Here’s everything I’ve learned from designing 10,000+ UI screens as a lead product designer.

Don’t spend your time being fancy for things that don’t need to be reinvented.

In the spirit of not reinventing your entire being, make yourself some design templates.

You’ll save yourself seven metric boatloads of time.

The more consistently you design, the faster you’ll become. 

For one thing, you’re dramatically reducing the number of design decisions you have to make along the way.

In order to work faster, you’ll have to create shortcuts for yourself. These shortcuts can be tangible things like design resources, or more intangible like establishing and following a set of design principles.

As you become faster, consistency will naturally follow.

If you can deliver value to the user, you will create customers who will drive value to the business.

Solve the right problem for the right person and you’ll be golden.

Visuals alone won’t carry a great design very far. They are really only about 20% of the entire presentation process.

The rest? Well, that’s storytelling. If you don’t hook your audience with a compelling story, demonstrate business value, and speak on behalf of the user, then you will fail.

Beautiful design? Awesome!
Didn’t launch? Failure.

In order to be considered a successful designer, you have to actually design something that gets built.