This month's round up of UX toolkits, how-to tips and learning materials that I have benefited from and have really grown to love.
Introduction
There's a lot of quality, open source materials on the inter-webs and plenty of articles from Designers and experts telling you how-to use them. With that said, I'm not going to overwhelm you even more by adding to it.
Instead, I'll organize the resources and tools that I've tried, failed and succeeded at and will give context on what I've learned along the way.
UI / UX TOOL KITS
Technology changes so fast and with it, digital products need to keep up with how it fits into the lifestyles and workflows of everyday people – including creators like Product Designers. In this section, you'll find tools and open source libraries to help you collaborate, explore or experiment.
Figma Onboarding & Collaboration
Today, Figma is one of the most widely used design software for digital products. One of the reasons why is because it adopted a product-led growth model by adding what I call, "collaboration features" with a zero barrier of entry – meaning anyone can create an account, view a project that's shared with them and comment on it with little to no issue. The only barrier I've noticed so far is feature discovery from collaborators like developers. Where can I find the comment button? How can I copy text from the properties panel? How do I export the images or vectors?
Fast & easy product research
Are you in need of some UX/UI patterns to describe your idea? Or maybe you just want to save time doing product research. Here are some resources for exploring mainstream apps without having to use your personal email to create accounts for each product.
If you are looking for the "why" behind some of the patterns seen above, then click-through the animated storyboards from Growth.Design. They offer case studies with UX analysis and data-informed insights on some of the most popular products in all categories from SaaS to D2C applications.
WORKSHOP FRAMEWORKS
Planning a workshop can be a challenge but these resources help moderators create workshops on short deadlines and help facilitators prepare – from team-building to creative brainstorming.
Miro's template library offers a good variety of frameworks for individual activities so you don't have to build an exercise from scratch. However, customizing the workshop agenda and online environment does require some assembly.
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
It's not enough to just copy UI guidelines and UX logic from popular products – Understanding the function of design and psychology can help you design better tests, get unbiased learnings and build more strategically.