As a UX Tutor, I review hundreds of user stories from aspiring designers striving to address their personas’ needs — but they end up doing exactly the opposite.

That’s because user stories focus on features rather than needs, so most students (and dev teams) struggle to develop innovative products since this framework suppresses their creative efforts.

Here’s a recurring example of how user stories impair my students:

“As a learner, I want to receive notifications so that I can stick to my study schedule.”

Pretty reasonable, but when was the last time you thought: “you know what, I definitely need…

Logistics are one hell of a hurdle when the entire European Union could fit inside your country’s border TWICE OVER.

This is OFF Premium’s ordeal: a multi-million fashion marketplace working with hundreds of stores spread throughout Brazil’s 8.5 million² kilometres, resulting in shipping costs of up to $400 for a single shirt!

The worst part is that shipping used to be free but new commercial policies suddenly changed it, so we went from $0 to WTF?! out of nowhere.

Customers were furious on social media, claiming they were abandoning packed carts and visiting competitors — and I honestly believe they…

People hate redesigns. Unless the original work is terribad, chances are the new version will be stomped even if it’s remarkably better.

Snapchat learned it the hard way back in 2018 after a major redesign that burned 35% of their revenue. Although it had a better Information Architecture than the original, it changed the app’s complexity so much that 5 million users simply jumped out of the boat.

But how can a system be both easy and complex at the same time?

Let’s explain that with something you’re certainly familiar with: a front door.

Have you ever noticed that some fast food prices seem absolutely clueless? I mean, how come a medium Starbucks cup is $4 while an extra-large is $5? Shouldn’t it be twice as much?!

The funny thing is that most people feel like they have gamed the system when opting for the bigger size — as if they found a breach in the operations — but the fact is that the system has just gamed them.

Medium portions are not meant to be sold just like many iPhones are planned to flop. It’s a huge mistake to say the iPhone 5C…

Information Architecture is hardly the most enticing subject in user experience, but this project — combining consumer psychology and lots of research — shows that it pays off to invest in browsability.

Actually, it pays some additional $70.000 every month!

The Problem

OFF Premium is a fashion marketplace offering over 10k products from hundreds of stores and brands all over Brazil. Selling over $1 million per month, OFF brings you premium apparel for an affordable price — I mean really affordable price, often reaching 80% off the original price!

The problem: OFF was an experiment that went viral. Sales skyrocketed on a…

For 180 days, I cranked out endless UX projects that were applauded and then trashed by the end of each and every Sprint. Developers wrote thousands of lines of code that never reached a single one of our customers.

You’d be surprised to know that it didn’t happen at a startup, but at a multi-million eCommerce instead. We were struck by a combination of Covid-19 + the onset of our Agile transformation + new business model — the perfect recipe for this disaster my squad went through.

After 6 months of failure, I approached our Agile Coach and said: “if…

Let’s do a quick scientific experiment together. You are in an art gallery and a vase is sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the room. A visitor, fascinated by it, approaches to take a picture — unaware of a second vase right behind him.

That vase immediately falls and breaks into a hundred. (Just like the man’s heart as he thinks of its price.) Now how would you describe this artsy tragedy?

A Stanford professor carried this same study with both English and Spanish native speakers, revealing a shocking pattern. The English described the scene with agentive expressions…

I’m not here to point fingers. No one could foresee that our sprint goal would go completely obsolete, and it’s easy to understand a manager who feels like cancelling a sprint is like admitting failure, but things shouldn’t be that way:

A Sprint is just a time-boxed container for Scrum events; arbitrary and independent from the people and work in it.

When a sprint is cancelled due to obsolescence (the only factor prescribed by the Scrum Guide itself), we don’t set computers on fire nor do we delete the useful stuff in the Sprint. …