Interfaces are becoming less dense. I’m usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and “we liked it that way” bias, but comparing websites and applications of 2024 to their 2000s-era counterparts, the spreading out of software is hard to ignore. To explain this trend, and suggest h … | Continue reading
Polish is a word that gets thrown out in conversations about craft, quality, and beauty. We talk about it at the end of the design process, before the work goes out the door: let’s polish this up. Let’s do a polish sprint. Could this use more polish? https://twitter.com/svlleyy/s … | Continue reading
It used to be easy to pick colors for design systems. Years ago, you could pick a handful of colors to match your brand’s ethos, or start with an off-the-shelf palette (remember flatuicolors.com?). Each hue and shade served a purpose, and usually had a quirky name like “idea yell … | Continue reading
Your workplace community — the way you interact with your coworkers every day — can have a major impact on your productivity, happiness, and self-worth. It’s natural to want to shape the community in ways that might make you feel more comfortable. But how can you shape it? Over m … | Continue reading
There’s a lot of fear in the air. As AI gets better at design, it’s natural for designers to be worried about their jobs. But I think the question — will AI replace designers? — is a waste of time. Humans have always invented technology to do their work for them and will continue … | Continue reading
After four months of parental leave, I came back to work and noticed something different. Many of the words, phrases, acronyms, and figures of speech I took for granted no longer held the same meanings. Specifically, the word “platform:” before my time off, I would breeze over it … | Continue reading
Here’s a riddle: Nobody I’ve ever worked with likes micromanagement. Yet, on every team I’ve been on, there is at least one micromanager. How is this possible? Harvard Business Review says, “Micromanage at Your Peril.” Forbes says “Micromanaging is one of the most damaging habits … | Continue reading
Starting a career in design is like crash-landing on Mars. You may have studied it through a telescope, but nothing can prepare you for actually being there. One of the biggest surprises many new designers experience is that design isn’t always about coming up with the most creat … | Continue reading
I like writing and sharing essays on twitter. I especially like the way the link previews look when they have images that stand out in the timeline. In the past, I’ve created illustrations for each of my posts. But I have two problems: 1. Creating illustrations takes time, and 2. … | Continue reading
Has design become boring? Or is it just harder to notice? | Continue reading
An algorithm for creating color palettes for data visualization | Continue reading
How exponential growht hides in plain sight | Continue reading
A new paradigm powering the next generation of design systems | Continue reading
“Brainstorming” — the problem-solving technique of coming up with as many ideas as possible in a short period of time — has been showing up on a lot of my leadership meeting agendas lately. Many of my peers are employing brainstorming in the belief that, as thought-leading creati … | Continue reading
A new trend is sending shock waves through the world of art, collecting, finance, and investing. It’s the result of a perfect storm: one part scientific breakthrough, one part new financial paradigm, one part reflection of world events. Some people attribute it entirely to the cu … | Continue reading
Unlocking impact through design systems and automation | Continue reading
In the January 1968 issue of computer science trade magazine Communications of the ACM, a paper appeared under the unassuming title “Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance.” “Programming is a multibillion dollar industry,” the paper … | Continue reading
A scene from the 2001 movie Zoolander1: INT. THE PALATIAL OFFICE OF FASHION MOGUL JACOBIM MUGATU (PLAYED BY WILL FERRELL) MUGATU desperately wants to hire DEREK ZOOLANDER (PLAYED BY BEN STILLER). MUGATU has prepared an employment offer … | Continue reading
How my approach to building a design team is changing | Continue reading
Prescriptive feedback limits creative collaboration. I’ve seen it time and time again, but I’ve struggled to articulate the exact reasons and their remedies. Recently, though, I got some insight from an unusual source: a game of chess. Even though it wasn’t the last move, pawn ta … | Continue reading
What exists in the space between riffing and ripping | Continue reading
Understanding affordances leads to better conversations about design | Continue reading
I spend a lot of my day talking to myself. “Maybe this whole experience should just be a chat interface,” I think while brushing my teeth. “What if that component didn’t have borders?” I ask to nobody while cooking dinner. The office-less office doesn’t help; I’m nostalgic for fo … | Continue reading
Update 6/12/22: The links to the implmentation of the API are currently broken. I'm updating some dependencies to make it work again. A few months ago I wrote an essay titled “Design APIs: the evolution of design systems”. The API model for design systems resonated with design sy … | Continue reading
Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash Growing up a white kid in the south, Juneteenth was on my list of ‘other kids’ holidays.’ Some kids had Ash Wednesday and All Saints’ Day, some kids had the first day of deer season, and some kids had Juneteenth. Juneteenth had the added obscurity … | Continue reading
Throughout the series, we’ve covered four of the major ethical movements in philosophy. Here’s a brief recap: Virtue ethics is the belief that well-being comes from having the right personality traits or dispositions. The key to virtue ethics is finding those special skills that, … | Continue reading
Care ethics is closely related to the rise of feminist voices in philosophy starting in the 1970s. Writers at the time were inspired by the vanguard of feminism — Mary Astell in 1694, Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, and Harriet Taylor Mill in 1869. They pointed out the dominance of … | Continue reading
On April 2nd, 2020, Brett Crozier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s commanding officer, was relieved of command. The Navy’s decision to remove Crozier stemmed from a message that the commander wrote to his superiors. The message concerned a developing emergency aboard the Roosevelt: … | Continue reading
Consequentialism became the most popular approach to ethics following the Age of Enlightenment. Writers in the late 18th and early 19th century saw how strict, rule-based, duty-bound theories of ethics resulted in contradictory and often destructive behavior. After Napoleon’s war … | Continue reading
Deontology was the result of a surge of new energy in philosophy beginning in the 17th century. After the chaos and destruction of the Black Death, Europeans re-evaluated their relationship to the world around them. Scholars like René Descartes and Isaac Newton took on monumental … | Continue reading
This essay is an adaptation of a talk I gave at Front, a UX and Product Management conference. If you prefer, you can watch the presentation here. Great companies are defined by their ability to change. Apple changed when they re-hired Steve Jobs. Microsoft changed when they embr … | Continue reading
Virtue ethics was one of the earliest attempts at defining a language and a logic around ethics. The effort to identify and understand virtues began in Ancient Greece and continues to this day. What is a virtue? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines a virtue as “an exce … | Continue reading
Why ethics? The 2010s were a remarkable decade for technology. Day after day, tech lined the front pages of major newspapers, the chyrons of broadcast news, and the glossy sheets of magazines. And in 2019, the trend took a turn: the stories became about the ethics of technology. … | Continue reading
A simple question I've never asked | Continue reading
Design feedback is one of the challenges I return to over and over again. It never seems to get easier, no matter how many times I practice or how many different tactics and frameworks I try. Recently, I did my first rounds of feedback with a new team. Once again, I was nervous. … | Continue reading
The attention economy is booming. While advertising, e-commerce, and social media are dominated by monopolies, the market for our attention is flush with competition. New movie studios, VR platforms, streaming services, and merchandisable cinematic universes are launched every da … | Continue reading
Let’s talk about Luddites. The actual, real, historical Luddites. “Luddite” was the label given to a group of English workers’ rights activists in the early 19th century. They owe their name to a man who may never have existed — Ned Ludd. The Luddites were working-class people an … | Continue reading
So many words take on different meanings the minute you get to work. Culture no longer means a shared identity in art, music, food, and dance. Engagement no longer means a sustained, meaningful connection. Other words undergo smaller transformations. The differences in meaning ar … | Continue reading
A/B testing began with beer. At the turn of the 20th century, William Sealy Gosset was exploring new ways of running experiments on his production line. Gosset was trying to improve the quality of Guinness’s signature stout but couldn’t afford to run large-scale experiments on al … | Continue reading
I read 25 books in 2019. That’s slightly more than last year, largely due to my discovery of the Kindle iOS and MacOS apps. The iOS can scroll continuously instead of flipping between discrete pages, which is ideal for the kind of non-fiction books I like to read. I still read on … | Continue reading
An exporation of how an API for design decisions works | Continue reading
Here’s a common problem: a design team creates a design system. They craft beautiful documentation, crystal-clear guidelines, and meticulously organized files. But the design system never gains traction. Engineers don’t use it, and other designers quickly stop maintaining it. It … | Continue reading
You can read this article on UX Booth. | Continue reading
Machine learning is a powerful tool that drives everything from curated content recommendations to optimized user interfaces. With Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon leading the charge, machine learning is becoming deeply integrated into everyday product experiences. This means … | Continue reading
This is the Müller-Lyer illusion. You’ve probably seen 1 it before: it consists of two lines, each with forked ends. The middle portion of the top line looks longer than the middle portion of the bottom line. However, when you measure the length of each middle portion, they are t … | Continue reading
At a time when data is king, product designers should place more trust in their intuition. Recently I attended Front, a product management conference in Salt Lake City. There, Maggie Crowley, product manager for a company called Drift, presented a case study in redesigning a comp … | Continue reading
You can read this article on UX Booth. | Continue reading
You can read this article on CSS Tricks. | Continue reading