I find myself coming back to Paul Graham’s article about how to come up with ideas for startups. As a result, my rule for personal projects at the moment is to work on something I have experience in, or a problem I’ve faced personally and want to solve. Designing a system you’re an end user for is great. You know the pain points and the nuances of the problem.

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
How To Get Startup Ideas, Paul Graham

But there’s a contradiction to this idea. What if you’re a UI/UX designer at a company that’s working...

The past few weeks have been eventful. I’m travelling to a bunch of cold places this December, and was in dire need of warm clothes. After looking up a few websites, I finalized on a Pikachu hoodie, a Hotline Bling sweatshirt and a Team Rocket sweater. Thank god for buying stuff online.

Work has been eventful too. Housing announced that it’s going to shut down its Rental platform and becoming a pure Buy platform. What that means is that you can’t look up places to rent anymore, only properties to buy and invest in.

What that meant for me was that I was in a bit of a situation. Since I joined Housing in May, I’ve been working on the Rentals platform almost exclusively. Until last month, I was balls deep in how to look for a rental apartment, communicating with brokers, token amounts and rental agreements etc. Now, I’m moving to a product that helps people buy houses. I’m 22 years old...

Responsive design is that which changes in response to the device it’s being viewed on. In this article I’d like to deconstruct responsive design and attempt to explore how we can extend it to new gen devices like wearables.

What responsive design aims to do

Change layout according to device

Just because your site is viewable on all devices, doesn’t mean it’s responsive. Changing layout often involves positioning elements differently, as you just don’t have the same luxury as you would do with a computer. You have to account for whether links are tappable, text is readable, whether you need that extra item and so on.

Change navigability to better suit device ergonomics

Each device is used differently, with actions of its own. On a computer you might click to go next on a slider, but on a phone you’d swipe. On a computer you can afford to display all nav links in the header vs...

Being a designer with an Android phone, I try my best to find the best designed apps on the market. That can be more difficult than it sounds, with majority of app designs on dribbble being iOS and also partly due to Android’s notoriety for being flooded with poorly designed apps owing to the low entry barrier.

In this article, I’d like to explore Android’s design guidelines for the Action bar or the top bar and the contrast with its iOS counterparts.

Left Alignment

While not specifically mentioned in their guidelines, it is standard practice to left align text or logo. The reason for this is two-fold.

Better discoverability of navigation drawer

The action to open the Navigation drawer aka the side menu is either a swipe or tap on the top left. Placing logo and text here increases tappable area, thus making it less likely that users will ignore it altogether.

Better utilization