At thoughtbot, we pride ourselves not just on making products, but on making products people actually use. To accomplish this, we employ a human-centric design process that embraces uncertainty and iteration. We know we don’t have all the answers upfront, so we lean on our respective processes to illuminate the path to success.
While each thoughtbotter’s individual design process varies, each shares the same general trajectory. This ensures an approximate consistency of approach without stifling individual creativity or innovation.
While we prefer to do design sprints in- person, sometimes it’s necessary to do them remotely. It just so happens that in the coming weeks, we may need to do more of them as many of us will need to work remotely or work with others that are remote. While I have experience running a handful of sprints and kickoffs remotely, I would love to hear from others about their experience on Twitter.
If you are like me and have a year or less of experience developing iOS apps, there might be some concepts that you use in code without realizing what they are or why you’ve used them—I’m talking about design patterns. These patterns allow our app’s codebase to be more readable and resilient, help guide us when structuring our apps, and allow us to create objects and govern how those objects communicate with each other. Chances are, you’ve used many of these patterns without realizing it—like MVC, MVVM, Singleton, and Observer.
Having gone through dozens of portfolios and participated in multiple candidate selections in the last couple of years prompted me to share the best practices for creating a design portfolio and propose a set of guidelines that could simplify this intimidating task.