What I learned from comparing the user experience of Facebook Marketplace to other marketplaces — You can improve marketplace UX with better search and helping users make offers. But the real secret? Having more people 📈. In our latest YouTube video, we did a UX comparison of Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji (a Canadian marketplace like Craigslist or eBay). Below we’ve summarized our learnings. It’s a…

The importance of information layers for design workspaces and the future of productivity in teams — Modern design canvases, like Figma, take inspiration from sticky notes we put on a wall. As you add and move sticky notes, their purpose gets lost and additional information not on the note is lost. Similarly, the design canvas gets messy with frames filled with UI at different states of…

Barcelona was hot and humid beyond what we could tolerate, but walking around the beautiful city, visiting friends and eating delicious food made it worth it. At least it did for the first week and a half. In addition to the recommendations curated by one of our generous friends, we…

Memory, misfortune, and subconscious messages. — This story originally appeared on my website. Head there to get my stories early and sign up to my newsletter to get them in your inbox. Charlie Gedeon | Interaction designer. Educator. Writer. Join me as I explore how we can improve the relationship between our minds and machines.charliegedeon.com In 2016, at the happiest moment of my design education, I forgot my notebook on a train and the documentation of my growth that…

Writing has always been about learning for me. I’ve started posting regularly on LinkedIn using articles I read as launchpads for my own thoughts. This way of making connections is a great way to digest the torrent of information I’m bombarded with on a daily basis. At the end of…

A story about pursuing an entrepreneurial career in design — For the last five years, I’ve grappled with a crippling obsession with making the rightdecision. This is despite knowing, intuitively, that life doesn’t have right choices. The onset of this condition was likely an overconsumption of content about what is now known as “hustle culture.” Following a severe dissatisfaction with…

A journey from incredibly touching ad to horribly tone-deaf — Take 1: Lover On Nov 19, 2009, Google posted an ad to Youtube titled Parisian Love. It encapsulated all the emotional highs and lows of living with Google Search. It is one of tech’s best ads ever made. The beauty of this ad was that it was not presumptuous. It painted a…

The king of search cannot conquer critical thinking if instructors are willing to put in the effort. — The question of whether Google impacts the way people learn is as old as Google itself. Opinions about its pros and cons are in constant flux. Fantasizing about retreating into our luddite shells of looking up information in the library is not productive. …

How a tool intended to help my students became a gauge for my own performance — I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of assigning weekly journals in my class before. Despite preaching to my students every year that they should journal to bolster their learning capacity, I’d never formalized it as a learning tool within the course. …