Life Contexts - Cues To Differentiate Between Work And Home

Edition 033 of Design Insight

Hello and welcome back to Design Insight 👋

If you're new here, welcome to our growing community of creatives! I appreciate you and truly hope you find lots of value here 🤗

This is the last edition of the year! 🎄 I'm taking some time to relax, play video games, and spend time with family. I hope you do the same 😊

Let's get started.

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🗃 3 Design Resources

📃 Article - I Borrowed James Clear’s Instagram Strategy to Grow My Email Newsletter

Here are my main take-aways from this article:

1. James Clear's Instagram account is a success because it is focused on a clear set of goals: increase newsletter subscribers, sell his book.

2. Set up your bio, highlights, pinned tweets, etc. to direct your audience to your goals.

3. Don't be afraid to repurpose your content. That's what it's for. Create a set of 2-4 post types and create content that fits those post types. Share a quote from an article, highlight a great point in your newsletter.

Link To Article: I Borrowed James Clear’s Instagram Strategy to Grow My Email Newsletter

🔨 Resource - UX Planet

• Source: @uxplanet

• A great resource full of articles related to user experience.

• Go To The Resource

🔨 Tool - ColorHub

• Source: @danielcranney

• A super tool that makes picking out a color palette fun and enjoyable.

• Go To The Tool

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🎨 2 Design Tips

Say what makes you different from the competition

Say what makes you different from the competition.

Why should someone choose your product over all the rest?

Explain it in terms of how it benefits your audience.

Search Input Width

The search box should be wide enough to fit a typical query.

If it's too short it can be frustrating to type into.

P.S. User research is a good way to figure this out.

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📃 1 Article I Wrote

Life Contexts - Cues To Differentiate Between Work And Home

As one of the many people now working from home, I found the process difficult at first.

I couldn’t switch my mind between my day job, my side-projects, and spending time with family. Everything bled together which left me focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time.

Over time, I have learned to set up various “life contexts” to focus my mind on the work at hand.

These life contexts are made up of subtle and not so subtle cues that signify the type of work or activity I’m currently doing. This allows me to focus on tasks when I’m at work. I can then switch my attention to friends and family when I’m done with work.

If the idea of life contexts sounds intriguing to you, please read on.

Read The Article

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🐦 Top Tweet Of The Week

Nicolas Cole @Nicolascole77

Success tip: Assume anything you want to achieve (output) simply takes a quantifiable amount of hours (input). Guesstimate a number. Now, you know exactly what needs to be done. As @dickiebush says to me often, "It's all execution risk from here."

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In case you missed it, here are last week's most popular links:

1. Designing for Long Waits and Interruptions

2. Ask A Designer

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Design Insight Tools + Resources - All the tools and resources I've mentioned across all editions of Design Insight in one place.

You’ve reached the end of this week’s edition of Design Insight. Thank you for reading, I truly hope you found value in the design insights I shared today.

Happy holidays 🎄 👋

Michelle

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