UX / UI Design Inspiration (from the AJ&Smart designers)

Hey, my name is Jonathan, Product Designer working at AJIN Smart. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly the resources that we use at AJIN Smart to keep ourselves nice and fresh, nice and inspired when it comes to UX or UI design. Every year at AJIN Smart, we make dozens of apps, we make dozens of user interfaces, and we work on pretty much every type of industry you can possibly imagine. Now, one of the questions we get pretty often is how do we stay inspired? How do we keep our ideas fresh? And where do we go for inspiration if we're working on this many different products every year? Well, in this video, I'm going to show you all the resources we use in-house to get inspiration when it comes to UI and UX design at AJIN Smart. So before I jump into all of these links here, which I'm going to show you, we'll also link everything in the description. I'd also love to know from you, where do you go and find your interesting product design resources? What do you look at? Like, tell us the websites and tell us the places that you check out because we want to know as many as possible. So here's, I'm going to show you a couple of links, a couple of websites that we use regularly just to keep up to date. And you'll know some of them, but maybe you don't know some of them. And a couple of these things are just designers that you can follow on Twitter as well. Number one, and I think this is pretty obvious, is producthunt.com. And producthunt.com is a great way to see which products are trending right now, which new products are interesting, and which new products are being talked about. And they're always, almost always, digital products. And this is a great place to come if you're interested. Let's say you're working on a new banking app, you can just type in banking and you can have a look at different apps and different products that are in the banking sector. You can look at different apps in the medical sector, all of this kind of stuff. And it's a great, great, great place just to look and get inspiration, especially if you're looking at, like, which products got people's attention. Why did they get people's attention? What were the conversations around the products? What were the people who made the products answering when people were asking them questions? And this is just a great, great place where I come to pretty much every day to have a look at what's happening in the product world. Great little place to get inspiration. And again, like I said, you can search through lots of different categories. Really, really great place to do that. So you can check out pretty much interfaces for almost any product. Next, and there's a couple of these on the list, is called Mobbin Design. And this is one of the many websites that basically takes screenshots of pretty much every product you can imagine and just puts them on the website so you can sort of scroll through the screenshots of a specific product and you can see the full flows of these products as well. So, for example, if I wanted to go into Jump Rope, just click on it and then I can see every single screen in the entire product. This is a really great way for me to see, without having to download the app, for me to say, how did they actually do the onboarding? Okay, I'm going to have a look at that screen. Interesting. That's how they did it. And I'm able to go through the flow step by step, step by step. And I find this really, really interesting for me when I want to do something that doesn't need to be reinvented pretty much, but something that's maybe done pretty regularly within products. For example, you know, onboarding or how account settings work. And yeah, I feel like Mobbin Dot Design is a great website for just getting an overview of all the screenshots of all the most recent apps that are out right now. And they also have patterns. So you can click on patterns up here and you can have a look at different types of patterns that you'll see regularly throughout digital products. And patterns are things that, well, like I just said, it's things that you're going to see in multiple products and things that are generally understood by users. One example of a pattern is a card navigation, for example, like Tinder. And that's a great way to have a look at these types of patterns. So if I put cards up here, boop, then it asks me to sign in. I'm not going to do that right now, but you get the point. Next, we have Twitter. And Twitter is a great resource for following some really great designers. But here are a few people we would recommend that you follow on Twitter. We have Ryan Singer at ORJS. He's a really, really great product designer working at Basecamp. He posts a lot of things around product strategy, around product management and around design, which I find very refreshing, very simple. And I think he's a great account to follow if you're looking at how products are made and how to make products more efficiently. Really, really inspirational. Next is Andreas Storm. How cool is that name? Andreas Storm. He just posts really great little animations, little micro interactions, lots and lots of very specific UI stuff, more on the visual design side. But he's also posting stuff like this, which is a goldmine. If you look at best UX case studies, things like this are always super inspirational. And I think that Andy Storm, Andreas Storm, which is at S-T-H-R-M-I, is a great account to follow if you're looking to keep up to date on pretty much like the best visual design trends. And I find that really... and UX trends. Next, we have Matthias Krenn, also an interface designer. Some great interface stuff here that he's posting about. Also, like with games and different types of products. And I think it's just great to follow people like this who are deep into the nerdiness of UI design. We also have, just taking like one hour to look, Aristide Benoist. I'm so sorry, man, if you're watching this video and I'm saying it horribly. Again, really, really great animations here, really great UI design work. And I just think a perfect place for us to go to and have a look at what's interesting at the moment. What are sort of things that we might want to look at that could be interesting. Very, very much animation focused, but great UI design work. Also, some best practices information there as well, which I find really, really interesting. And that's a redirect link. Next, I mean, of course, you're going to guess that Dribbble is going to be in here. Dribbble is the website for basically posting very simple little animations. And what? It's making me create my account. I already have an account. Well, I'm not going to log in just for this YouTube video. I'm logged out of everything to do the YouTube video. So let's have a look at a few Dribbble accounts. Claudio Guglieri, great Dribbble account, interface designer, design creative direction. Really, really great stuff on his account. Just really inspirational, beautiful design work, beautiful UI design work, beautiful motion work. Really great guy to check out on Dribbble. Next, we have Rally. It's a product design and development studio. They've done work for InVision, for Nike, for PayPal. Very simple. Not what I like about this Dribbble account is it's not like all super over the top stuff. It's stuff you actually would see in real products. And I think it's great to see what these guys are doing. Really, really impressive work on Dribbble. And Fantasy. I mean, these guys are super, super famous. I think everyone kind of knows them. World famous human-centered product design firm. These guys are just fantastic. They're amazing at their job. And they have great, great stuff on Dribbble. It's super inspirational. So definitely check that out. Next, I have a really, really great, huge resource for you. And this is Evernote.design. So Evernote is this note-taking app, which I'll admit I've tried loads of times and never got into. But what I really love is that they have this fantastic design. Basically, like, kind of, it's just every possible website. You know, a lot of the ones that I've shown you now. Just a huge resource center for all the different sort of libraries you might want to check out. All the different websites for inspiration. It's really, really, really amazing. It's a fantastic link. It's got different communities like news, inspiration, icons, illustrations. Everything. This is amazing. To the Evernote team who made this, amazing work. I'm super impressed. We're using it a lot at AJ and Smart. Really, really cool. Next, we have PageFlows. Really, really similar to Mob and Design, like I showed you earlier. But what I like about PageFlows is that it's not just mobile. There's also a heavy focus on landing pages, which I really like. You can click here just to see landing pages. And I think landing pages are a big part of UI design, product design. If you're going to be getting into the marketing part of it as well. So you can see a really, really up-to-date look at every interesting landing page out there at the moment. And once again, here you have, similar to Mob and Design, the ability to see the user flows of specific products that you want to check out. So unless you want to go and screenshot every single thing yourself, I would recommend going to something like Mobbin. Informationisbeautiful.net is a great, great website to basically check out infographics. If you're interested in infographics, this is a great website that kind of dumps tons and tons and tons of different types of infographics. They're not always beautiful, I would say. I don't think this is beautiful, actually. I think it's pretty ugly. But if you're interested in how to break down complex information into infographics, Informationisbeautiful.net is a really, really great website to check that out. Instagram's great as well for UI and UX and all that kind of stuff. But here's an example from Tyler Spangler. Spangler. And this is more visual design. This is more just like an inspirational, hardcore, kind of arty type Instagram account. But I wanted to throw one of those in there. So this is Tyler underscore Spangler on Instagram. To be honest, there's loads more stuff on Instagram. It's just that we haven't started using it so much yet for design inspiration. But it is something that's up and coming. So maybe if I make another video, there'll be more on that. Next, we have, well, actually, this is a pretty well known one for graphic designers. But this is a great place. AIGA, Ion Design Twitter account. Really, really great place just for mixture of print and digital design. Loads of really interesting stuff here. Just a great place if you want to go and get a little bit of inspiration. It's not very focused on product design, but some nice things in there that might catch your eye. I personally love techmeme.com. And this is not a place to get UI inspiration or UX inspiration. But it's for me the best tech website that's out there. It doesn't have all the kind of political bullshit that's on theverge.com, which I really, really don't enjoy. It's just straight up, here's what's happening in the tech industry. Here are the new interesting products. Here's the new mergers. Here are the new acquisitions. I check this every single day. I find it super interesting because it's a look into what's happening in Silicon Valley. And for me, that's pretty important because a big part of design for me is understanding the strategies that are happening within other companies and sort of the directions they're taking. And so for me, Techmeme, fantastic website. In my opinion, the best tech website out there. So, yeah, Techmeme is really one of my favorite websites for all sort of tech news. And I really do check it every day. And last one I'll just say is that Instagram, like I mentioned earlier, is sort of something that we're starting to use slowly. And how I use Instagram for that sort of stuff is I just explore tags. So I will put in the tag UX design. Just hit it and see what comes up. And here's an example of a page like that. If you're interested in product design, if you're interested in UX design, UI design, we would obviously love you to subscribe to this channel. Give this video a like. Lots more videos like this coming up. Hope you like this kind of chilled run through a few of the things that inspire us at AJN Smart. Would really, really, really love to know what inspires you, what sort of websites you check out. We want to add this to our list. And one last thing. If you are trying to get more information on the design, tech, product strategy, product design industry, definitely also check out my podcast. It's every Monday morning. It's called The Product Breakfast Club. It's with myself and the author of Sprint, Jake Knapp. And it's basically a look at the design world from both the Silicon Valley and corporate perspective. So definitely check that out, too. Thanks so much for watching the video and have a great day. Just click into it. Go to that specific page and then, of course, check it out. Hey, Jonathan here from. Oh, you know what? I'm going to stop this video recording and do it again because it's been just going on for ages. New screen recording. Hello. Got it.