“The excellence of a successful product is in direct proportion to its clarity and usability!”
Hello 👋🏼, and welcome to my website. I’m glad you have found your way here. My name is Martin, and currently, I’m working as a Senior Product Designer @ Singtel Optus in Australia.
In my spare time I like reading and writing, playing sports, hiking, and occasionally enjoying moments of solitude. This website is mostly a collection of my scribbles on various topics, mostly design-related, but not only.
To learn more about what I do or who I am, click here.
“Pride comes before the fall. Remember, the lack of confidence is your enemy, but so is overconfidence. “
The best way to design amazing product is to stay curious and keep your ego at bay. Always ask questions when unsure, be inquisitive, and don’t assume that you know everything that needs to be known because most likely you don’t.
“Any understanding of the world is incomplete. Be open to new interpretations and perspectives as it can help you to move beyond existing solutions.“
Philosophers are well aware that any understanding of the world is incomplete. As a product designer, I like to remind myself of this simple truth about our world, especially when reviewing older research findings or design solutions.
We need to embrace change and adapt as new information and perspectives emerge. We should question the key decisions from the past and challenge the existing solutions when they stop making sense. It could be that circumstances have changed, and what was a sensible solution before is no longer the one.
“I believe that it is our duty to help create products that promote the welfare of all people, not only users of our products but also non-users of our products who might be impacted by our creations, including future generations, animals, plans, and ecosystems.“
You can call me naive or idealist, but I’m convinced that we should design holistically, consider the interconnectedness of complex systems, and always mitigate the negative impact of our creations.
It is our duty, as designers, to promote the welfare of all people through designs that are inclusive and holistically thought-through.
My thinking is inspired by the philosophy of utilitarianism, which I believe is the most rational approach for ensuring the long-term survival of our species.
“Feedback, either explicit or implicit, delivered through affective feedback loops, is our most powerful design tool.“ 🤔
Collecting feedback is an essential part of what we do as designers 🧑🏻💻 It is our way of discovering what works for our customers and what doesn’t 👍🏼👎🏼
We should always listen to our customers, but they don’t need to always know that we are listening to them when collecting feedback.
There are different ways how we can collect feedback:
we can observe our customers going about their business (implicit feedback),
or we can ask them specific questions allowing them to express themselves verbally (explicit feedback).
Remember: It is usually the combination of these two methods that yields the best results 👍🏼
AI tools have made design faster, easier, and more accessible to everyone. From generating colour palettes to upscaling low-res images or turning rough sketches into polished visuals—AI can now assist with many of the tedious or technical parts of the creative process.
I’ve gathered some useful AI-powered tools, which I came across recently. You can use them to streamline your work, enhance your visuals, and experiment with new ideas—even if you’re not a designer by trade.
If I learned one absolute statement in the past 20+ years of practicing the craft of digital design is that anyone trying to make absolute statements about almost anything is doomed to be proven wrong at some point.
Is it possible that we became so obsessed with our design processes that somehow, we lost sight of our primary mission, which is the creation of useful products for our customers. Any thoughts?
I find personas to be one of the most overrated design artefacts. They are often too generic, contextually irrelevant or unrelated to the problem at hand.
