I’ve reviewed a lot of design portfolios over the years.
The ones that impress me most aren’t the ones with the most beautiful interfaces. They’re the ones that can clearly explain why a design decision was made and trace it back to a real business or user need. This is the difference between decorating and designing.
Every UX problem is a business problem in disguise.
When DealNews came to me with their marketplace project, the surface problem was “we need a website.” The actual problem was that sales reps were losing deals because there was no way for brands to buy advertising placements online. Every piece of friction in that process was costing the business money.
Once I understood that, the design priorities became clear. The application process had to be fast and confidence-inspiring. The product offerings had to be simple to understand. The calls to action had to be direct and unambiguous. Those weren’t aesthetic choices. They were business decisions expressed through design.
Talk to the people who use the thing before you design it.
This sounds obvious. It rarely happens. Designers often receive briefs from stakeholders who are one or two steps removed from the actual user. The brief describes what the stakeholder wants the product to do. It rarely describes what the user needs to accomplish.
For the DealNews app redesign, the most valuable input came from understanding why users were dropping off during login. Account sync issues, limited login options, and an outdated interface were real friction points that real users were hitting. The design solutions followed from that understanding.
Good UX is invisible.
When I think about the redesigns and products I’m most proud of, they’re not the ones where I showed off technically. They’re the ones where users didn’t have to think. The path through the product was clear. The next action was obvious. The interface got out of the way.
That’s the goal. Not to be clever with design, but to be useful with it. The business problem and the user problem are almost always the same problem approached from different directions. Your job as a designer is to find where they meet.
