Gone are the days of feature-rich software with poor usability. In order for your software company to stay competitive, you'll need to invest a great deal into your user experience and overall visual design.
Here are 5 UX designers to follow in 2018:
1. Luke Wroblewski
Luke Wroblewski is a thought leader within the design community with nearly two hundred thousand followers on Twitter alone. On social media, he's always sharing nuggets of wisdom about the industry, the state of UI, and how to better create effective UX design.
Why should you listen to him? Currently, Wroblewski is a Product Director at Google. He founded his own company Polar, which was later acquired by Google, and served as Chief Product Officer for Bagcheck, which was later acquired by Twitter. In addition to these accomplishments, he's authored three well-liked web design books, including Mobile First, Web Form Design and Site-seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.
2. Whitney Hess
Whitney Hess's mission is to bring humanity back to business. She's an independent UX coach who helps humanize technology. In addition to coaching executives in empathy, she helps teach individuals, companies, and software designers how to understand and interact with computers in the best way possible.
Following Hess on Twitter, you'll get more than insight into design as she's also a life and business coach. When following Hess, you'll also get her personal insights on how to design both a better professional and personal life.
3. Jessica Robbins
Jessica Robbins is the UX director at Saxum, a very respected Oklahoma-based PR firm. On Robbins' Instagram, she leaves UX memos, little bits of advice written on sticky notes, to help endow her followers with a bit of her design wisdom. Sticky notes like, "VUI", with the description "Voice User Interface -- the new GUI" and "Listen, Synthesize, Document, Repeat," give followers an opportunity to learn something new about how UX designers think.
4. Kevin Mercier
Kevin Mercier has quite the following on Instagram, racking up thousands of followers with only 65 posts. Mercier posts images, primarily UI design ideas that are clean, bright, and trendy. While Robbins Hess provide much more context for the things they post, Mercier's images speak for themselves. He's not the chattiest of designers, but if you're looking for visual inspiration, Mercier's Instagram could be a great resource for you.
5. UX/UI Wireframes
UX/UI Wireframes is another Instagram account that is well worth a follow, regardless of your job title. UX/UI Wireframes, just as the name suggests, supplies followers with images of wireframes, mockups, and whiteboard scribblings. They've racked up nearly forty thousand followers because of the quality of their posts, and their posts can assist you in your endeavor to making better user experiences from scratch. Follow UX/UI wireframes can help you understand the process of creating great UX designs -- from paper wireframes to digital workflows.
If you're a UX designer, then you know how important is to stay up-to-date with the best UX designers out there, but it's not just designers that need to stay in the loop. Tech entrepreneurs, software engineers, and software team leads need to follow UX trends closely, and learn from leading UX and UI designers in order to better manage UX designers so that they can compete with user-optimized software applications.
About the Author: Ellie Martin is co-founder of Startup Change group. Her works have been featured on Yahoo! , Wisebread, AOL, among others. She currently splits her time between her home office in New York and Israel. You may connect with her on Twitter.