Think of this page as a playlist of helpful techniques for building digital products and services. Shaped by the values of the Balanced Team. Focused on building products that matter through inviting diverse perspectives. Curated by a product designer. Useful for the cross-functional team building great experiences.
We are more than our tools, but sometimes, it's really helpful to have something to fall back on.
Clarify how and when you will check-in with your team. Build conversation in as a crucial piece of workflow. Early, often, and with reliability.
Use sketching to rapidly iterate through ideas individually or in a group. See Lane Halley's Quick, Useful UI Sketches and Kate Rutter's Sketchnoting practice decks.
Align your team on goals through these recipes - opportunity statements, persona 4x4s, six-ups, and wireframe walk-through. See Lane Halley and Courtney Hemphill's Conversation, Cadence and Culture.
Flesh out who your customer is, what problems they have and a simple business model. See Ash Maurya's How to Create a Lean Canvas, its predecessor, The Business Model Canvas and try David Bland's How to Create a Business Model Canvas in Google Docs.
A straight-forward model for measuring success. See Dave McClure's Startup Metrics for Pirates.
Create a backlog of experiments and show progress. See Mike's Kanban Boards for Hypothesis-Driven Development or use Trello as a digital Kanban board.
Find your target customer segments and learn about the problem space. See Giff Constable's 12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews, Ash Maurya's Getting Started with Customer Development and the Lean Startup Circle Wiki.
Fill out the persona 4x4 template after each problem interview with the real person's behaviors, needs and goals.
A divergent, collaborative technique for rapidly generating ideas (also known as a charrette). Many, many approaches to this - see the Founder's Wiki for a few of them.
Picture your user in an environment interacting with your product or service. Refer back to Conversation, Cadence and Culture. and see Jeff Gothelf's Remote Collaborative Brainstorming and Sketching.
Visualize how the technology will work with the engineering team. See Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age and these examples: Technology Diagrams and Function Model.
A tone or mood board is an easy way to collaborate on visual style. Try Pinterest.
Liberate your six-ups into interfaces and interactions. See Shawn Medero's Paper Prototyping and POP App.
Create a malleable systems of components over co-dependent interfaces. See Atomic Web Design and This is Responsive.
Try a search on A List Apart, Smashing Magazine and Quora Design Patterns Topic.
Two key books that I use every single time I make something for the web: HTML and CSS Book and Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design.
Amazingly disciplined designers keep pattern libraries. Start your own and save great examples and check out Anna Debenham's Getting Started with Pattern Libraries and Pttrns.
I can't do this one justice but do yourself a favor and learn Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping blog post and buy his book on it.
Helpful to organize design iterations along the code repository. To see an example, check out Webcompat wiki.
In between a mood board and a style guide, see Samantha Warren's Style Tiles.
A diverse community of product makers that keeps on giving. See the Balanced Team website and Balanced Team list.
Quora is an underutilized resource to ask and answer important questions. Side note: you can also start a blog there and have a built-in audience!
Or follow great people whose work and writing you trust. See my list Design Thought Leaders.