Write your book and get it published. Part 3.
In this final part of this series, I want to give some advice on tools that will make your writing easier. When I started my book, I thought Google Docs would have been enough, and well, it could be, but there are tools out there that you might not be aware of that can really boost your productivity and make your life as an author much much easier.
Let’s start with the one I used for 90% of the work:
Scrivener
Scrivener is a Mac, Windows and iOS app specifically made for writers (of any kind). It’s really a great tool because you can basically organize your entire work there, not just the manuscript, but notes, images, links, docs, pdfs, etc. You can create folders to organize your material (I organized mine by chapter), and you have everything at hand. …
Write your book and get it published. Part 2.
In the previous part of this article, I talked about the preliminary work of writing a design book. Coming up with right concept, finding the right audience, defining a table of content, looking for publishers, submitting a book proposal, etc. The final step was about research and, even though that will basically keep on going throughout the entire writing process, that’s the last step you can take before actually turning your gaze to the scary white of a blank page.
Let’s take a look at how to tame the fear of starting to finally hit those keys and see words popping up. …
Write your book and get it published. Part 1.
Filling hundreds of pages with written words (about 50 to 70 thousand of them, for a non-fiction book) seems like a gigantic task. And it is actually, but with the right approach, it’s definitely doable. I know because I did it.
Writing a book about design (whatever the specific topic is) is a design project itself. …
And it’s not moving back to skeuomorphism either.
I’m not a fan of neumorphism. If you follow me here or on Twitter, you might have noticed I’m usually quite critical or, at least, skeptical about this visual style. There are several reasons, from accessibility issues to, for sure, a simple matter of personal taste.
In the past months, countless articles have been written on the topic. Besides the ones indicating this as a “2020 trend” (yea, like if this year wasn’t bad enough already), just because “it’s all the rage” on Dribbble, some designers rightfully investigated a little more.
Now, I’m not here to say neumorphism is good (it’s not) or bad (it is). But in the last few days after Apple’s WWDC2020, I’ve seen more and more articles saying basically that “APPLE IS EMBRACING NEUMORPHISM!!111!1!2”. …
We can help make products that assist urgent isolation efforts and will also benefit society when we come out of this crisis.
As I’m writing this, I’m at the end of my first month under full lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Lombardy, Italy. As of now, we still lead the world in deaths related to the virus and this life — drastically changed and totally weird — seems like the new normal, at least for a while.
While this pandemic is, of course, a disastrous situation for many people, companies and entire industries, it can also be a big opportunity to push toward a more digitalized society, where many processes become easier, faster and safer.
I have been working from home for the past six weeks, and many of the things that seemed impossible to execute without being face to face inside an office are now working perfectly fine in a remote setting. But many products, now catering to the needs of these remote users, can still be made better (can you honestly say that Zoom is the best possible solution for video calls?), and many others can be made from scratch. Slack, Zoom and Dropbox work for everyone, but they serve very generic needs for anyone working at home from a desk. There are thousands of more specific needs that are just waiting for the perfect tool to be performed more efficiently in a remote setting. And many of the tools people use already could be transformed for remote collaboration. Just think of how the classic office software to write documents and create spreadsheets changed in the last several years. Google Docs and Office 365 introduced the idea of collaboration through a cloud-based service, and Figma — to give a less generic example — is leading the way in this direction for digital product design. …
The very near future will be a concert of devices talking to each other, and the job of the UX designer will be writing the symphony.
In the past few years, we’ve been witnessing a rapid acceleration in innovation and new technologies. This process is fed by a virtuous cycle of new solutions and products influencing one another and improving other technologies that we then use to create more and more innovation, and so on. It’s exponential growth, very much like the kind described by Moore’s law. Though Moore’s law explicitly refers to computing power, we can, to a certain extent, apply it to UX as well. New technologies breed new products. New products create new scenarios and use cases, and shape society (think about how Airbnb or Tinder changed the way we live specific moments of our lives). Those societal changes create new needs, new pain points and new opportunities. …
China is dealing with the new coronavirus better than others because of its massive surveillance infrastructure and policies.
Since 9/11, the world population started to give up its privacy more and more, with the promise of being kept safe against terrorism. Today we’re facing a different threat, something maybe, in some ways, more predictable, but faster to spread and affect millions.
I live in Italy, and I live in Lombardy, to be precise, so I’ve been among the first, outside of China, to experience a full lockdown. …
Rules of thumb for in-car HMI.
It’s quite complicated to find material and articles online about UX in automotive. While there is an overwhelming amount of information on UX for mobile and desktop devices, getting insights on HMI (Human Machine Interaction) principles seems to be much harder. Why?
My answer is that it’s probably because it’s a niche discipline, compared to designing for handheld devices and computers, plus screens in cars haven’t been around for as long. …
Making sense of the mess going on in the industry.
Yes, I’m guilty, your honor. I’ve been using the prefix “UX/UI”, but there’s a reason, dear people of the jury. When the entire world call apples “bananas” and I want to buy apples, I go to the grocery store and ask for bananas. It kinda makes sense, right? But maybe, just maybe, we could try to fix this.
There is something inherently wrong with the “UX/UI” thing, and yet it’s still the norm in job postings and job titles. But, what is wrong with that? Let me explain with an example:
“I need someone who can build me a house. …
I say yes. Here’s why.
I recently did a lot of research about the computer desktop, a metaphor that all current operative systems have in common and that is going on for almost 50 years now (!!!), since the Xerox Alto that first to introduce a graphical user interface.
Offices were very different 50 years ago. Files were, for the most part, actual pieces of paper, the work was carried on on the physical surface of a desk and people were digitally illiterate, so the desktop metaphor came to help smooth the transition from the physical world of the office to its digital counterpart. …
