The Mobile Spoon

Hey everybody!

It’s that time of the year again when all the cool websites collect lame summaries and recaps of their old stuff so that they don’t have to come up with fresh content (and also get a chance to boost their internal linking and page rank…).

Well, I’m no different.

Plus, I’m a huge fan of summary posts.
Hence, this:   So without further adieu, let’s welcome this year’s most popular posts in the categories: UI design and UX Writing:





1. The most comprehensive guide to cognitive biases and how to use them in products  This one is my all-time favorite post (and this blog exists for over 12 years!).

I love it not because it took me hours to collect all of those 84 cognitive biases and design over 40 UI snippets, but because the process was pure joy!

This guide turned out to be pretty useful; it includes plenty of psychological insights, ways to understand human behavior, biases we all suffer from, loads of useful UI/UX tips, small marketing hacks, and tons of practical rules fo…

20 rules for designing and developing great data tables. 

Tables and grids have always been an important UI component for products and dashboards.
And yet, even today, it’s easy to find data tables that are badly designed or deliver an inadequate user experience.

I came up with the idea to write this UI guide (which was written a thousand times before, but not as brilliantly as I'm going to write it...) while doing some maintenance work for our product (yeah, in our startup, the most senior person does the cleaning...).

Anyway...

I went through over 30 different SeaS tools and SDKs that we're using and played with their dashboards to review some numbers, collect some insights, and make minor modifications. I couldn’t help but notice how bad those tables were implemented, in terms of UI design and basic functionality (and those are good Saas products I'm talking about).

Given that I’ve been developing (and using) tables for 20 years (yes, I know I'm old, one day you'…

Entrepreneurs and product leaders are well-trained to relentlessly prioritize the important stuff, and say no to everything else.

And yet, despite using countless prioritization tools and decision-making frameworks, we are often caught off-guard, allowing our human weaknesses and cognitive biases to get in our way and make bad product decisions.

Often enough, those bad decisions mean bad features sneaking into the product making it cluttered, lacking a coherent experience, and practically making it worse.

Here are 7 deadly sins that invite bad features to sneak into your product:

1. Ego  There’s nothing like inflated ego to make good entrepreneurs behave like rock stars seeking personal glory.



When the “me” part comes before everything else (company, users, employees), bad features are invited into the product for the sake of creating a buzz, being trendy, trying to get noticed and becoming famous.

The thing about ego is that it usually comes with other destructive characteristics suc…

Lately, I had a chance to help a few developers and product managers with their CVs.

After spending years going over resumes, I got to the conclusion that even the brightest people, who know how to design, develop, and promote their products, face some difficulties when it comes to promoting themselves.

So I came up with this notion that CVs are just like products, and product people of all, can exploit the similarities to make their CVs stand out and convert better.

Let’s dive into the details:

Know your user  Let’s start with the personas: HR managers, recruiters, ATS bots, and hiring managers.
There are many practical tips on how to get past the ATS bots into the human hands. These guides usually focus on including accurate keywords across the resume and/or in a dedicated summary section. Personally speaking, I hate buzzwords, so as a general guideline I would suggest to manage them like SEO: you must include them, but don’t overuse or repeat them too much.

In this post, I will foc…

It seems like everyone is trying to wean themselves off their smartphones these days; turning it into black and white, hiding apps inside folders, canceling their notifications and badges, and whatnot.

I’ve been reading countless theories and methods about this and thinking:

“Who am I kidding?"
I don't want to break up with my iPhone!
I love my iPhone!
It’s part of me, the most important add-on to my body.
It’s the amplifier and the distortion all together!

I love checking my messages 1,000 times a day. I love checking our server loads, the number of open orders, exceptions, statistics, trends, emails, who retweeted my tweets, how many new subscribers joined my newsletter and how many likes my last blog post generated.
The iPhone is my all-in-one monitoring tool. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's even productive in many cases despite what many people think these days.

Only problem is - I became a bit too obsessive about it.

I find it hard to let it go and check…

I’ve been gifted with a questionable super-power to spot visual defects at first glance.
It’s like having a spider-sense for distortions, I get this tingling feeling in the back of my skull, every time I see something that’s not aligned, twisted or unaesthetic.

It happens to me when I meet people (look at those gigantic hands! her head is tiny! OMG those fingernails! they look like they belong to a mole!), and as much as I’m trying to make it stop - I just can’t fight my own super-powers.

It also happens when I look at user interfaces: whether I’m working on something new, advising others, or just using a product - I can’t help but spotting design issues the minute I look at things.

So, as an attempt to get rid of this overweight - I decided to create this collection of common UI distortions caused by optical illusions and other design reasons, along with my proposed fixes, hoping that it will help the world create better-looking interfaces (and help me get rid of this unwanted “gift…