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Questions to Ask as a New Designer on the TeamLast summer I switched teams at Facebook. My first project seemed simple enough: redesign the sign up flow for Facebook Lite, an app for low-end Android phones.
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Tips for Becoming a Design LeaderOne of the things I love about working at Facebook is the emphasis we put on personal growth and the objectives people have for their careers...
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The Current State of Adaptive DesignA survey of 2016's most popular design tools to see how they compare for adaptive layout features.
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Inside Another Design Critique with FacebookGet a look into a critical part of our product process: the design critique.
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Giving Back to the Design CommunityWhy a small team of Facebook designers build resources for designers.
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A DIY Design Education
Build your own design curriculum without going to design school.
I’m a student at Stanford and a product design intern at Facebook, where I help design products for billions of people around the world. But I’m not studying design—I spend my time in school taking classes on philosophy, computer science, psychology, and linguistics. Instead, most of what I know about product design comes from independent learning and on-the-job experience.
For those who didn’t have the fortune of going through a design program, the path to... -
How We Changed the Facebook Friends IconNot long into my tenure as a Facebook designer I found something in the company glyph kit worth getting upset about.
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How to Make Your Not-So-Great Visual Design Better
“How do I get better at visual design?”
This question comes up a lot. I coach and mentor a lot of students on product design by tutoring for the Academy of Art in San Francisco, reviewing for AIGA’s portfolio reviews, hosting interns at Facebook and so on.
There’s a bridge from a student’s perspective to a professional’s perspective. For most, it’s guaranteed to be a blend of fear and excitement and curiosity, peppered with a lot... -
Peek Inside a Facebook Design CritiqueAt Facebook, where we’re working to make the world more open and connected, an inherent part of our mission is to share how we create the things we build.
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Metrics Versus ExperienceWant to have a productive conversation about metrics and good experiences? Here’s what I’ve learned.
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A Sense of Where You Are
Why it takes organization and process to get things done as a designer.
The trouble with essays about design process is that they read like some sanctimonious twit regaling you with stories about their rosy life. I appreciate that you don’t want to hear that it takes organization to get things done. It’s all totally obvious, yet surprisingly hard to do day-to-day when you’d rather be learning Framer and coding a prototype. So I’ll try to keep this rooted in my direct experience.
The problem with simplicity... -
Questions (and Answers) from Design Interviews at FacebookAt the end of our interviews for Product Design at Facebook, we reserve a few minutes for the candidate to ask questions.
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How to be Effective at Working RemotelyJust like all other relationships, the largest contributing factor to a failed working relationship is basic communication—or the lack thereof.
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Bridging the Gap: How Facebook Teamed Up With TV AdvertisersDigital channels are revolutionizing what advertisers can do in ways that they don't understand. So we helped them see the possibilities.
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Framer & Sketch: An Intentional WorkflowMaking prototypes can communicate what a final product will feel like early in the design process.
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Six Steps to Building Domain Expertise in a Complex Industry
Spoiler alert: you're almost NEVER the only person who doesn’t understand something complex.
About four years ago, I decided to take the plunge and join the Facebook Ads & Pages group to help build a design team for this crucial area of the business. I knew it was one of the biggest design opportunities in the industry, and I was excited to learn something new. -
Unintuitive Lessons on Being a Designer
Of everything I believe, this goes deepest to my core: we can all be better. And so we should be.
I sometimes joke that everything I have ever learned about design, I learned from my first job. Nowadays, this first job has extended to nearly ten years, its soul consistent even as its shape unfurls in depths and colors I could never have imagined in the beginning.
Though I’ve always been an obsessive journaler, this year, I am particularly reflective... -
Canvas: How We Crafted Facebook’s New Immersive AdsMobile ads can be painful. But they don’t have to be.
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Reactions: Not Everything in Life is LikableIn 2009, Facebook introduced the Like button, but we've since learned that not everything in life is likeable.
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Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique
Critique is an important part of any design process. Here’s how my team at Facebook does it.
Whether you work within a diverse team or independently. The feedback you get through a formal critique can help get you outside your own head in order to make better decisions, overcome obstacles, and strengthen your craft.
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What I've Learned Designing Small Things at FacebookUse small things as experiments, ways to learn more about that big thing you want to attack.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Researchers
What’s the difference between a good researcher and a great researcher?
“Move Fast” is one of Facebook’s best known mottos, which can be seen on posters that decorate the walls of our offices around the world. Although the philosophy of Moving Fast allows Facebook to design and improve products for people all over the world, every once in a while it’s important to slow down, take a step back, and reflect.
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Enterprise Software Design: A Call to Arms
Enterprise and business software should be as human-centered and approachable as consumer technology. And it's the responsibility of designers to get us there.
Today, many products we use in our daily lives are nothing short of miraculous. There’s an increasingly impressive array of well-crafted mobile apps that do a myriad of things. Many modern appliances are easier to operate than ever; even our thermostats have become smart and connected. But all these advances apply mostly to the products we choose to use...
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The Intricate Dance of Designing for 2.5 Million BusinessesThe dance of quality design is never-ending; the rhythm and movements merely change over time. This dance is one I can only learn by doing.
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Photographing Diverse HandsA person using Origami told us that a caucasian male hand didn’t feel right when a majority of people using their products were neither caucasian nor male. We agreed.
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A Guide to Interviewing for Product Design InternshipsProduct design interviews are hard, but interviewing for product design internships is like any other skill.
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Design the BeginningWe often neglect to design the very beginning of things until they're already at their very end.
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Emotional Intelligence in Design
Without mindfulness, products might only be rude, but they might also affect someone’s health, their support systems, or their very livelihood.
We’re on a journey together, you and me. We’ve come a long way, but design for the web is still in its adolescence. In the early aughts we learned to build websites without tables, then we learned to use data to make decisions. Emotion never played a role in driving page views, purchases or video plays. We just needed to get people from point A to point B...
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Designing with ScienceNot everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that is measured matters. — Elliot Eisner
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Facebook’s Four Business Design Principles for Crafting Elegant ToolsWhile Facebook is good at building consumer experiences, we didn't have that reputation in the business context. We wanted to do better, but we had to learn how.
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How Not to Make Your Engineer’s Life Completely TerribleI’m a designer. I like engineers. But I've noticed that most designers don’t know how to work well with them.
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Exploring Dynamic Layout in SketchIf we combine the WYSIWYG nature of Sketch with the power of prototyping, we can make layouts more adaptive and dynamic.
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Designing MomentsWe wanted to help people gather the photos they take with friends. A strong, multidisciplinary team made it happen.
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Designing From Scratch
About a year ago, we were discussing how strange it was that a mobile advertising tool for marketers didn’t exist... so we built one.
About a year ago, a couple of team members and I were discussing how strange it was that a mobile advertising tool for marketers didn’t exist. My team, the ads growth team, spends its time building products that make it easier for small businesses to advertise successfully on Facebook. But the majority of Facebook Ads products have been built with full-time marketers in mind. These people buy Facebook ads at work on their computers...
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What My Grandfather’s Drill Can Teach Us About Designing Business SoftwarePhysical tools give us extraordinary abilities. Software tools should do the same.
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What Designers can Learn from Product Managers
Since I work with some of the best PMs in the industry, I wanted to share some of my learnings over the years gleaned from their PM Handbook of Success...
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A Year of Designing at FacebookAt Facebook, we can explore design challenges that often aren't available elsewhere.
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The 5 Most Common Design Mistakes
There’s no learning without mistakes. And I’ve done the following (as well as seen the following done) too many times to count.
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Designing for Privacy on FacebookPeople are very different and have different expectations of Facebook, so privacy needs to work for all of them.
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Why Design at FacebookThe most classic story of Facebook has nothing to do with its humble beginnings in a dorm room.
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The Death of "Users" and "Product Design"“We need to stop calling people users.” People don’t exist to use your products; you build products with the goal that they can be useful to people.
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How to do a Product CritiqueProduct critique is about developing curiosity of why some products and experiences work for people, and why others don’t.
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Matching A Designer To The Right ProjectThe first time I sit down with a designer joining my team, I ask one very specific question: what is it that motivates you?
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How to Work with Engineers: a Cheat Sheet for DesignersEngineers are like magicians who take plans and pixels and Voila! Create something that works. As a designer, how do you keep up with their meme-savvy, script-loving ways?
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How to Work with PMs: a Cheat Sheet for Designers
Product managers are like chameleons, changing to do whatever it takes to ship. As a designer, how do you handle their data-gushing, smooth-talking ways?
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Quality is Not a Tradeoff
Generally speaking, you can trade in more time and talent and scope to get more quality. Alas, the inverse is not true.
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How to Present Designs
If you're a designer, PM, architect, writer or anyone who spends most of their time living in a creative whirlwind, talking about design is an essential skill.
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Designing Facebook for Mobile VRLessons from the making of the Facebook 360 app for Gear VR.
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Live 360 Videos: Right Time, Right PlaceOn going where few designers have gone before.
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Four Critical Lessons From Upgrading the PanoramaSince the nineteenth century, photographers and storytellers around the world have been attempting to freeze a moment in time by capturing immersive vistas.
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How to Become a Virtual Reality Designer
Lessons from a VR intern at Facebook.
In Summer 2016 I got the opportunity to intern at Facebook as a product designer. A few weeks prior to my internship, I found out that I would be working on the virtual reality team. Given that I had no prior experience in VR, I felt extremely intimidated and unprepared. But to my surprise, upon joining the team, I realized that everyone around me was also constantly learning new skills and that I was not alone. Within 12 weeks I had become a more...
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Identity Transfer And The Rise Of Virtual SurrealismAn exploration of today’s Selfie Culture finding itself at home tomorrow, in a world where everything that defines who we are is only limited by imagination, free from natural constraints.
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A Month Designing in VRA few months ago, I visited Oculus after they joined Facebook—and I remembered my passion for the merging of physical and digital.