more inclusive future.

Hello, I’m Angela, a Salesforce consultant specialising in Design Strategy at PwC UK.

How we shipped fast funds to UK entrepreneurs during COVID-19

How to define the behaviors you value

Templates for you and your team to get started with everything from brainstorms to retrospectives.

What happens when you throw five early professional IBM designers into a fully immersive, high-pressure six-week program centered around…

Reflections on Pride month, and how you can participate

When designing a product, you might wonder if one concept fits all. If you can simply get it translated and reproduce it across markets. Today, you will see why 99% of the time, the answer is no…

What are the can’t-miss sessions for design Trailblazers this year? We put it all in one place.

Discover how to design a modern email for audiences of all abilities by using the new Salesforce builder

Welcome to our blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

Highlights from our first podcast season

We’re changing Spotify’s most important buttons. Here’s why.

When I moved to Stockholm at the beginning of 2020, I was tasked with expanding the internal tools team in Spotify’s Platform Mission. We…

TL;DR: 6 mo of work by 1 intern and the 20% time of two “dev-signers” has led to designs taking 30% less time, on average, for every…

Watch all of the videos from Config 2021

Shahrzad Samadzadeh, VP of UX at Salesforce, talks about design as a team sport.

Exploring the aesthetics and functionality of the rule of three in user interfaces

25 quick questions, plus his closing keynote from Config 2021

Welcome to our blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

How I use journey mapping to align teams before they begin

How we think and what we look for

The tactics, processes, and systems that keep teams running

By Michelle Cortese and Andrea Zeller

By Michelle Cortese and Andrea Zeller

The highest-performing Salesforce homepages have one thing in common: upfront user research

A designer shares how her one-year-old inspired a new accessibility design team

A designer shares how her one-year-old inspired a new accessibility design team

Welcome to our blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

Things we’re doing (and aiming for) at Shopify

Foster more diverse and inclusive communities with the Dropbox Design toolkit.

Delight has a somewhat wobbly boundary of meaning in the product design community, yet we all understand it on some level…

A behind-the-scenes look at a Figma tradition, and some of our favorite moments

Google’s developer conference is back, online, and free for everyone

Freelance or in-house? Senior Product Designer Caroline Shen gives a thoughtful analysis of the pros and cons, and how to decide.

Welcome to our blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

Slack senior product designer Kristin Au gives advice on how much code designers might need to know, and why.

How the Microsoft Mixed Reality Studios explored more immersive interactions

Google’s AIUX team on creating more equitable AI-related products

Some of our favorite moments from the conference

Plus a Figma virtual debate kit to run your own.

Pinterest Sans — a typeface for tomorrow’s ideas

Pinterest Sans — a typeface for tomorrow’s ideas

Scaling color to infinite possibilities

Scaling color to infinite possibilities

How (and why) we developed a brand identity with inspiration at the heart

How (and why) we developed a brand identity with inspiration at the heart

A festive parade of design from Amazon

Create vaccine management programs that serve everyone.

Welcome to our blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

25 quick questions, plus her closing keynote from Config 2021

How do new design grads know which career path is the right one? Josie Jeffries, Director of Creative at Slack, lends some expert perspective and advice.

Slack content designer TJ Lee weighs in on useful design skills for UX writers to learn

The four criteria that will set your design system up for success

Welcome to our blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

Why we’ve changed the job title of our UX Writing team

We’ve commissioned five new custom fonts–help us choose which one should be the next default font for Microsoft 365!

Announcing branching in beta

How we united UX Research and ML to improve image quality on Pinterest

How we united UX Research and ML to improve image quality on Pinterest

Our content designers work across all of our consumer, rider and restaurant products — collaborating with a diverse set of disciplines…

Welcome to our new blog series, Meet Asana Design, where we feature members of the Asana Design team.

Everything we announced at Config 2021

FigJam is an online whiteboard for teams to brainstorm and ideate together

An end-to-end case study of the design process for a feature where riders and drivers can reference past chats with Lyft support.

Find out how product teams can create ready-made conversation replies through content design principles.

Find out how product teams can create ready-made conversation replies through content design principles.

    A conversation between two Slack designers Nikki Nolan and Vivian Urata on why inclusive design should be the new normal. Audio version provided above.   Nikki Nolan: I’m glad we’re having this conversation around inclusive design. To get started, I would love to know who you are and what got you interested in …

For these copy/design duos, inspiration, trust, and talking about nothing are the keys to success

Repsol, Spain's largest multi-energy company, set out to unify their designs in Figma while making energy more approachable to consumers.

Changes to our Starter plan

Why our current definition of leadership doesn’t match the rallying cry for diversity, equity, and inclusion

What it took to build and ship a (seemingly) simple user request

How—and why—to create product principles to guide your decision-making processes.

How the team at Tailwind Labs created a set of fully responsive components

“Started from the bottom now we’re here!”

“Started from the bottom now we’re here!”

We’re back with a spring installment of more things the design team has been looking at, reading, inspired by, or in some cases, just…

Build on a work-in-progress Figma Community file and help complete a transit map of the San Francisco Bay Area

I still remember the first playlist I helped name at Spotify. I’m a UX Writer on the Personalization team at Spotify and naming —…

When Janey Lee moved to Stockholm to join Spotify Design, one of her main goals was to learn more about designing products for the entire…

How work has changed over the past year, and what collaboration looks like through the lens of two Figma customers

Shifting from UX design to product design was pretty straightforward: the bigger challenge was adapting my design mindset. Here are a few key lessons I’ve learned.

Insight into the Product Design interview experience

How the team handled difficult interactions and edge cases to bring comments into the Figma Community

Facebook designers write to honor women

Facebook designers write to honor women

Change management is not about writing a bunch of policies about process; it’s deep design work to establish new operating practices for…

The value of passion projects for creatives

The value of passion projects for creatives

Best practices and templates from Figmates across teams

Intro

Every December, millions of Spotify users around the world experience Spotify Wrapped, and reflect on their audio habits from the past…

As creatives, we tend to draw inspiration from the things and people around us. We love that moment where the penny drops, the stars align…

How a team of designers, scientists, developers, and engineers worked together to create a truly unique device in Echo Show 10.

Career growth might not be linear. If it isn’t, what other shape can it take?

Career growth might not be linear. If it isn’t, what other shape can it take?

Observations and management approaches as we enter year two of the pandemic

5 learnings from developing trauma-informed products

A product design manager unpacks whiteness — power centered in white people — and how it manifests in design, media, and his own life.

A lo-fi technique to distill information, see more at once, focus discussion, and work through design complexities.

A crash course in understanding the basics of what it takes to design user-centered digital products successfully in our highly digital age.

Metrics often seem inherently factual, but they have shortcomings too. Data comes in diverse forms.

A look into how automatization can supercharge the design process in Figma

How Design Sprints became the way Google—and the world—creates

Interesting links found and shared by Medium’s design team

Amazon Design partners with Cooper Hewitt to prepare the next generation of designers in tech.

Mentorship and guidance have never been more important than they are at this moment.

Amazon Design sponsors 2021 Interaction Awards

Change can offer an opportunity to reflect. Right now, many people are asking: “How can I make the most of what’s going on in the world to…

Every year, Slack Frontiers, our annual flagship conference for Slack users, is a little different. This year, like so many other things in 2020, it proved to be like no other. Traditionally we host Slack Frontiers in San Francisco, home of our headquarters and many a tech event. But back in April, for the safety …

Designer and journalist Cliff Kuang shares an excerpt from “User Friendly”

A look at how we identify and address bugs

Part two of the long and winding design road that resulted in Slack's pivotal "threads" feature being released

A look back at the year’s most resilient design projects

How the team moved to a virtual-first model

How your web searches empower everyday giving

Learn how a product designer built usable, well-designed tools to help data scientists transform a mass of raw data into valuable insights.

This is an installment of our blog’s recurring series, Design x design. Members of the Pinterest design team — designers, writers…

This is an installment of our blog’s recurring series, Design x design. Members of the Pinterest design team — designers, writers…

We ask Googlers what they’d pack in their virtual carry-ons to the destinations of their dreams

Reflections from co-founder and CEO Dylan Field on the first five years of Figma

What cash trips in Mexico taught me about designing for international markets at Uber

Creating services to keep our travel community safe

Product designer McKenna Lowry and content designer TJ Lee were on completely different pages when they were tasked with redesigning Slack’s search filters. To get it done, they had to remix how content and product design collaborated. TJ: Changing jobs in the midst of a global pandemic wasn’t super high on my bucket list. But …

How we created the Lyft Product Language attributes and component libraries

Design with empathy for our drivers and riders

How to think about the 90,000 hours you spend at work

Helping shoppers save time and money with an intelligent browser

Three UX writing strategies to get unstuck when you just can't seem to find the right words.

How a minimalist approach unlocked our ability to create a more detailed representation of the world

The evolution of Auto Layout and more on the latest version

Google Seed Studio shares the inspiration behind their latest creative direction

Sure, this is the Spotify Design Medium, and I dive a little into engineering in the article below  —  but design systems are…

What introverts can teach us about better meeting design

How to make ambient computing work—for people

How designers can think like PMs to embrace iteration and fast-forward user feedback.

As variable fonts make their way into Google Fonts, learn what they are and their benefits for digital design–better compression for developers, greater expression for designers, and finer text typography for readers.

Today we're launching Variants and updates to the Inspect panel to power up your design system

The technical challenges of updating our autosave system

Our free digital toolkit for freelance illustrators

A simplified heuristics evaluation can help improve even the smallest parts of how users experience your product.