Opinions

Women In Product is growing!

Our last edition of our Women In Product dinners turned out great! And now, we are thinking of expanding our event to welcome a larger crowd!

Navigating the Gray Area: How to Ensure Ethical User Research Practices in the Digital Age

Alexia Ingber

How do handle ethics in user research? This articles goes over the main ethical issues that can arise and offers solutions and best practices to help you on way to conducting ethical research

"Why do bad products still exist when we know how to make good ones?"

Alexia Ingber

Critical questioning is the foundation of good research. And good research will lower the risk of your product failing, save you time & money, and just be the perfect bridge between your unique ideas and actual user needs.

Women In Product Dinner: for the love of food, people and Product

At Smooth Sailing, we enjoy qualitative, yet informal networking. That’s why we love to organise ‘Women in Product’ dinners; small scale dinners where we welcome about 15’ish women that work in the Product scene. In the time span of a few courses, we share our experiences, future career ambitions, laughs and we broaden our network. Last Thursday we hosted the second edition, together with Amplitude.

You probably need a design system. Or do you?

Dieter Peirs

Design systems are a common topic if you work in product design. Creating such a system is often sold as the fix to all of your product’s design, scaling and consistency issues. But is it really the best solution for your product?

6 Learnings from transitioning from a corporation to a small design agency as Product Manager

Judith Straetemans

Judith, our newest team member, left Stripe and joined the Belgian agency life at Smooth Sailing. Quite a change, and one outside of her comfort zone. She wrote down 6 learnings from transitioning from a corporation to a true start-up and design agency.

Collaborative documentation: Feature passports

Crafting digital products is an interdisciplinary process, which makes aligning visions and communicating between separate disciplines quite challenging. Feature passports help lower those barriers.

Hypotheses: the design nursery

Hannes D’Hulster

As good designers, we all know that everything starts with understanding our users. But sometimes we are already having discussions with clients, drawing things and checking out competitors.

The oak table

Hannes D’Hulster

I want you to imagine a large massive oak table that has been passed on to you by your grandparents. It is robust and serves its purpose well: supporting food and enabling social contact.

How usability lets your users engage more

Whether you are selling toys to new parents online through a webshop or providing your employees with a platform to manage customers’ financial data, your digital solution will sabotage your company if it is not user-friendly.

Hey Google, how do I design for Voice?

Voice is popping up everywhere. It’s integrated in our phones, tablets, speakers, headphones and even our cars. Our designer Inti explains on how to get started with Voice Interface. It is the ideal step to start even without technical knowledge.

Why my mom should replace judges of design awards

Our user researcher Alex explains in his article why his mother, without any design or development knowledge, is the ideal user interface judge

Let’s go Smooth Sailing ⛵

Hannes D’Hulster

It has been 5 years already since I went my own way, head-first into design research. I was a bit scared, naturally, but I was also really eager to be my own boss.

Time for software design to grow up

Hannes D’Hulster

The value of software design is greater than having good looking interfaces and frictionless flows. Good design creates an impact on the long-term behaviour of people and therefore it impacts the world we live in.

A designer’s guide to talking with users

Hannes D’Hulster

Even with good intentions, it is not easy to get the right user insights. Qualitative research is the basis of a solid digital product that people can relate to. This is why I wrote a blog post or two (in Dutch) about how important it is to involve users in your design research.

Never ask a designer to build a bridge

Hannes D’Hulster

Have you ever worked on a project where something looks off and it’s easy to adjust, but your designer says no? If the designer would just make this simple change, but still no!