💌Great reads from February 2019 💌
Welcome to the roundup newsletter for February.
Here's my top 5 links from posts I read in February.
Tooltips: Your Secret Weapon for Improving Feature Discovery
Whether you agree or not tooltips (not the markup feature that is still woefully underused) have become a common method for introducing people to your digital products now we've reached a point of never writing a user manual 😔this post goes into detail of how they're used in some of the biggest platforms on the web and along with some good advice on when and when not to apply them.
https://blog.nomnominsights.com/tooltips-your-secret-weapon-for-improving-feature-discovery/
Great design calls for a new relationship
This is a belter from UK Customer Experience Specialists CXPartners. Stu Charlton details a recent experience in UK insurance that required radical new thinking to a time-precious wicked problem. What I especially liked was the politeness around calling out the large consultancies of this world (you know the ones..) and their lacklustre performance to pander risk aversion and report writing. By far one of my top 5 agencies in the UK, if not Europe their blog is always worth following.🤟
https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/our-thinking/great-design-calls-for-a-new-relationship/
How to hire designers
You had me at the dribbblisation of design 🖌️ This post by messaging platform/swiss army knife Intercom is a great example of how to write about design if you want to get loads of traffic. It is buzzword galore but scrape all that away and there is some critical advice for anyone looking to hire their first designer, what not to look for and how to cut through the BS and see what they're capable of 🤘
https://www.intercom.com/blog/how-to-hire-designers/
How to build culture that lasts
Patreon VP Operations Tyler Palmer was their first hire. He wrote about their culture back in 2017 and it's still a good example of internal policy used as external PR. In the slide deck pages 39-43 are about their manager expectations. Great read for anyone thinking of becoming a manager in a creative business.
https://patreonhq.com/how-to-build-culture-that-lasts-dc25b086cefd
Preventing customer churn with UX
In Dylan Ortega's post he takes a look at how churn reports and stats can be mapped to user journeys for SaaS businesses in order to identify areas for improvement. It's all too obvious so why aren't we adding these types of data-points to our journeys? I'd love to read more about how you integrate good data to journey maps to make them meaningful to more business units.
https://blog.nomnominsights.com/preventing-customer-churn-with-ux/
And a bonus one that will get you in the mood for the next project.
How To Storyboard for Animation
A lovely little video on why storyboards are critical to the success of an animated film because it is expensive to make and you can't just re-shoot. Storyboarding has been my favourite way for communicating user journeys for a long time now and a great skill for anyone to learn.
https://youtu.be/m2JJxRlxV2s