Annyeong Smashing Friends,
In times when everybody is trying to get things done faster and more efficiently, there is value in doing the opposite as well. Slow down and zoom in. Explore all the fine little details that make or break an experience. But also study how you work, how you make decisions, how you organize yourself, and how you grow.
This newsletter is looking at some of those fine little details that matter — how to make better design decisions, how to think out of the box, and how to grow in your design career. Hopefully, there is something for you in here!
If you have time in the following weeks to boost your skills, we highly recommend signing up for one (or more, just sayin’!) of our interactive and friendly Smashing online workshops:
Explore shiny new design patterns for better AI experiences, with yours truly. Join in →
Wishing you a wonderful week ahead, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. Spider Map
Imagine a spider moving over a map. Its body marks your location, while the tip of each leg stretches out, attaching to nearby metro stations as if drawn to them by magnetic force. That’s exactly how Lior Steinberg’s Spider Map works. The interactive web map shows the closest metro stations to any location with one to eight adjustable “spider legs.” To give people a better sense of travel distance, they can switch between Euclidean and actual walking distances. Clever!
2. Enterprise Design Systems
Whether it’s in healthcare, education, or employees’ internal systems, enterprise products have a significant impact in critical domains, and still, the UX work required often goes unnoticed. To shine a light on designing for enterprise products, Vitaly compiled enterprise UX design systems and Figma kits. They provide precious insights into a challenging field, where the user experience needs to be build around internal politics, rigid processes, and strict legal regulations.
3. AI-Powered Design System Auditing
As agents, automation, and AI-led workflows are transforming the product lifecycle, design system components need to meet AI and engineering needs alike. To help designers ensure their components are robust, structured, and self-describing, TJ Pitre created FigmaLint. The plugin audits components for design system compliance, accessibility, and developer readiness, then helps you fix what it finds.
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4. How To Become A Senior Designer
A lot of junior designers think that if they work hard enough, their efforts will be seen and they’ll reach the next career level. In reality, things look different, and growth must be proactively initiated. But how? In her post “How To Become A Senior Designer,” Yutong Xue, formerly Google, now Meta designer, shares her growth story and the mindset shifts that helped her advance in her career.
5. How To Organize Figma Files
We often assume that fellow team members know how to navigate Figma the way we do. However, other designers may have different methods, and engineers and PMs may not know where to start at all. To help you organize your Figma files so they are easy to use for everyone involved in a project, Lee Munroe shares the template he and the design team at One Signal Design use for organization.
For some quick tips for cleaning up a messy Figma file, also be sure to check out the cheatsheet that Vitaly put together. It summarizes ideas for neat setup and better maintenance that you can apply to your files right away.
6. The Cognitive Bias Gap
In organizational settings, what appears to be bias often turns out to be a rational response to incentives and constraints. To help us reframe the old narrative, Robert Meza created The Cognitive Bias Gap. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where something isn’t working, you can scan the patterns to notice which one might be true, then challenge that instinct.
Another useful tool to narrow down which biases might be affecting your decisions and judgments is Jon Yablonski’s Cognitive Bias Index. It gives you an overview of how different types of bias occur and how to avoid them.
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7. Tools For Better Thinking
Am I solving the right problem? Which option is the best one? What are the long-term consequences of my decision? To help designers find answers to the questions they ask themselves on a day-to-day basis, Adam Amran created Untools, a wonderful collection of tools for solving problems, making decisions, and understanding systems. For more, also be sure to check out Vitaly’s collection of tools for better thinking.
8. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚
We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.
Meet our brand-new book: “Accessible UX Research” by Michele A. Williams. Printed copies shipping now.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.
9. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
10. Person Of The Week: Joe Attardi
Please give a warm round of applause for our Person of the Week: Joe Attardi. Joe is a software engineer with a deep love for the modern JavaScript ecosystem. He has been building functional, user-friendly web applications for over 20 years.
Beyond the code, Joe enjoys connecting with the developer community and helping others navigate the complexities of web development. He shares his insights and experiences through writing articles, authoring books, and contributing to open-source projects.
Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Joe! 🧡
11. Recent Smashing Articles
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Cosima Mielke, Vitaly Friedman, and Iris Lješnjanin.
Sent to truly smashing readers via Mailchimp.
We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.
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