This site is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather a useful guide—our FAQ for design understanding. We hope it will inspire discussion, some questioning, a little soul searching, and ideally, a bit of intellectual support for your everyday endeavors.
The Design Questions Library goes nicely with the Library of Ambiguity.
What makes a startup ecosystem thrive?
What do people plan to do once they’re over 35?
Is an income of $160K enough to survive?
What kind of car does Mark Zuckerberg drive?
“What if someone doesn’t browse the web like I do?”
I had fun answering these questions.
A useful set of questions to ask on any project, shuffled and dealt to you.
They’ll not only help you foresee unintended consequences—they can also reveal opportunities for positive change.
All of the content in images. Not a single image has alternative text. If only they had asked themselves:
When you picture your user base, who is excluded? If they used your product, what would their experience be like?
My publishers asked me some questions. My answers turned out to be more revealing of my inner demons than I was expecting. I hope this isn’t too much oversharing, but I found it quite cathartic.
My greatest fear for the web is that it becomes the domain of an elite priesthood of developers. I firmly believe that, as Tim Berners-Lee put it, “this is for everyone.” And I don’t just mean it’s for everyone to use—I believe it’s for everyone to make as well. That’s why I get very worried by anything that raises the barrier to entry to web design and web development.
It’s ironic that, at the same time as we can do so much more with less when it comes to the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in browsers, many developers are choosing to make things more complicated by introducing complex tool chains, frameworks and processes.
A great set of answers from Rachel to frequently asked questions about CSS grid. She addresses the evergreen question of when to use flexbox and when to use grid:
I tend to use Flexbox for components where I want the natural size of items to strongly control their layout, essentially pushing the other items around.
A sign that perhaps Flexbox isn’t the layout method I should choose is when I start adding percentage widths to flex items and setting
flex-growto 0. The reason to add percentage widths to flex items is often because I’m trying to line them up in two dimensions (lining things up in two dimensions is exactly what Grid is for).
- What problems will a component library solve?
- Is everyone on the project behind the component library?
- How will the component library be used?
- What tool(s) will be used to build the component library?
- Where should the component library live?
- How granular should the library be? How should it be organized?
- How will component code be scoped? What about page layout?
- What data will the library use? What else should it have?
Little interventions for designers in the form of questions designed to challenge assumptions. Kind of like Brian Eno’s oblique strategies.
Many, many years ago, Tim Berners-Lee wrote this page of answers to (genuinely) frequently asked questions he got from school kids working on reports. I absolutely love the clear straightforward language he uses to describe concepts like hypertext, packet switching, and HTTP.
Questions prompted by the Clearleft gathering in Norway to discuss AI.
A series of questions to ask on any design project:
- What are my lenses?
- Am I just confirming my assumptions, or am I challenging them?
- What details here are unfair? Unverified? Unused?
- Am I holding onto something that I need to let go of?
- What’s here that I designed for me? What’s here that I designed for other people?
- What would the world look like if my assumptions were wrong?
- Who might disagree with what I’m designing?
- Who might be impacted by what I’m designing?
- What do I believe?
- Who’s someone I’m nervous to talk to about this?
- Is my audience open to change?
- What am I challenging as I create this?
- How can I reframe a mistake in a way that helps me learn?
- How does my approach to this problem today compare to how I might have approached this one year ago?
- If I could learn one thing to help me on this project, what would that one thing be?
- Do I need to slow down?
As part of an ongoing series where we ask industry professionals what they use to get the job done, we speak to Jeremy, technical director at Clearleft.
I couldn’t resist the smartarse answer about my “dream setup.”
I’ve made one of them there “ask me anything” things so that you can ask me, well …anything.
I can forgive our answer machines if they sometimes get it wrong. It’s less easy to forgive the confidence with which the bad answer is presented, giving the impression that the answer is definitive. That’s a design problem.
Absolute gold dust from Mike!
I think that having regular 1:1s is really important, but I’m sure I’m not doing them as effectively as I could—the advice in here is going to be invaluable.
There are three types of employees in the world when it comes to disclosing issues:
- Those who will always tell you about problems.
- Those who will never tell you about problems.
- Those who will tell you about problems when asked in the right way.
I love my ones and am frustrated by my twos, but I feel like at least 9 out of 10 people are actually threes.
This is really good fun! And thanks to service workers, it works offline too.
The rounds are:
In which I attempt to answer some questions raised in the reading of Resilient Web Design.
Shamefully, I haven’t been doing one-to-ones with my front-end dev colleagues at Clearleft, but I’m planning to change that. This short list of starter questions from Lara will prove very useful indeed.
Eric asked me some questions and I was only too happy to give some answers.