Design Heuristics

Faced with a new brief, an experienced designer does not start from nothing: they spot the pressures in the requirements, such as heavy reads or users on every continent, and reach for the pattern each one usually calls for. The topic gathers fifteen of those pairings into one map, then reads two briefs that look nothing alike, a global news site and a flash sale checkout, the same way. A gotcha shows two heuristics pulling against each other and how a requirement settles which wins. The two exercises that close the topic, and the subject, ask you to diagnose ten real failures at scale and then to produce a first design for a chat application, from requirements and estimates to the parts and patterns.