Job-hopping and invisible design changes

📰 3 Design Articles

How I Know When to Quit My Design Job

• Senior Designer Melanie Koh reflects on being a seasoned “job-hopper” in the design industry, addressing issues like unfulfilled promises, toxic work environments, and the pursuit of professional growth and purpose.
  
• Koh discusses factors that lead to job changes, such as companies devaluing work, while also focusing on some positives of leaving a role, such as increased opportunities for challenges and growth.
  
• Koh advocates for a thoughtful assessment of one's career path and aspirations: “If you choose to pursue a career of curiosities, your decision chart is pretty much a colorful pathway of your interests as the years go along.”

The Polish Paradox

• In this insightful article, design team lead Matthew Strom considers the concept of “polish”, advocating that polish in design is not merely an aesthetic enhancement, but more so meticulous attention to detail that actually aims to make itself invisible.
  
• Through dissecting real-world examples, Strom illustrates how thoughtful refinements make interactions feel intuitively right, stating that the best polish is that which goes unnoticed, thereby achieving a seamless integration of form and function.
  
• “The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must be an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning.”

Sustainable UX: Promoting Behavior through Cognitive Biases

• UX researcher Nergis Çolak explores the pivotal role of sustainable UX design in mitigating the environmental impact of our digital activities, emphasizing how cognitive biases can be harnessed to promote eco-friendly behaviors that positively impact our rapidly changing global environment.
  
• Using examples like nudge theory, such as making a paperless banking option more prominent on a page default bias, or reciprocity, where users receive something in return for making an eco-friendly choice, Çolak illustrates how subtle design choices can lead users to make more sustainable decisions.
  
• “The transformative power of sustainable UX offers hope in our search to mitigate the environmental impact of our increasingly digital lives. The path forward requires more than just design. It demands a continuous commitment to monitoring adoption, ethically balancing influence with autonomy, and overcoming service limitations that currently hinder these efforts.”

💜 Portfolio Inspiration

Charm Salvino, a UX Academy graduate, brings a background in civil engineering to her redesign of a construction company’s website, incorporating both strong UI and thorough research. She also seeks to streamline the online shopping process through an app design called “Favorite”, where users can easily feel less frustrated and more in control of their shopping experiences.

Got a portfolio you love that you’d like to share with our audience? Email your suggestions to hello@designlab.com.

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I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things. — Lindo Leader (designer and creator of the FedEx logo)

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