Author: Vitaly Friedman

Every generation is different in very unique ways, with different habits, views, standards, and expectations. So when designing for Gen Z, what do we need to keep in mind? Let’s take a closer look at Gen Z, how they use tech, and why it might be a good idea to ignore common design advice and do the opposite of what is usually recommended instead.

This article is part of our ongoing series on UX. You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 — with live UX training coming up soon. Free preview.

When we talk about Generation Z, we usually refer to people born between 1995 and 2010. Of course making universal statements about a cohort where some are adults in their late 20s and others are school students is at best ineffective and at worst wrong — yet there are some attributes that stand out compared to earlier generations.

Gen Z is the most diverse generation in terms of race, ethnicity, and identity. Research shows that young people today are caring and proactive, and far from being “slow, passive and mindless” as they are often described. In fact, they are willing to take a stand and break their habits if they deeply believe in a specific purpose and goal. Surely there are many distractions along that way, but the belief in fairness and sense of purpose has enormous value.

Their values reflect that: accessibility, inclusivity, sustainability, and work/life balance are top priorities for Gen Zs, and they value experiences, principles, and social stand over possessions.

What Gen Z Deeply Cares About

Gen Z grew up with technology, so unsurprisingly digital experiences are very familiar and understood by them. On the other hand, digital experiences are often suboptimal at best — slow, inaccessible, confusing, and frustrating. Plus, the web is filled with exaggerations and generic but fluffy statements. So it’s not a big revelation that Gen Zs are highly skeptical of brands and advertising by default (rightfully so!), and rely almost exclusively on social circles, influencers, and peers as main research channels.

They might sometimes struggle to spot what’s real and what’s not, but they are highly selective about their sources. They are always connected and used to following events live as they unfold, so unsurprisingly, Gen Z tends to have little patience.

And sure enough, Gen Z loves short-form content, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to a short attention span. Attention span is context-dependent, as documentaries and literature are among Gen Z’s favorites.

Most design advice on Gen Z focuses on producing “short form, snackable, bite-sized” content. That content is optimized for very short attention spans, TikTok-alike content consumption, and simplified to the core messaging. I would strongly encourage us to do the opposite.

We shouldn’t discount Gen Z as a generation with poor attention spans and urgent needs for instant gratification. Gen Zs have very strong beliefs and values, but they are also inherently curious and want to reshape the world. We can tell a damn good story. Captivate and engage. Make people think. Many Gen Zs are highly ambitious and motivated, and they want to be challenged and to succeed. So let’s support that. And to do that, we need to remain genuine and authentic.

Remain Genuine And Authentic

As Michelle Winchester noted, Gen Zs have very diverse perspectives and opinions, and they possess a discerning ability to detect disingenuous content. That’s also where mistrust towards AI comes into play, along with AI fatigue. As Nilay Patel mentioned on Ezra Klein Show, today when somebody says that something is “AI-generated”, usually it’s not a praise, but rather a testament how poor and untrustworthy it actually is.

Gen Z expects better. Hence brands that value sincerity, honesty, and authenticity are perceived as more trustworthy compared to brands that don’t have an opinion, don’t take a stand, don’t act for their beliefs and principles. For example, the “Keep Beauty Real” campaign by Dove (shown below) showcases the value of genuine human beauty, which is so often missed and so often exaggerated to extremes by AI.

Gareth Ford Williams has put together a visual language of closed captions and has kindly provided a PDF cheatsheet that is commonly used by professional captioners. There are some generally established rules about captioning, and here are some that I found quite useful when working on captioning for my own video course:

• Divide your sentences into two relatively equal parts like a pyramid (40ch per line for the top line, a bit less for the bottom line);
• Always keep an average of 20 to 30 characters per second;
• A sequence should only last between 1 and 8 seconds;
• Always keep a person’s name or title together;
• Do not break a line after conjunction;
• Consider aligning multi-lined captions to the left.

On YouTube, users can select a font used for subtitles and choose between monospaced and proportional serif and sans-serif, casual, cursive, and small-caps. But perhaps, in addition to stylistic details, we could provide a careful selection of fonts to help audiences with different needs. This could include a dyslexic font or a hyper-legible font, for example.

Additionally, we could display presets for various high contrast options for subtitles. This gives users a faster selection, requiring less effort to configure just the right combination of colors and transparency. Still, it would be useful to provide more sophisticated options just in case users need them.

Support Intrinsic Motivation

On the other hand, in times of instant gratification with likes, reposts, and leaderboards, people often learn that a feeling of achievement comes from extrinsic signals, like reach or attention from other people. The more important it is to support intrinsic motivation.

As Paula Gomes noted, intrinsic motivation is characterized by engaging in behaviors just for their own sake. People do something because they enjoy it. It is when they care deeply for an activity and enjoy it without needing any external rewards or pressure to do it.

Typically this requires 3 components:

• Competence involves the need to feel capable of achieving a desired outcome.
• Autonomy is about the need to feel in control of your own actions, behaviors, and goals.
• Relatedness reflects the need to feel a sense of belonging and attachment to other people.

In practical terms, that means setting people up for success. Preparing the knowledge and documents and skills they need ahead of time. Building knowledge up without necessarily rewarding them with points. It also means allowing people to have a strong sense of ownership of the decisions and the work they are doing. And adding collaborative goals that would require cooperation with team members and colleagues.

Encourage Critical Thinking

The younger people are, the more difficult it is to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Whenever possible, show sources or at least explain where to find specific details that back up claims that you are making. Encourage people to make up their mind, and design content to support that — with scientific papers, trustworthy reviews, vetted feedback, and diverse opinions.

And: you don’t have to shy away from technical details. Don’t make them mandatory to read and understand, but make them accessible and available in case readers or viewers are interested.

In times where there is so much fake, exaggerated, dishonest, and AI-generated content, it might be just enough to be perceived as authentic, trustworthy, and attention-worthy by the highly selective and very demanding Gen Z.

I keep repeating myself like a broken record, but better accessibility is better for everyone. As you hopefully have noticed, many attributes and expectations that we see in Gen Z are beneficial for all other generations, too. It’s just good, honest, authentic design. And that’s the very heart of good UX.

What I haven’t mentioned is that Gen Z genuinely appreciates feedback and values platforms that listen to their opinions and make changes based on their feedback. So the best thing we can do, as designers, is to actively involve Gen Z in the design process. Designing with them, rather than designing for them.

And, most importantly: with Gen Z, perhaps for the first time ever, inclusion and accessibility is becoming a default expectation for all digital products. With it comes the sense of fairness, diversity, and respect. And, personally, I strongly believe that it’s a great thing — and a testament how remarkable Gen Zs actually are.

• Large parts of Gen Z aren’t mobile-first, but mobile-only.
• To some, the main search engine is YouTube, not Google.
• Some don’t know and have never heard of Internet Explorer.
• Trust only verified customer reviews, influencers, friends.
• Used to follow events live as they unfold → little patience.
• Sustainability, reuse, work/life balance are top priorities.
• Prefer social login as the fastest authentication method.
• Typically ignore or close cookie banners, without consent.
• Rely on social proof, honest reviews/photos, authenticity.
• Most likely generation to provide a referral to a product.
• Typically turn on subtitles for videos by default.

• Designing for Gen Z, by Designlab
• Designing For Gen Z (Case Study), by Michelle Winchester
• Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation, by Paula Gomes
• Shopping Habits For Gen Z, by Sara Karlovitch
• 10 Gen Z Insights To Improve Your CX, by Telus
• Millennials vs. Gen Z Expectations, by Zendesk

I’ve just launched “How To Measure UX and Design Impact” 🚀 (8h), a new practical guide for UX leads to measure UX impact on business. Use the code 🎟 IMPACT to save 20% off today. And thank you for your kind and ongoing support, everyone! Jump to details.

Finally! After so many years, we’re very happy to launch “How To Measure UX and Design Impact”, our new practical guide for designers and managers on how to set up and track design success in your company — with UX scorecards, UX metrics, the entire workflow and Design KPI trees. Neatly put together by yours truly, Vitaly Friedman. Jump to details.

In many companies, designers are perceived as disruptors, rather than enablers. Designers challenge established ways of working. They ask a lot of questions — much needed ones but also uncomfortable ones. They focus “too much” on user needs, pushing revenue projections back, often with long-winded commitment to testing and research and planning and scoping.

Almost every department in almost every company has their own clearly defined objectives, metrics and KPIs. In fact, most departments — from finance to marketing to HR to sales — are remarkably good at visualizing their impact and making it visible throughout the entire organization.

But as designers, we rarely have a set of established Design KPIs that we regularly report to senior management. We don’t have a clear definition of design success. And we rarely measure the impact of our work once it’s launched. So it’s not surprising that moste parts of the business barely know what we actually do all day long.

Business wants results. It also wants to do more of what has worked in the past. But it doesn’t want to be disrupted — it wants to disrupt. It wants to reduce time to market and minimize expenses; increase revenue and existing business, find new markets. This requires fast delivery and good execution.

And that’s what we are often supposed to be — good “executors”. Or to put differently, “pixel pushers”.

Over years, I’ve been searching for a way to change that. This brought me to Design KPIs and UX scorecards, and a workflow to translate business goals into actionable and measurable design initiatives. I had to find a way to explain, visualize and track that incredible impact that designers have on all parts of business — from revenue to loyalty to support to delivery.

The results of that journey are now public in our new video course: “How To Measure UX and Design Impact” — a practical guide for designers, researchers and UX leads to measure and visualize UX impact on business.

The course dives deep into establishing team-specific design KPIs, how to track them effectively, how to set up ownership and integrate metrics in design process. You’ll discover how to translate ambiguous objectives into practical design goals, and how to measure design systems and UX research.

Also, we’ll make sense of OKRs, Top Task Analysis, SUS, UMUX-Lite, UEQ, TPI, KPI trees, feedback scoring, gap analysis, and Kano model — and what UX research methods to choose to get better results. Jump to the table of contents or get your early-bird.

A practical guide to UX metrics and Design KPIs
8h-video course + live UX training. Free preview.

• 25 chapters (8h), with videos added/updated yearly
• Free preview, examples, templates, workflows
• No subscription: get once, access forever
• Life-time access to all videos, slides, checklists.
• Add-on: live UX training, running 2× a year
• Use the code SMASHING to get 20% off today
• Jump to the details →

25 chapters, 8 hours, with practical examples, exercises, and everything you need to master the art of measuring UX and design impact. Don’t worry, even if it might seem overwhelming at first, we’ll explore things slowly and thoroughly. Taking 1–2 sessions per week is a perfectly good goal to aim for.

This course is tailored for advanced UX practitioners, design leaders, product managers, and UX researchers who are looking for a practical guide to define, establish and track design KPIs, translate business goals into actionable design tasks, and connect business needs with user needs.

By the end of the video course, you’ll have a packed toolbox of practical techniques and strategies on how to define, establish, sell, and measure design KPIs from start to finish — and how to make sure that your design work is always on the right trajectory. You’ll learn:

• How to translate business goals to UX initiatives,
• The difference between OKRs, KPIs, and metrics,
• How to define design success for your company,
• Metrics and KPIs that businesses typically measure,
• How to choose the right set of metrics and KPIs,
• How to establish design KPIs focused on user needs,
• How to build a comprehensive design KPI tree,
• How to combine qualitative and quantitative insights,
• How to choose and prioritize design work,
• How to track the impact of design work on business goals,
• How to explain, visualize, and defend design work,
• How companies define and track design KPIs,
• How to make a strong case for UX metrics.

Producing a video course takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts! We hope you’ll find the course useful for your work. Happy watching, everyone! 🎉🥳

Maybe you’ve been there before: You’re in the middle of the design process, and stakeholders expect you to deliver faster. How do you best manage a situation like this? How do you communicate the design process and defend it when stakeholders think the design is taking too long?

Let’s take a closer look at what you can do to clarify false expectations and prevent them in the first place.

This article is part of our ongoing series on UX. You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 — with live UX training coming up this year. Free preview.

🤔 Polished deliverables hide the process.

When you show someone a polished, final design, they probably won’t see the complexity of the work behind it unless they are a designer themself, of course. That’s the knowledge gap that lies between designers and stakeholders and one of the reasons why stakeholders might make false assumptions about how long the design will take.

🤔 Polished deliverables suggest a fast production time.

Not familiar with the design process, stakeholders often track value in UX deliverables in an attempt to “measure design” and the progress made. And that can lead to a dilemma: When more final, polished deliverables arrive quickly, stakeholders also assume a faster production time. The real value of design, however, lies in the quality of the process behind it.

Design is all about well-orchestrated feedback loops. For different audiences, from customers and designers to developers and stakeholders. Cutting corners breaks these feedback loops. The result is poor inputs that lead to poor outcomes — often reversible but sometimes damaging for years to come.

Protecting the design process isn’t only in the interest of the designers but, most importantly, in the interest of the user and the business. So, how can we advocate for it?

✅ Highlight user value.

One mistake to avoid is to present deliverables as “finished.” Emphasize that you are still testing and highlight that the design process is a way to maximize user value and that business value comes from user value, not the other way around. No productivity optimization can automate user value, and there is no “later” phase to patch broken design work.

✅ Ask for uninterrupted time.

To get the time you and your team need to design, it might be an option to suggest uninterrupted times for heads-down design work. You could also suggest shifting priorities or reducing the overall scope.

✅ Be sincere about the process.

Also, remember to calibrate expectations: You don’t know how your stakeholders work, so you shouldn’t expect that they know and understand the design process. The more sincere you are about what’s needed to be ready, the more likely you are to get understanding and support, rather than fast turnaround requests.

✅ Visualize progress.

As designers, we often get defensive, not showing the work until we feel that it’s in good shape. Personally, I found it remarkably helpful to show the design progress to stakeholders early and repeatedly instead. Not to ask for a personal opinion on the design but if they think it actually helps deliver user value.

A great technique to visualize the complexity of UX work is event storming — we’ll take a closer look at how it works in a second. To keep stakeholders on top of things, it might also be a good idea to report progress proactively. So why not opt for a short, two-minute video update once a week?

The most impactful way to be transparent about the process and explain why design takes time is to visualize it. Not as abstract Double-Diamond or Triple-Diamond diagrams, but as messy, real-world sticky notes on a huge Miro or FigJam board — with all the pieces of work needed to get to final deliverables.

How To Run An Event Storming Session

Basically, we bring everyone involved in the project on board for a 2-hour session. We set orange sticky notes as events required for the success of the project on a timeline. Then, we cluster these events and break them across lanes, with everything from user testing and stakeholder approval to research tasks and design initiatives.

The resulting timeline visualizes the process and acts as a reference for the work to be done, or the work completed. Sometimes, we add multiple lanes to map the work across different UX activities, e.g., UX research, UX metrics, and so on. Your timeline might also include any other teams and domains that are relevant to the work — think technical details, risks, stakeholder engagement, user testing, and others.

The Value Of Event Storming

To me, event storming creates a much more honest and real visualization of the design process compared to any diamond diagrams that we often use. It’s messy, it’s complex, it’s difficult, and it matches the complexity of real life. Plus, it’s customized to the needs of a specific project, with people who must be involved for successful delivery.

I can’t emphasize enough just how incredibly impactful this little exercise can be to create a shared understanding about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and what is required from all teams for a successful delivery. I hope it will help you defend your process the next time stakeholders ask for a quicker turnaround. 🙌🏽

• “Design Without Process, Or The Form Factor Trap,” by Pavel Samsonov
• “How To Increase Heads-Down Time To Design,” by Sungjoon Steve Won
• “How Can You Find Time To Design?,” by José Torre
• “Product Design: Too Much Work, Too Little Time,” by Tess Gadd

You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

100 design patterns & real-life examples.
10h-video course + live UX training. Free preview.

How do you know what UI component to choose? Decision trees offer a systematic approach for design teams to document their design decisions. Once we’ve decided what UI components we use and when, we can avoid never-ending discussions, confusion, and misunderstanding.

Let’s explore a few examples of decision trees for UI components and how we can get the most out of them.

This article is part of our ongoing series on design patterns. It’s also an upcoming part of the 10h-video library on Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 and the upcoming live UX training as well. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

Doctolib Design System is a very impressive design system with decision trees, B2B navigation paths, photography, PIN input, UX writing, and SMS notifications — and thorough guides on how to choose UI components.

• B2B Navigation Patterns Decision Tree
• Form Components Decision Tree
• Actions and Calls To Actions Decision Tree
• Error Design Decision Tree
• Help Component Decision Tree

I love how practical these decision trees are. Each shows an example of what a component looks like, but I would also add references to real-life UI examples and flows of where and how these components are used. A fantastic starting point that documents design decisions better than any guide would.

The team behind Workday’s Canvas design system created a fantastic set of design decision trees for notifications, errors and alerts, loading patterns, calls to action, truncation, and overflow — with guidelines, examples, and use cases, which can now only be retrieved from the archive:

• Notifications Decision Tree
• Errors and Alerts Decision Tree
• Loading UX Decision Tree
• Calls to Action Decision Tree
• Truncation and Overflow Decision Tree

For each decision tree, the Workday team has put together a few context-related questions to consider first when making a decision before even jumping into the decision tree. Plus, there are thorough examples for each option available, as well as a very detailed alternative text for every image.

A choice of a form component can often be daunting. When should you use radio buttons, checkboxes, or dropdowns? Runi Goswami from Lyft has shared a detailed form components decision tree that helps their team choose between form controls.

We start by exploring whether a user can select more than one option in our UI. If it’s indeed multi-select, we use toggles for short options and checkboxes for longer ones.

If only one option can be selected, then we use tabs for filtering, radios for shorter options, a switch for immediately applicable options, and a checkbox if only one option can be selected. Dropdowns are used as a last resort.

Onboarding comes in various forms and shapes. Depending on how subtle or prominent we want to highlight a particular feature, we can use popovers, badges, hints, flags, toasts, feature cards, or design a better empty state. The Newskit team has put together an Onboarding Selection Prototype in Figma.

The choice depends on whether we want to interrupt the users to display details (usually isn’t very effective), show a feature subtly during the experience (more effective), or enable discovery by highlighting a feature within the context of a task a user tries to accomplish.

The toolkit asks a designer a couple of questions about the intent of onboarding, and then suggests options that are likely to perform best — a fantastic little helper for streamlined onboarding decisions.

How do you decide to add a new component to a design system or rather extend an existing one? What’s the process for contributions, maintenance, and the overall design process? Some design teams codify their design decisions as design system process flowcharts, as shown below.

• Contribution Process at British Gas
• Contributing Guidelines at Nordhealth
• Processes at Aviva
• Contribution Process at OpenCollective
• Contribution Process at Zalando

And here are helpful decision trees for adding new components to a design system:

• New Component Decision Tree at Boston Scientific
• Handling New Patterns at GitHub
• Design System Governance Process by Brad Frost
• New Component Decision Tree by Louis Ouriach
• Design System Contribution Template by Chad Bergman
• How To Launch A New Component + Figma template by Rama Krushna Behera

What I absolutely love about the decision tree approach is not only that it beautifully visualizes design decisions but that it also serves as a documentation. It establishes shared standards across teams and includes examples to follow, with incredible value for new hires.

Of course, exceptions happen. But once you have codified the ways of working for design teams as a decision tree and made it front and center of your design work, it resolves never-ending discussions about UI decisions for good.

So whenever a debate comes up, document your decisions in a decision tree. Turn them into posters. Place them in kitchen areas and developer’s and QA workspaces. Put them in design critique rooms. Make them visible where design work happens and where code is being written.

It’s worth mentioning that every project will need its own custom trees, so please see the examples above as an idea to build upon and customize away for your needs.

If you are interested in similar insights around UX, take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview.

100 design patterns & real-life examples.
10h-video course + live UX training. Free preview.

Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be able to communicate brand values.

This article is part of our ongoing series on UX. You might want to take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 and the upcoming live UX training as well. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

Successful candidates must neatly fit within established roles and excel at tools and workflows that are perceived as the best practice in the industry — from user needs to business needs and from the problem space to the solution space.

There is nothing wrong with that, of course. However, many companies don’t exactly know what expertise they actually need until they find the right person who actually has it. But too often, job openings don’t allow for any flexibility unless the candidate checks off the right boxes.

In fact, typically, UX roles have to fit into some of those rigorously defined and refined boxes:

Job openings typically cast a very restrictive frame for candidates. It comes with a long list of expectations and requirements, mostly aimed at T-shaped designers — experts in one area of UX, with a high-level understanding of adjacent areas and perhaps a dash of expertise in business and operations.

But as Brad Frost noted, people don’t always fit squarely into a specific discipline. Their value comes not from staying within the boundaries of their roles but from intentionally crossing these boundaries. They are “V”-shaped — experts in one or multiple areas, with a profound understanding and immense curiosity in adjacent areas.

In practice, they excel at bridging the gaps and connecting the dots. They establish design KPIs and drive accessibility efforts. They streamline handoff and scale design systems. But to drive success, they need to rely on specialists, their T-shaped colleagues.

I sincerely wish more companies would encourage their employees to shape their own boxes instead of defining confined boxes for them — their own unique boxes of any form and shade and color and size employees desire, along with deliverables that other teams would benefit from and could build upon.

🏔️ Hiring? → Maybe replace a long list of mandatory requirements with an open invitation to apply, even if it’s not a 100% match — as long as a candidate believes they can do their best work for the job at hand.

🎢 Seek a challenge? → Don’t feel restricted by your current role in a company. Explore where you drive the highest impact, shape this role, and suggest it.

✅ Searching for a job? → Don’t get discouraged if you don’t tick all the boxes in a promising job opening. Apply! Just explain in fine detail what you bring to the table.

You’ve got this — and good luck, everyone! ✊🏽

If you are interested in UX and design patterns, take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview.

100 design patterns & real-life examples.
10h-video course + live UX training. Free preview.