Your tastes will always outpace your skill, and what to do about it
Powerful advice gleaned from a quote by Ira Glass - your taste will always outpace your creative abilities.
Read more โ10-15-2024
Using first principles in UX will make your product more intuitive and more enjoyable for your customers, while making your job easier.
10-01-2024
Avoid the temptation of the dramatic reveal. Here's why openness and transparency are your real competitive advantages in product development.
08-27-2024
Open up the potential of your designs with a deeper understanding of what variable fonts like Inter can do.
08-20-2024
How you do one thing is how you do everything. This is a phrase that has been around for a long time, but what does it really mean? In this article, we will explore the meaning of this phrase and how it can be applied to your life.
Powerful advice gleaned from a quote by Ira Glass - your taste will always outpace your creative abilities.
Read more โ06-25-2024
I'm open sourcing the Figma file I use to design and create images for my personal site.
06-11-2024
People spend most of their time on sites and apps other than yours. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
06-04-2024
When building something new, what's more important: that it works, or that it looks good? The Aesthetic-Usability Effect says that users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs as easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.
04-09-2024
"Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara outlines how to making customers feel exceptionally special. Let's bring these hospitality principles to tech, by creating memorable experiences, and using hospitality to elevate customer satisfaction in product design, engaging with the people using our products.
02-13-2024
Ever felt that you've seen a design that just makes sense to you, but you couldn't quite put your finger on why? There's rules for that. Let's talk about Gestalt
01-22-2024
Building better products involves skills you won't learn in computer science school, or at a boot camp. Find success through testing, learning from real-world feedback, and adapting.
12-05-2023
In product design, there's a critical difference between crowdsourcing ideas and feedback, and user research.
11-07-2023
The Decoy Effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to have a strong preference between two options, when presented with a third option that is inferior to one of the original options.
09-04-2023
Learn how to escape common product development pitfalls using data-driven decisions. Read how Craftwork used analytics to optimize their user experience.
07-04-2023
Understand how multitasking affects your customers' memory, and improve your product design and engagement with cognitive psychology and the Zeigarnik effect.
06-13-2023
How to use being wrong to improve UX and product design. Learn how to embrace mistakes and create better products for your users.
06-06-2023
Cognitive load is a concept that is important to understand that is often overlooked, and has a huge impact on both UX and the lived experience of building your product.
02-21-2023
Though we don't often think of it this way, the objects and buildings around us are the result of a series of design decisions.
01-31-2023
Explore the fascinating world of perception and cognition in the Tiny Improvements newsletter. Uncover the unexpected tricks of our minds and learn how to make tiny improvements in our cognitive abilities.
01-17-2023
A sampling of books that have had a fundamental impact on my career as a designer, developer and startup founder.
12-06-2022
The Gartner Hype Cycle, and its relationship with customer experience for new products and companies.
Powerful AI tools like ChatGPT make it super easy to generate inaccurate and dangerous and inaccurate content. Relying heavily on AI to write can be messy.
Read more โAs a part of my work as a DevRel lead for Google Assistant, I did a guest segment on VOICE Talks in August of 2021, talking about why UX research for voice-first experiences is so crucial.
This is an article about CSS and usability. The ch unit in CSS was a revelation for me, and I promise that if you don't know about it already, you're gonna love it.
Read more โFrom a talk I gave at my then-home-base Hygge Coworking at a community event. The thesis: we're all designers, and you should give a damn about the things you put into the world.
Slides are available on slideshare.
These are slides from an empassioned talk I gave about design during a community event called Zero Day at Hygge Coworking in Charlotte, NC, USA.
The thesis: good design is important, and you should be paying attention to good-and-bad design in the world around you. Contributing to making the world better for everyone is everyone's job.
Slides are available on SlideShare
A rehash of a talk on the basics of design and aesthetics, covering color theory, swiss design, and some of the historical roots of modern design.
Authored with Andrew Miller, Jeremy Osborn, and Leah Cunningham
Slides are available on SlideShare
This is a talk I gave at Blend Conf in Charlotte, NC USA in 2013, when I was working for Microsoft as a UX Designer. If you're interested in learning how to design apps for a version of Windows that came out in 2012, this is your day!
Slides are available on Slideshare