Daniel Hill

My pal Vitaly Friedman is second-to-none when it comes to delivering thorough, thoughtful, and actionable design advice. He's released a few courses that are really valuable for practicing designers and design leads: 🧠 Smart Interface Design Patterns: https://lnkd.in/e-v-jsCG 📏 How to Measure UX Impact: https://measure-ux.com/ #design #ux

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Thoughtful breakdown review about eBay Playbook!

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I’ve spent a good part of last week interviewing MSO users, it’s always an enlightening experience—especially when it comes to product design. Hearing real stories, uncovering pain points, and discovering those “aha!” moments firsthand is invaluable. It’s a reminder that great design starts with empathy and a deep understanding of the people we’re designing for. The next stage? Synthesising all this rich insight to help shape a design approach that truly meets users’ needs. This is where the magic happens—turning observations into actionable ideas. #UserResearch #ProductDesign #DesignThinking #UX #HumanCentredDesign #Innovation #EmpathyInDesign

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#Adobe is in hot water with the DOJ, and for good reason. 🔥💁‍♂️ Just two days ago, the DOJ sued Adobe over hidden fees and difficulties in canceling subscriptions. This lawsuit highlights significant customer complaints about Adobe’s subscription practices, pointing to deceptive tactics that make it harder for users to opt out. 😠 Do we really think users appreciate being trapped by manipulative design? Especially those who value transparency, only to find themselves surprised by hidden fees and complicated cancellation processes. This lawsuit against Adobe underscores a critical issue in the digital subscription industry. 👀 Taking a step back, wouldn’t it make more sense for companies to prioritize ethical design and genuine user engagement? Design should enhance the user experience, not exploit it. Imagine interfaces that respect user autonomy and foster trust. 🙂‍↕️ There are different approaches, like designing with clarity and simplicity. Lots of companies are already implementing straightforward cancellation processes and transparent pricing. These practices build trust and promote long-term user loyalty. 🤗 Granted, eliminating dark patterns might be a challenge for some companies used to quick gains. But we should reconsider how these practices align with long-term brand integrity. Are short-term profits worth the potential damage to reputation and user relationships? 🧐 As a designer, I know how important innovation and experimentation are. Both are key to advancing our field. But we must question our practices and ensure we’re creating value in the right way. 💪 There’s a lot of potential to develop ethical, user-friendly solutions. Digital design should be a playground for creating transparent and respectful user experiences. This future can foster trust and engagement, benefiting both users and companies alike. ✨ #design #userexperience #ux #experience #darkpatterns #innovation #subscription #DOJ #FTC

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It's interesting to me that, while engineers are seeing a massive explosion in productivity from AI, product design has yet to see any real progress. Where are the tools from Figma/Adobe that 2-3x the output of a designer? Where is the AI-driven design system, etc.

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Many consumers tend to look at a design system through the lens of what’s missing or constrained and miss a critical part of the core mission: start small and grow the collection based on the needs of the community you serve. Constraints are a natural part of the biological makeup of any system. Much like scope, defining what you can and cannot do creates healthy boundaries that establish the foundation for growth and opportunity. With a design system, constraints open the door for discussions about how we introduce meaningful change over time. That said, when you’re up against a deadline and you encounter an intentional limitation I can understand how it feels like a blocker. But what if you considered that it’s also an opportunity to start a dialog that identifies new requirements, unlocking untapped potential that translates into community value in the process? What if I also said that you have the power to change the system through focused contributions that rethink and reshape the smallest pieces and parts to make it a more effective or efficient solution? As a consumer you need the system to be flexible and I need it to be consistent. I have a responsibility to govern while you need to be able to experiment. This is the nexus where the balance between governance and empowerment becomes more than just managing a component collection. It’s creating a process for shared ownership that requires compromise, rooted in equal parts input and output to guide growth and evolution. Imagine what we can achieve if we work together to create a culture of possibility that focuses on what we do have and how to make it better. Sometimes all it takes is a small, curated foundation, a positive feedback loop, and an engaged community all working together towards the same goal. #ExperienceDesign #UX #ProductDesign #DesignSystems

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The Band is Breaking Up: A Lesson from Music for Digital Design Teams Just watched an intriguing piece on the disappearance of bands from the top music charts. For decades, ensembles ruled, but now? It's the era of solo artists and duos. https://lnkd.in/euhxChHU Here's why I think this matters to us in UX and product design: Technology has changed the game. Just as in music, where one or two individuals can now produce a full track thanks to tech advancements, in digital design, AI and sophisticated toolkits mean smaller teams can achieve what once required a whole ensemble. Complexity scales with team size. Managing a band is like managing a large design team – more people, more problems. Coordination, egos, differing visions – it all slows down the creative process. My take: As we embrace AI and powerful design libraries, let's rethink team structures. Scale down to scale up. Smaller, more agile teams can iterate faster, innovate quicker, and adapt seamlessly. Let's compose our digital products with the efficiency of a duo, leveraging technology to fill in all the instrumental gaps. What's your take? Are we ready to solo or duet in the design world, or do we still need the full band? #UXDesign #ProductDesign #Innovation #TechTrends #TeamDynamics #leadership #LeadershipMatters

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shower thought: by 2025 product designers and devs will be co-creating in tools that feel like Figma and an IDE had a baby—turbocharged with AI coding faster launches, tighter feedback loops, and way less time lost in handoffs. PDs, it’s time to start picking up some dev basics. DEVs, your backend and architecture skills are about to be more valuable than ever

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User-Generated Content (UGC) isn't just a feature - it's the future. 🎮 Three key components in any UGC strategy and execution.. 1️⃣ Empower your community. Give them tools that are powerful yet accessible. Best features comes from watching how players push boundaries. 2️⃣ Build for discovery. Great content needs to be found. When you improve your discovery system, creator engagement increases. 3️⃣ Think ecosystem, not economy. Yes, monetization matters. But sustainable UGC thrives on community recognition first, revenue second. Watch Out For: 🚫 Over-automation 🚫 Complex tools barrier 🚫 Poor discovery systems * Video Inspired from Battlefield 2042 😎 #gaming #tech #UGC

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I've developed *a lot* of stuff (tools, prompts, and assistants) with generative ai over the last 18mos. Some by myself, others with the help of my team, and several with the insane technical talents of a close friend (Cesar Perez). Here are a handful of things I've learned: ♦️ It will take longer than you expect. Using AI speeds things up, for sure, but as you get rolling you're going to want to add just a little bit more functionality. Do, or don't, just understand that whatever you thought it'd take, it's going to take a bit more than that. ♦️ QA is essential. Like, *really* essential. You think you've identified all your use cases? Think again buddy. Generative AI will produce results you'll have accounted for – and so many you haven't. Add time into the project schedule to have MULTIPLE people test the product with you. ♦️ Communicate. No, OVER-communicate. No matter how much fine tuning you do or how low your temperature setting is, you will get results that are not perfect. Communicate this FACT to your clients. Get them comfortable with there being a degree of variability. Also, it's a good idea to write that into your SOW – that you basically cannot 100% guarantee the output of a GenAI-based tool. ♦️ Chances are someone has already built something similar to what you're building. Find it. Look at what they have, and haven't, done well. Do not make the same mistakes. Improve upon what's out there. And if you're building something truly new, well that's awesome. I can't wait to see it! I've learned a lot of other stuff, but this post is already too long. 🤷‍♂️

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Not sure how I missed this podcast with Lenny Rachitsky but this episode with Katie Dill is amazing. There's a reason it has 47k views on YouTube. Just furthering my claim that the very best of Lenny's podcasts are not about product development or traditional product management. His best episodes are about design and business. "The use of the word beauty in books that have been digitized by Google has decreased,  like pretty dramatically. And it's aligned with this idea of, "Well,  functionality is king. Functionality is what matters." As if people think about  functionality and beauty as like two opposite things. No, they're not two  opposite things. Functionality is important. And actually beauty enhances functionality  because it does make things easier to use, more approachable, more comp elling to use.  And the other piece of it that is not talked about in business as often is just  the importance of how people feel. Things that are more beautiful, increase trust. You see that  we've put painstaking detail into this, and we care about the details of how something works,  and that gives you assurance that we care about other details that you can't see too." —Katie All I have to say is YES.

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It's not controversial to say that metrics are important - but not all metrics are born equal. If metrics weren't set *by* leadership (or at least have leadership buy-in) they are not very useful. "Productivity" is one that I often hear. Leaders set a goal to improve productivity because *their* targets are often measured in money, and doing more of what we already do is a no-brainer for making more money. But "productivity" is not a metric. While leaders are using it as a proxy for "making more money" their orgs wrack their brains to come up with productivity-improving initiatives. And while it would be a mistake to say "we launched an AI assistant, therefore making our org more productive" (because there's no impact being measured) it would ALSO be a mistake to say "we launched an AI assistant, reducing the amount of emails staff have to read by 10%." It's a mistake because in the stakeholder's mind, "more productivity" is still linked to "more money" and not to the metrics the orgs worked so hard to identify and improve. While it is possible to convince the stakeholder that less time spent on emails will eventually roll up to more money being made, it'll be an uphill struggle. Instead of jumping straight to solutioning, start by drawing that clear line to the value. Ask the leader what success looks like for them - how will they be able to determine productivity increases, how much of an increase in that metric they are looking for, and so on. There are lots of frameworks that can help you do that (North Star, OKRs, etc etc). But unless you are doing it together with the person who will ultimately decide if you succeeded or failed, you'll be stuck retroactively justifying that your work was valuable.

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So Meta unveiled Orion yesterday, their prototype AR glasses... OK, so the presentation was cheesy and some of the video quality looks a bit low res but if you forgive all that - this is a big step forward in wearables. Apple Vision Pro may be better technically but humans want to fit in not stand out and wearing a giant silver blob on your face is always for the edge case users. In my view, Meta has made the right call of prioritising form over some functions. Until this tech doesn't make you feel like you look like an idiot it's never going to take off. As a glasses wearer since the age of 12 I can see myself being an early adopter of these. Come on, we've all seen creative directors with bigger glasses than these already right? Anyway, I can't wait to get my hands on these to see how this could be explored in immersive entertainment. Read the announcement here https://lnkd.in/ehGbENfT https://lnkd.in/e-iVee4S #innovation #technology #AR #ImmersiveTechnology

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Have you ever wondered if there is a difference between designers/creatives and researchers in terms of Owls vs Larks? I did a LinkedIn profile analysis based on the poll answers and put it in a WordCloud. Here is the result. Well, there certainly seems to be something to it ... 😁 #uxdesign #uxresearch #marketresearch #chronotype

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It's heartening to see how many media sites in SpeedCurve's Page Speed Benchmarks have sub-2.5s LCP times! For some of the sites with poorer LCP, perceived #webperf / #ux isn't the issue. They're fast to start render. The main culprit is that the LCP element is just wrong. The takeaway: don't just look at the numbers for your performance metrics. Visually validate them to make sure they're measuring the right things! https://lnkd.in/gG5zEK4u #pagespeed #sitespeed #corewebvitals #webperformance

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Comparing a mouse to a Rolex is a joke. The value of a Rolex doesn't come from software upgrades (???) - it comes from premium materials, engineering, and fashion.  Watches - like mouse drivers - are a solved problem. They don't need "updates" precisely because a high quality item, purchased once, is good forever. I've had a single Logitech mouse for 10 years. It's fine. It doesn't have any diamonds in it. It works fine without software updates. No one is ever going to go "nice mouse bro!!" and I'm never going to style an outfit to match my mouse. And that's ok!  The industry is inventing problems they want to solve, because they already have the business model in mind. This is the polar opposite of user centered design. 

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