Our sponsor for this newsletter is Sam McNerney!

Designing a survey and worried you’re not doing it right? Get a 🔥$45 Survey Roast🔥.

What's a Roast? A custom 15-minute video, with methodology tips and copy-and-paste recommendations (in a Google Doc), delivered to your inbox in 3 business days.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

The best thing about selling out for the year is the sorts of problems we presently have in front of us – and how none of them regard the holiday period. This is in right relationship to the practice of store design, which knows no season and acts as evergreen practice. Our newest two clients have structural challenges that move outside of hype or trend, which is always where we like to thrive.

In the past, we’ve found that most holiday sales involve two steps:

1. Put your stuff on sale
2. Tell people about it

It’s that simple. People are already psychically primed to expect sales around the holidays, so you probably don’t need to work too hard on either step.

Yet everybody tries too hard. The numbers are big, they say. So? Just relax and enjoy the journey, y’all. You already know what to do.

While ecommerce bros are howling about Q4, we’re heads down, doing the work that we always do. We’re grateful that you have chosen to follow along with us.

You may have noticed that there have been a couple of sponsorships these past few weeks. It’s our busiest sales time of the year, and given the sudden interest we imagine we’re not alone.

If you want to take advantage of the year’s peak interest in value-based design, you might want to sponsor the next few weeks of our work.

This week, for paid members

• Our weekly lesson is about the role of the value-based designer in strategic, consultative work, and what it means for one’s design practice when phantom stakeholders & unsolicited comps are presented.
• And our design of the week covers a really lovely hack around the issue of multiple color swatches. Does it work well for usability, or just bump page weight for no good reason? We’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Want in? Join us now – named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Already a member? Log in here and take a look at what’s new.

Links

• Notes on the structural collapse of technology, using microservices as an example. Related.
• Don’t even think about asking to create an account until the order is placed, says Baymard, correctly. Also: why even have account creation in the first place? Most stores don’t need it.
• A lovely rumination on fake movie branding, using Wes Anderson films & Barbie as examples.
• People are less thinky when they use software than you may believe. This piece discusses how, some ramifications, and outlines a potential way forward.
• How to run interviews, by some of the best in the business.
• I’m legally required to link anything good about sidenotes. CSS veteran Eric Meyer shows a lovely way to implement them.
• A nice guide to reusing design system components.
• Canadian typography.

Thanks for the sponsorship, Sam!

Designing a survey and worried you’re not doing it right? Get a 🔥$45 Survey Roast🔥.

What's a Roast? A custom 15-minute video, with methodology tips and copy-and-paste recommendations (in a Google Doc), delivered to your inbox in 3 business days.