/solo-startup-product-design

So you're a product designer at a startup? A collection of bookmarks, resources, & articles.

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Startup Product Design Awesome

So you're a solo product designer at a startup or larger org? A collection of bookmarks, resources, articles.

Digital product design is an iterative design process to solve a functional problem with a formal solution. A digital product designer identifies a real problem, offers the best possible solution, and launch it to a market that is showing demand for that particular solution.

Feel free to add something interesting by pull request.

Contents

Principles

Guides & Articles

Books

Research

Methods

Research Plan
User Interview
  • NN Group - Despite many weaknesses, interviews are a valuable method for exploratory user research.
  • UXDesign.cc - How to Get the Most Out of User Interviews.
Stakeholder Interviews
Research Synthesis
  • UX Movement - How to Turn User Research into Usable Data.
  • SlideShare - Design Research Synthesis.
  • Medium - Using Trello for User Research Synthesis.
  • Tuts+ - How to Prepare and Use an Affinity Diagram.
  • Medium - Affinity Diagrams: Tips and Tricks.
Competitive Analysis
  • Xtensio - How To: Create A Competitive Analysis.
  • Hootsuite - Competitive Analysis Template To Help You Outsmart The Competition.
Job to be Done
  • Intercom - Designing features using Job Stories.
  • JTBD - Replacing The User Story With The Job Story.
Personas
  • Usability.Gov - The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience.
  • UX Mag - Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience.
  • Tuts+ - Defining And Applying Personas to UX Design.
Empathy Map
  • UX Pin - The Practical Guide to Empathy Maps: 10-Minute User Personas.
  • Boagworld - Adapting empathy maps for UX design.
Storyboard
  • UX Magazine - Storyboarding in the Software Design Process.
  • Medium - Storyboarding in UX Design.
  • NN Group - When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps.
  • UX Lady - Experience maps, user journeys and more.
  • Smashing Magazine - All You Need To Know About Customer Journey Mapping.
  • Medium - How to build an experience map.

Articles

  • Smashing Magazine - The Rainbow Spreadsheet: A Collaborative Lean UX Research Tool.
  • Coglode - Bite-size behavioral research analysis.

Testing

  • User Testing - Unlock customer insights and increase your revenue.
  • Optimal Workshop - User Research Platform that helps you and your team make design decisions with confidence.
  • Measure Success - How Do You Measure the Success (or Failure) - of Your UX Design?.
  • Lookback - Simple, powerful user research.
  • Full Story - What do you want to know about your customer experience?.
  • Desinion - Make smart and informed design decisions for your company, or your client's company.
  • Survey Monkey - Turn instincts into insights.
  • Etnio - Intercept Real People for User Research.

UX

Guidelines

  • The UX Bookmark - Collection of the best UX websites from across the globe.
  • Gov.Uk - Helping government teams create and run great digital services.
  • Methods 18F - Collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.
  • Guides 18F - 18F Guides is the repository for best practices across our teams.
  • Usability.Gov - Improving the User Experience.
  • Medial Lab Amsterdam - Design method toolkit.
  • Design Kit IDEO - Step-by-step guide to unleashing your creativity.
  • Gamestorming - Gamestorming is a set of co-creation tools used by innovators around the world.

Articles

  • UX Magazine - UX Magazine is a free community resource exploring all facets of experience design.
  • UX Booth - The UX Booth is a publication by and for the user experience community.
  • UX Mastery - We help user experience professionals get started and get better.
  • UX Myths - Build your product based on evidence, not false beliefs.
  • A List Apart - List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content.
  • 52 Weeks of UX - Discourse on the process of designing for real people.
  • UX Pin - Guides, articles and ebooks that explore all facets of UX Design.
  • The IxD Library - Collection of materials related to Interaction Design.
  • LukeW - Publications on the critical details and big picture behind digital product design.
  • NN Group - Evidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting.
  • Information Design - InfoDesign Hand-picked since 1997.
  • Intercom - Design, Customer Success, & Startup Blog.
  • UXDesign.cc - User Experience, Usability, Product Design. Follow the UXDesign.cc.
  • UX Reactions - Fun stuff.

Tools

  • UX Recipe - This project is a personal manifesto against the objectification of the term "UX".
  • UX Checklist - UX Project Checklist.
  • UX Stackexchange - UX Stack Exchange is a question and answer site.

UI

Guidelines

  • Ant Design - An UI design language for enterprise applications.
  • iOS Guidelines - Get in-depth information and UI resources for designing great apps that integrate seamlessly with Apple platforms.
  • Google Material - Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.
  • Google Design - Google Design is a cooperative effort led by a group of designers, writers, and developers at Google.
  • Facebook Design - Collection of articles, videos, and resources made by designers at Facebook.
  • UsTwo - Pixel Perfect Precision Handbook 3.
  • Vinsol - Tips for Designers: from a Developer.

Inspiration

  • Pttrns - The mother of all design resources.
  • Call To Idea - Light up your imagination!.
  • Android Niceties - Aiming to provide inspiration and insight into Android UI conventions.
  • Lovely UI - Collection of mobile UI elements.
  • Brian Lovin - Visual exploration of the best products.
  • Inspired UI - iOS Mobile Apps Design Patterns.
  • Sloppy UI - It's all about intellectual honesty, not trolling.

Tools

  • Pattern Lab - Create atomic design systems with Pattern Lab.
  • Huge - Tool to make creating and maintaining styleguides easy.
  • Figma Bootstrap 5 UI Kit - UI Kit comprising 300+ organized Bootstrap 5 components built with atomic design system & auto layout.
  • Sketch Bootstrap 5 UI Kit - UI Kit comprising 300+ organized Bootstrap 5 components built with atomic design system & smart layout.

Visual

Resources

  • Design Principles FTW - The biggest collection of Design Principles on the Internet.
  • Awesome Design Systems - Curated list of design systems, patterns libraries, and everything in between.
  • Awesome Sketch - Curated list of awesome Sketch videos, articles, plugins, whatever, for designers, developers, or neither.

Icons

  • Use Iconic - Meet Iconic. The definitive icon set designed for the modern web.
  • Icon Finder - Search through 1,739,045 icons or browse 42,226 icon sets.
  • We Love Icon Font - This is a free & open source icon fonts hosting service.
  • The Noun Project - Icons for everything.
  • Iconmonstr - Discover 3847+ free simple icons in 263 collections.

Font Foundries

  • Open Foundry - New platform for open-source fonts in a noise-free environment.
  • Use & Modify - Provide a contemporary set of fonts distributed under libre or open source licences, hand picked by a typography and free culture lover.
  • Font Fabric - Fontfabric is an independent type foundry.
  • Font Squirrel - Free Font Utopia.
  • Play Type - Browse through our selection of more than a hundred fonts and nearly 500 different font weights.
  • Identyfont - Identify a font by answering questions about key features.

Typography

  • NN Group - Typography Terms Cheat Sheet.

Colors

  • Coolors - The super fast color schemes generator!.
  • Colour Lovers - Creative community.
  • Color Hunt - Color Hunt is a social platform for everyone who love colors.
  • Brand Colors - 1100+ color collection available in sass, less, stylus and css.

Stock Images

  • Unsplash - Free (do whatever you want) - high-resolution photos.
  • StockSnap - Hundreds of high resolution images added weekly.
  • Pixbay - Free images and videos you can use anywhere.
  • Jay Mantry - Free pics (CC0).
  • Get Refe - Royalty-free, high-quality, Real Life photos.
  • ISO Republic - ISO Republic provides free stock photos for creative professionals.
  • All The Free Stock - Get all the Free Stock Images, Videos, Music and Icons in one location.
  • Pexels - Free stock images in a range of styles including filtered, natural, and commercial.
  • unDraw - Open-source illustrations for every project you can imagine and create.

Stock Videos

  • Vimeo - Royalty Free Stock Video for Free Personal, Corporate or Commercial Use.

Tools

  • Polarr - Photo Editor.
  • Licecap - Simple animated screen captures.
  • Kap - Capture your screen
  • Screen Studio - Screen recordings
  • Hand Brake - HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

Prototype

Articles

  • The 12 Principles - The 12 basic principles of animation were developed by the ‘old men’ of Walt Disney Studios.
  • Hoverstat - The home of alternative digital design.
  • Microinteractions - Designing with Details.
  • Motion UI Design - Resources for inspiration, lists of software, libraries and other stuff related to Motion UI design, animations and transitions.

Softwares

  • Pop - POP helps you transform your pen and paper ideas into an interactive iPhone or Android prototype.
  • Invision - The world's leading prototyping, collaboration & workflow platform.
  • Marvel - Simple design, prototyping and collaboration.
  • Flinto - Flinto lets designers quickly make interactive prototypes of their mobile, desktop, or web apps.
  • Origami Studio - Explore, iterate, and test your ideas.
  • Framer - All-in-one design workflow.
  • Proto - Create fully-interactive high-fidelity prototypes that look and work exactly like your app should. No coding required.
  • ProtoPie - ProtoPie is the easiest prototyping tool to build advanced, highly interactive prototypes.

Tools

  • Lottie - Easily add high-quality animation to any native app.
  • Keynotopia - Keynotopia transforms Keynote and PowerPoint into the best rapid prototyping tools for creating mobile, web and desktop UI mockups.

Accessibility

Articles

  • Gov.Uk - Making your service accessible: an introduction.
  • Smashing Magazine - Color Contrast And Why You Should Rethink It.
  • Medium - Accessibility for designers. Mind your RGBs.
  • Web Credible - Visual design and color accessibility.
  • A List Apart - Easy Color Contrast Testing.

Tools

  • WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool.
  • Contrast Ratio - A tool to calculate the contrast ratio between any two valid CSS colors.
  • Snook - Colour Contrast Check.

Writing

  • Chat GPT - AI driven
  • Writer for Chrome - Chrome Extension
  • Wordtune - Chrome Extension
  • Google trends - Stories trending now.
  • Google Ngram - Enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books.
  • Hemingway - Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
  • Readable - You have 7 seconds to grab someone's attention. Readable.io helps you cut out the noise.
  • The Writer - How readable is your writing?.
  • Taskade - Collaborative editor and outliner.

Data

  • London Datastore - The London Datastore is a free and open data-sharing portal.
  • YouGov - We believe in the power of participation.
  • Data.Gov - Find data published by government departments and agencies, public bodies and local authorities.
  • The Tate Collection - Here we present the metadata for around 70,000 artworks.
  • NASA - We're Setting Data, Code and APIs free.

IoT

Articles

  • IoT Weekly News - Subscribe to hand picked articles by Justin Grammens on the Internet of Things.
  • IoT Agenda - Design an IoT user experience, not an IoT product.
  • IoT For All - Designing the Internet of Things – 5 Key Principles.

Tools

  • Node RED - Low-based programming for the Internet of Things.