We are always creating in relation to those artifacts, systems, services and rituals which came before us, and it is in relationship to one another that the creations also take meaning. Therefore, to design for others is to will oneself to become something a little bit different, in hopes that it will also change the lives of the stakeholders for the better in turn.

While it is true that design is often a benevolent dictatorship (and not a democracy), every single person from the product owner to the engineers should feel welcome to present design hypotheses. There are no wrong ideas, just differently informed points of view. A designer needs to be emotionally bulletproof when a team member’s ideas contradict their own because a design-lead organisation needs to foster a culture of creativity. In that culture the best feedback is often inquisitive, not prescriptive: as in “yes, and how about this?” Anxiety, fear, and self-consciousness are the enemies of insight. Surprise is the engine of innovation. Imagine working with people where you could find something surprising everyday.

Design is not strictly created from universal, empirical truth as is the work of science –an invaluable tradition which can inform us of the mechanisms in which the world works, but is absolutely sterile when it is the heart of design. Design is not science.

There is no “right” design, but there is the most appropriate design situated for the stakeholders it serves. But how might we come to know when the design is most appropriate to serve our stakeholders?

Ultimately, the UXer holds in its hands the say of what can, may, should or should never be in an final interface. Getting inputs from Project Manager, Developers, Support Teams, Research, Legal, is a work of refining information and purpose to find the best of a common desired world for everyone involved.

And although designers can use trusted sources of knowledge to help generate ideas, there is no way in which the final designs can be evaluated as “right” or “wrong” based on this criterion. Instead, I believe it takes a great designer to acknowledge their humility. They must vocalize what they can know as well as what they cannot; they should explain why they trust and depend on their sources for knowledge.

Why should we care at all? Well, if we are the ones who plan the processes and make the decisions, these are topics that ought to be addressed from a professional standpoint. No one would like to be labelled as the creator of an app that makes its users feel uncomfortable to interact with. For company owners, it is even more significant. Users today have a developed sense of critique. They voluntarily leave reviews in app stores, use stars to rate, invest time in conversations about the product/service, etc. You would probably like to avoid a public crisis or a product failure which originated from poor planning, especially when it is relatively easy to prevent by putting your mind to it and gaining trust.

Values come from people in their complete, situated uniqueness. It is up to us as designers to work to discover and notice differently the ways in which others come to place value on experiences, artifacts, rituals, and community. Ultimately to design in service of others, as well as myself, is to constantly question what it means to be human, and how I might come to new truths by engaging earnestly with others in activity and in dialogue.

The more constraints you face in the design, the broader access you may reach, meaning the less people will churn because of the "side effects" of your design. That includes not only making very clear compositions, but thinking about aspects of physiology (disabled, deafness, blindness, color blindness, genders, races) and culture (religion, habits, laws, values, tradition, techniques). Design thrives in constraints.

Considering this, you would avoid launching a feature that will be used in Iran that exposes people's genders for anyone to see, where being an homossexual is punished by death, like Facebook has done.

According to user experience expert Peter Morville a good user experience is:
Useful, Usable, Desirable, Findable, Accessible, Credible and Valuable. Following Ergonomic Guidelines to good software interface design are essential to reducing mind friction to the minimum.

→ See Ergonomic Guidelines
Language is key, in every experience and every dialog we make agreements. Legal design is coming into play using disciplines to enhance the human friendliness of understanding and applying the law, since the law is meant to create order in society and make a peaceful living and working environment for everybody. Let's say goodbye to only-lawyers-read Terms of use and Privacy Policies.

→ See Legal Design‍

Analytics gives you the basic health status of a product by monitoring Task Success, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Revenue.

AB tests (randomized experiment with two variants, A and B) being it in production or moderated with a phone with your layout can bring real data insights.

Mapping funnels, in order to get it right where users are churning (dropping out). This can be made with numerical data but strongly recommend to do presencial tests to hear what's users feel about a specific cloudy screen.

Heatmaps are a quick way to see where users are interacting more with the product, or where the mouse is browsing more (or eye tracking expensive tests). The result uncover what attracts the most attention.It can also be analyzed comparatively between types of users, for example Brazilian users and American users.

Usability Tests are carried out with users representative of the target audience. Each participant tries to perform typical tasks while the analyst observes, listens, takes notes or records. From the tests you can minimize the friction of accessibility, test your Design System (visual consistency) and have many opportunities to ask "why" the tester is behaving one way or another.

Other metrics include: Frequency of Return Visits, Feature Usage, New Accounts or Visitors, Conversion Rate, Returning Visitors, Conversion Rate, Returning visitors, Renewal Rate, Churn, Completion Rate, Time on Task, Error Counts and Rate.

By getting out in the field, speaking with others, watching them as they work, how they build the world around them with their artefacts, what things they take pride in, what frustrates them, how they solve everyday problems, and cope with everyday breakdowns. I want to get to know the moral ontologies of my users. By eliciting their stories and living a day in their lives, good designers can provide services that react to their users’ world views.

Personas and journey maps are helpful for teams that have a limited understanding of users, and/or haven’t done user research before. They could also be helpful for teams working on products where they are not the users, such as medical products, products for construction workers, apps for truck drivers, etc.

Don't get obsessed with Customer Satisfaction tests, they don't prove to be very useful. I worked on a product when at a point every every metric was going down, and the NPS (Net Promoter Score) kept having a great rate.

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Facebook example of making countries politically polarised, based on white people's ideals of "What's good for the world is not necessarily what's good for Facebook", it's exactly the definition of impact as "Move fast, break things" - which is their motto, and it happened. Just look at how countries from Egypt, USA, Brazil and most of Europe are all polarised. Their engagement madness caused this. The more people express hate, the more likes and shares it tends to generate, creating radicalised parts.
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→ Watch The Facebook Dilemma, A major investigation of Facebook’s impact on privacy and democracy around the world.
Compositions suggests actions, materials communicates what we could do with them, digital interfaces with like and share buttons promotes certain actions. The sensitive level of design affects people in many different levels. One way of broadening the way we see these levels is by having diverse teams thinking together, so to think these "touches" in broader contexts.

It shows a bit of hope when Instagram is hiding the number of likes on pictures from users, as a way to stop passing around this engagement sickness to their users. The certain ways a Product team thinks tend to directly affect the way their customer are going to think. If products are not made with care and attention, people will not have care and attention on their experiences. 

For instance, too much engagement with our phone screens may take away the other human rituals and experiences which we may have used to fill our time in close quarters, such as playing cards and cooking together.
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Minding the Impact can also be creative and thoughtful of the community, not like Yellow Bikes (Grow) dumping thousands of bikes in 14 cities of Brazil when going out of business. What about some humility, failure embrace and doing a positive action for the sake of it?