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The design process never stops. New patterns emerge, more tools become accessible by users. Smooth user experience comes when you truly understand the problem you are solving and help users solve it effortlessly.

Once you narrowed down your focus to some key areas, you need to know the performance of the design. 

• Pageview and traffic analysis. Tracks your visitors’ entry and exit from different pages, what browser and screen size they are using, and where they are coming from.
• Behaviora...

Having a list of problems and ideas on how to solve them is a good thing, but it needs prioritization. 

We need to understand what are the low-hanging fruits. For each opportunity, we need to understand what it will take to deliver it and how much value we will add for the end-user.

Fresh ideas and innovation are never coming from competitor analysis. As everyone keeps a close eye on each other, you can only learn what is considered to be a standard.

For inspiration, look beyond your domain. There are hundreds of amazing products that...

Once you found out the issues, the next step is to find solutions for each identified problem. 

Competitive research and exploration should give you enough inspiration. 

There are no perfect designs, and there is always space for improvement. But excellent user experience comes at a great cost. Creating a marginal improvement in already great design will require exponentially more resources invested than taking something bad and turning it into an average design....

Hand sketches are great ways to start offloading some of the ideas from your head into the physical world. 

Like in a fancy restaurant, presentation is as important as the dish itself. If you spend months crafting a design, spend some time on presentation.

And remember you are not selling new styles, clean fonts. Create a new story, a story about newly empowered users, because h...

The number one mistake that designers do during the redesign process is that they completely ignore and disregard the current design. The worst thing you can do is to take the current design and create a new one based on your personal preferences. 

There was probably a ton ...

It is as simple as that. Everyone can confidently say that they know better than the users, and 

“users don’t know they need it till they get it.” 

That statement is true only in a very rare case. Don’t forget that everything you are doing is for users. 

Once you have understood everything clearly with the help of data from analytics, you can start identifying key problem areas with the existing design. 

Those problems can range from usability issues to visual flows, bugs, inconsistencies, wrong patterns applied, or exotic solutions without...

It’s one of the first natural questions that should come to mind. “Well, what are others doing?” As your customers will have to choose between your product and its alternatives, you need to analyze the experience they provide to customers. 

When reviewing both direct and in...

As a designer, your role is to bring everyone on the same page and unite over one common goal. 

• First, interview stakeholders to understand what and why we are trying to achieve for the business and on what timeframe. Check their expectations regarding...

There are many activities you can do to understand users better, build empathy. 

• User journeys and value propositions are beneficial, but there is not always time to do them when we are talking about something small. 
• Personas, on the other hand, are fluffy and fake and have ve...

Your goal is to listen and capture everyone’s thoughts and propositions, but don’t take it as absolute truth. 

In the end, you are the expert who needs to filter through the noise and find where to focus.