Category: Article

A short and simple set of  guidelines to encourage better UX discussions. This (or a variation) could be posted near your code of conduct in your repos. It’s not a silver bullet, but allows teams to level up how they discuss UX. (It helps in discussing other things too!)  1. Focus on the target audience […]

This is the third in a series. The first two showed how confusing products could be fixed with fairly simple changes. It’s often possible to significantly improve a product even using the same hardware. This one tackles a much trickier problem: improving the quality of hardware. The majority of the terrible products I’ve discussed used […]

My last post was on how ‘smart devices’ create overly complex designs by throwing in too many features and misusing their hardware. It showed how great design doesn’t need to be fancy. Design, in fact, can be free. This post wants to push those assumptions a bit, redesigning a product two ways: a modest improvement […]

As consumer devices get ‘smart’, they tend to sprout a large number push buttons. It’s almost cliche at this point to complain about them. The tiny buttons, hidden modes, and Konami Code interaction encourages mistakes and forces frequent trips to the user manual. Of course, they are survivable, but we don’t like them. As a […]

I borrowed a friend’s Tesla 3 yesterday. About 5 minutes into the ride, the windshield started fogging up. I couldn’t find the defroster on the large control screen Teslas are so famous for. In desperation, I tapped the CAR icon but that took me to the settings screen which ended up being a dead end. […]

My last post “The Future Needs Files” clearly touched a nerve. The comments covered concerns well beyond what I intended. This amazing energy shows how fundamental and impassioned we are when it comes to “storing my data”.  However, I made a mistake by titling my post “The Future needs FILES” as several assumed I meant some […]

For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.  I’m not here to tell you exactly what […]

UX is less about technique and more about teamwork. Getting everyone to agree on a common goal is where the real magic lives. But too often UX designers inadvertently sabotage that teamwork. Not intentionally, it’s just that, as a group, we UX designers have strong opinions that sometimes rub our teammates the wrong way. It’s […]

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. Isaac Asimov It all started while on vacation with my wife. We were driving a rental car to a remote location in Washington state. The car had a safety feature that beeped every […]

“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” Alan Kay This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”. I had this intuition that video games would also change my perspective. They seemed so much edgier, playing with deeper and more experimental UX […]