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'…

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…

Conversion rate optimization always reminded me of curling.

In curling, the main player throws a giant puck-shaped stone, aiming to reach a certain point, while 2 sweepers use their brooms to sweep the ice in front of the stone and slightly modify its path or speed until it reaches the target.

The path to optimize a product’s conversion rate involves a lot of curling-style tasks: UX/UI polishing, text modifications, psychological hacks, measurements, tons of experiments, numbers, and some more measurements.

There’s nothing sexy in those hundreds of small tasks that usually drive minor improvements, but then again, there’s nothing sexy in curling either…





While it’s hard to find improvements that will sky rocket your conversion rates, there is one topic that can easily knock it down if it's badly implemented: Money.

Whenever money is involved (purchases through the app, paid services, booking), the users become much more sensitive to security risks, uncertainties, unclear text, bug…