design wisdom

Where am I going with design? That's a hard question because none of us has the ability to understand our path until it's over.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud enough: this isn’t just a UX failure. It’s a business failure. Because when you ignore the human, you lose the customer. Trust isn’t a soft metric. It’s a hard outcome. It’s revenue. Retention. Reputation. UX is where user needs and business goals are supposed to shake hands, not silently walk past eac... See more

We built UX. We broke UX. And now we have to fix it!

Your UX voice isn’t your style or your deliverables. It’s your ability to connect what people need to what the business can deliver and to make sure no one forgets that alignment is what success actually looks like.

Joe Alterio • The death of craft

" For example, 'one' could be total veto. I disagree and I won't support it. 'Two' could be I don't agree, but I will back it. 'Three' could be I think we need more information. 'Four' could be I agree, but with these caveats. And 'five' could be I wholeheartedly agree. It allows people to take a position and make that clear very quickly "

The illusion of alignment

We spend too much time thinking about AI as a substitute (for interfaces, workflows, and jobs) and too little time about AI as a complement. Progress rarely follows a simple path of replacement. It unlocks new, previously unimaginable things rather than merely displacing what came before.

The same is true here. The future isn’t about replacing exist... See more

Julian • The Case Against Conversational Interfaces

Let’s build a UX practice that people don’t just invite in at the last minute, but count on from the start.

Let’s get back to that.

A few ways to start

Ask better questions earlier. Don’t wait until usability testing to challenge assumptions. Start during planning. Be the one who says, “What are we actually trying to solve here?”

Make your work visi

We built UX. We broke UX. And now we have to fix it!

Instead, though there was indeed an increase in public awareness of charts, the majority of people—as I wrote in my previous blog post—were only interested in those standard charts. I’ve found in recent years that my clients have started to shy away from anything too unconventional because they’re concerned about getting pushback from their stakeho... See more

what killed innovation?: the past decade of interactive graphics, a brief recounting - Shirley Wu

These misdirections are known as “dark patterns” – a term coined by Dr. Harry Brignull in 2010, when UX still prioritised accessibility and care for the user. Megumi Tanaka, a UX designer and educator, tells me: “We were kind of inventing the field from scratch then, so people just assumed that you had to think about the person on the other end.” I... See more

The Good, the Bad, and the Iffy: is there such a thing as an ethical designer?

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