Sunny June!

So the first half of the year is soon crashing to its end. It's the season of increased intensity and intentions of getting things hopefully done before embarking on a relaxing holiday. In this newsletter, I have created observations of why different design roles exist and what their key purposes are from a tech person's perspective.

Meet our curator of the month

Ilmari is a curious IT generalist based in Helsinki, Finland, who open-mindedly flirts with many domains ranging from business and IT to design and everything in between.

His most recent curiosity is understanding how great products are shaped; and how different aspects of design serve the success of a product, small or large. As a tech principal, Ilmari typically paves the way for Futurice’s customers toward technological excellence from a code-level all the way to tech strategy. In his free time, he builds a consumer music app.

His interest in design has emerged from a realization that great tech alone doesn’t translate into tangible customer value.

Ilmari's picks

How to simplify complex online-application UX design

By Arun Murugesan

Arun shares a practical example of splitting a complex task into multiple easy to understand steps. Even the number of steps can be obfuscated to appear fewer. I really enjoyed the level of detail and story flow of this article.

How to simplify your design

By Taras Bakusevych

As a tech guy it’s a huge frustration to see users miss the killer features they absolutely fall in love with once they understand. Another well-structured article on simplifying UX.

Modern iOS navigation patterns

By Frank Rausch

This is one of the articles that successfully distills lots of complex information into a graphical and comprehensible format. Perhaps you aren’t designing solely for iOS, but the same principles can be applied anywhere.

Aperture’s Hannah Parvaz on profitably scaling performance marketing

By David Barnard

This one sheds light on how exactly tech, design and growth come together in the context of an app.

Know your curator better

Tell us about a particularly interesting or challenging project you’ve worked on.

In my current assignment as a release manager in a large corporation, I observed that many issues surfacing at the release stage have their roots in the very early stages of development, in the translation of business opportunities into Jira issues to be implemented by the developers. Solving apparent release-stage issues has required improvements to the overall thinking in the whole process.

What hobbies or interests are you passionate about?

Aside from helping big companies, I do have a side project, an AI music generator called Songen. It provides a nice playground for applying all learnings on a small scale.

These are the recent design learnings around building Songen:

1. Lack of service design makes user personas and flows obscure
2. Lack of CX design loses customers before they get their hands on the product
3. Lack of UX design fails to convey the potential value of the product (=users get lost)
4. Lack of UI design makes the product appear cheap

A bonus learning: advertising can absolutely yield growth. Although growth is super cool, advertisement-driven growth is very often just a short-term plaster, shifting focus from solving the real product/usability issues in the journey of seeking actual product-market fit.

Any tips for maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

Learn to develop a sense of urgency immediately before the actual hard deadlines approach. This takes lots of active discipline but rewards a calm work environment and enables you to reserve ad-hoc time for getting to know new people and be curious about them. Strong relationships are key to anything associated with health, mental or physical.

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