How to make smarter design tradeoffs

Clarity > Consistency

Edition 043 of Design Insight

Hello and welcome back to Design Insight 👋

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📃 3 Articles

What does simplicity really mean for product design?

The article in 3 ideas:

1. Simplicity is a golden rule for design.

2. Simplicity can be achieved via visual elements and the information presented.

3. Simpler UIs are more pleasing to the eye and easier to interact with.

Link To Article: What does simplicity really mean for product design?

Don’t just test the happy path

The article in 3 ideas:

1. In software development, a happy path is the default scenario where there are no errors.

2. Focusing on the happy path alone will leave room for bugs and other potential issues.

3. A great way to overcome some of these issues is to write unit tests for the code.

Link To Article: Don’t just test the happy path

How to make smarter design tradeoffs

The article in 3 ideas:

1. In design, there will be tradeoffs with design in favor of constraints or business goals.

2. Every product should have an overarching vision to guide the decision-making day-to-day.

3. Clarity > Consistency

Link To Article: How to make smarter design tradeoffs

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🔨 2 Tools/Resources

Tool - Yodlr

• A fun tool created by @danielcranney that allows you to generate Twitter shoutouts.

Tool - Extract CSS

• This tool extracts inline styles from HTML and turns them into CSS code.

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🎨 1 Design Tip

Don't neglect the power of whitespace

Luke Netti @luke_netti

When designing websites, don't neglect the power of whitespace! I see designs cram sections together and this makes it difficult for the visitor. Giving your designs space to breath will help the visitor digest the information more clearly.

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

1. How to make an interface feel friendlier

2. Freebie Supply

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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.

Til next week 👋

Michelle

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