During my first year at Figma, I designed and printed a run of posters for the office titled “Design is more.” The idea was to highlight that UX design is more than people expect, and connected in interesting ways to other domains. Today, they feel like a spiritual predecessor to this blog.

The first series was three posters:

I still (mostly) like them. I do believe that software can learn more about conveyance from video games; a lot of first-run experiences and particularly new feature onboarding still feel like a series of random pop-ups floating around the screen without much understanding of me as a user.

I would rewrite these posters, however, and particularly the Fitts’s Law examples: they’re generic and probably not as relevant to today’s applications.

After series one, we also collaboratively started working on series two, but the pandemic put a halt to the effort, and these posters were never finished/​printed. But the two below were perhaps closest to ready, and they seem fun today; I particularly liked the joke on the Hick’s Law one.

Jon Yablonski, the author of “Laws of UX,” made some posters in a similar vein and they’re available for purchase. His are slightly more on the visual side, but I was delighted to discover today that we both chose a rather similar approach to visualizing the Zeigarnik Effect.

(200th blog post here!)