Do you find yourself spending too much time sifting through articles on UX, Product Design, and HCI just to realize you didn’t learn anything new? I’ve been pretty annoyed at home much time I’ve sunk into reading the same article on why it’s important to create journey maps or how to write personas. So annoyed, in fact, that I’ve taking to trying my hardest ingest real research papers in the field.

Why take that time if it isn’t worth sharing with the rest of you. So in an effort to make us smarter, send us down rabbit holes of interesting ideas, and maybe stop paying for that medium subscription, I’ve started a venture to share some of what I’ve found on Substack and hopefully find a paid subscriber or two.

So if you feel the same way I have about the current state of the shared knowledge that is being created online, check out the first (very free) issue of academiUX.

in Notes ux research hci

For years I was an unofficial spokesperson for #Figma. I tried my best to convince everyone that it was the future of design and, for a while, people resisted. There wasn’t a tool out there that could do what Figma did. For anyone that’s been watching, it has somehow become the de-facto tool for interface design, for good reason. One of the reasons I loved it so much was that it wasn’t #Adobe, but I’m not going to get into that here.

Almost every piece of software I use in my work (outside of my day job) is open source, with Figma being the one exception. I’ve played around with a lot of different options for open source #UX, but there just wasn’t anything that could compare.

And then came PenPot. I’ve been watching from afar as it has developed, played around to get a feel for the features, but never delved deep into using it in my regular workflow. Today, however, as I start a new freelance project, PenPot is where I’m starting and I plan on doing all my freelance/personal work from here on out with it.

Figma, I appreciate you but I have to move on. Team #PenPot!

in Notes figma penpot ux design adobe open-source