On the second episode of the Product Design Report, we talk about the Wix design team refactoring their error messages, several updates and tools for Figma and FigJam, a recap of Adobe MAX, accessible color combinations, Overflow Stories, and the State of Design Ops 2022 report.

Links:

1. Article from Jenny Nadler about error messages: https://wix-ux.com/when-life-gives-you-lemons-write-better-error-messages-46c5223e1a2f
2. Find and replace in Figma: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/9141292269847
3. A few new things in Figma and FigJam: https://twitter.com/figma/status/1584927247328313344
4. Figma Autoname plugin: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1160642826057169962/Figma-Autoname
5. Adobe MAX: https://www.adobe.com/max.html
6. Adobe Fonts in Figma: https://www.creativebloq.com/news/adobe-figma-max
7. Some AI experiments at Adobe MAX: https://prototypr.io/post/adobe-ai-max-sneaks-2022
8. Randoma11y: https://randoma11y.com/
9. Overflow Stories: https://overflow.io/stories/
10. State of Design Ops 2022: https://designops.report/

Watch the first episode of the Product Design Report where we talk about working remotely as a designer, Penpot's big announcement about a round of funding, the Abstract show on Netflix, and the new Spark app for Mac.

Links

1. Article about in-demand remote jobs: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/05/the-most-in-demand-work-from-anywhere-jobs-companies-are-hiring-for.html
2. Penpot: https://penpot.app/
3. Penpot’s article announcing funding: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563
4. Abstract show on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80057883
5. Stark for Mac: https://www.getstark.co/mac/
6. Tweet from Anna Cook about accessibility specialists: https://twitter.com/annaecook/status/1529170604225482753

Darshan Gajara is Head of Design at GraphCMS and creator of Product Disrupt. In this episode, we discuss how to take insights you glean from UX research and turn them into actual designs.

We talk about:

• Make sure your design and research reports are clear and story-based so others have the right understanding.
• Utilize low-fidelity tools like wireframes and user flows. It helps bridge the gap.
• Getting hung up on a specific process can sometimes hamper your ability to make designs based on the real problem.
• If you're having trouble translating research into designs, it's likely that there's a breakdown earlier in your flow: you're going after the wrong problem, don't have a hypothesis, chose the wrong method, etc.
• Raise the general UX research IQ of your whole team so everyone can synthesize together.
• Utilize usability testing — it's an easy way to validate your design translations.
• When you're doing really broad research, make sure you know exactly what you're looking for so that you have specific deliverables to help you more easily translate your findings.
• Get effective and efficient at synthesis because that's the bridge between research and UI design.

Links:

• Follow Darshan on Twitter
• Product Disrupt
• Follow UX Tools on Twitter
• Subscribe to the UX Tools Newsletter