💡 2 design practices non-designers should know about

Bad design VS good design

Dear reader,

Being a UX product designer comes with professional quirks¹. As soon as I go online, I feel bombarded by design mishaps, sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose. To help make the web a better place for everyone, I would like to raise awareness on good and bad design practices.²

🗣️ Bad design practice : Exploiting the anchoring bias

Bad practices done on purpose have a name: dark patterns. They usually exploit cognitive bias to make you do things you wouldn’t like.

The Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information that we are given. This is often exploited to make you believe you’re making a good deal.

For example, a website might offer a product for $100, but then show a comparison to a similar product that is priced at $200. This makes the $100 product seem like a better deal, even though it might be worth $10.

Another example, curtesy of Venture Harbour, who are recommending to use this dark pattern to boost sales.

🫂 Good design practice : Checking contrasts

Now that you’re aware of a bad practice, let’s make the web a better place! If you sometimes create visuals to share online, consider checking the colours against contrast accessibility norms.

That is something we do a lot when we make apps, but even graphic designers sometimes miss out on this. An easy step to get started would be to check the font colour. Good news is, a bunch of websites offer to help you for free!

Here’s one you can try today: https://coolors.co/contrast-checker

Coolors.co is very user-friendly, so you don’t have to know about design to start using it.

I know this is not related to language learning, but I really wanted to share these tips with you. Let me know in the comments if you’d like more design related content, or if you’d like to request something else.

Best,

Lou

✍️ Dear language learner

Here are a few sentences to test yourself. You can add them to your notes or spaced-repetition system if you’d like!

🌱 Beginner

I just bought a new laptop.

🌿 Intermediate

I think I got ripped off, this looks sketchy.

🌳 Advanced

I can’t see well, so I have to zoom on my screen to read.

Thank you for reading “I heard from Lou”. It can be hard to find people who share your passion for learning. If you have friends who might like this letter, let them know.

1. In French, we call professional quirks “une déformation professionnelle”.

2. Also, I keep seeing people confusing graphic design with UX. We design functional specifications over aesthetic interfaces, so I hope people can see the beyond the pretty colours! I might make a disambiguation post at some point.