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Product Design Insights #24 - Prototyping platforms to win more clients and how human memory works

It's been a while since we have sent you our last newsletter. We have teamed up (again) to bring you
Product Design Insights
Product Design Insights #24 - Prototyping platforms to win more clients and how human memory works
By Athar Majeed  • Issue #24 • View online
It’s been a while since we have sent you our last newsletter. We have teamed up (again) to bring you the best and handful curated articles that we are reading and hope you would like them too. It would only be a few handful articles from us and around the web. We would love to have you on this bi-weekly newsletter list and continue sharing what we are learning on the way to building the product for app designers and app developers. We have updated our privacy policy and terms & condition in relation to the GDPR, please review them on our website. You can review your subscription for this newsletter and opt out if you don’t want to receive product design insight newsletter. 
A new version of Savah releasing in September 2018 with a tons of new exciting features including Sketch App plugin and project design workflow. Stayed tuned!
Hope you are having a great week! Enjoy the reading 😊

How simple prototyping platforms can win more clients
The buzzword surrounding app development now seems to be ‘prototype’ as businesses, and app designers strive to find a way to design a mockup app. It is difficult for clients to understand exactly how their app works without practically seeing an example. However, how is that beneficial for the designer? They cannot spend hours creating and coding an app for a presentation or demonstration, only to be turned down and not be paid for the time and effort. This challenge has paved the way for simple prototype platforms, which are extremely easy to learn.
There are surfeit of reasons to develop prototypes for new ideas, concepts and platforms. Prototyping platforms to win clients starts with taking an idea and transforming it into a palpable functional existence.
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Start-up organizations provide an extraordinary example of chaos organized into manageable chunks. Perhaps more than anyone else, the individuals who comprise a start-up team are required to understand their team’s goals across a variety of disciplines — research, marketing, design, development, architecture, etc. — as well as their own responsibility to move the company’s overarching objective forward. Entrepreneurs must choose the direction, designers must think through the options, and developers must cull a functional product or service, all while giving feedback to and receiving it from their colleagues.
At least, that’s the idea. Most **start-ups tend to take liberties** somewhere along the way. Some start-ups begin with a novel business model, whereas others begin with a beautiful design. Still others try to test things out first with a functional prototype, even if it is a bit ugly. All of them — regardless of their initial approach — adapt their process over time in order to create a well-rounded product or service. And for this reason, most of today’s start-ups describe themselves as “agile.”
www.smashingmagazine.com  •  Share
Usability and user experience for EdTech products | Jisc
With the huge competitive advantage well designed technology products give to universities and colleges, an understanding of usability and user experience is key to their success. Usability and user experience relate to how well a product (or service) is designed, but there are subtle and important distinctions between them two.
  • Usability is about ease of use: a highly usable product enables the user to achieve their goals quickly, with minimum fuss or frustration and without error
  • User experience includes usability, but also encompasses a more emotional dimension: for example, the desire, joy, meaning, reflection, value or frustration that a user experiences
www.jisc.ac.uk  •  Share
Good teams have a clear sense of who documents these decisions and how they are communicated. These contributors (depicted in orange) author guidelines, build components in code, update design tool templates, and do so much more than keep the system alive.
High-performing teams establish platforms (such as github.com repositories and other content publishing tools) that enable an array of individuals to continuously evolve a system’s definition.
But, alas, some teams don’t have such platforms. More often, the individuals making decisions in a federated model aren’t always available enough to write them down.
Yes, a federated team needs a centralized component of staff dedicated enough to the cause.
Leaders create space for doers to get the job done. They ensure there’s staff for whom the library is a prioritized responsibility of or only part of their job. Without that fine work, that living style guide can seems quite dead—or at least unconscious—ten months on.
This is a great long and great article if you are working on designing a large and complex information system.
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A shorthand for designing UI flows – Signal v. Noise
Flows are just as important to good interfaces as individual screens are. Customers don’t land on screens from out of nowhere. Specific sequences of actions lead customers through your app as they try to accomplish their tasks.
Flows are made out of individual interactions. A screen offers some possibilities and the user chooses one. Then something happens, and the screen changes. It’s an ongoing conversation. Each moment in a flow is like a coin with two sides. The screen is showing something on one side, and the user is reacting on the other side. My flow diagrams illustrate this two-sided nature with a bar. Above the bar is what the user sees. Below the bar is what they do. An arrow connects the user’s action to a new screen with yet another action.
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How Human Memory Works: Tips for UX Designers
Knowing how memory works, designers can create human-centered interfaces which correspond to the natural abilities of the users, save their effort and boost usability.
Basically, psychologists mention three types of memory:
  • sensory memory holds the data for a short moment when we perceive it with our physical senses like hearing, vision or touch;
  • short-term memory (working memory) allows a person to keep some data remembered for a short period of time without repetitions;
  • long-term memory presents the storage for big quantities of diverse data which could be saved for long periods of time, potentially up to the whole lifetime.
One of the greatest information processors we deal with in our everyday life cannot be seen or touched. It cannot be bought or sold as well as taken from other people; however, it can be developed.
uxplanet.org  •  Share
The number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven. Miller’s Law
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And finally!
🏁 Thank you for reading this week Product Design Insights. We’d love to hear from you! You can tweet us with your feedback. Should you have any questions or suggestions/comments, please get in touch! 🔔
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Athar Majeed

We curate tips, news, articles on product design, UX resources and trends in design and prototyping. Specifically curated content for designers, founders, startups and digital agencies. Curated by @atharmajeed.

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