We have all been there as designers. Someone may give feedback in a less-than-helpful way to make us feel personally attacked, or our user test results aren’t what you expected. Everyone can have their moments. That said, when I learn a new technique or even sometimes synthesize the results of…

This is the story of an actual conversation I had with an actual client who hired me, and other people, to redo a software product. One of the first things that we did for this client is to include them in a workshop to determine two things: how the company…

WARNING: Spoilers for The Bear Seasons 1 and 2 are discussed below. I’m getting this out of the way first, partly so I don’t have spoilers in my lead paragraph: where Ted Lasso shows managing change in a color-saturated fantasy world, The Bear, while still a fictional television show, shows…

My first job with “web” and “design” somewhere in the title was about a year before the .com bubble burst. …

Years ago, before I changed my profession towards design, I sold classified advertising for newspapers. It was the nineties, so we all typed each ad into ancient localized computer terminals. Occasionally we would do this while the person buying the ad was there, since where I worked people were charged…

I studied photography when I was in college. The dirty smelly analog kind, the kind when you’re in a darkroom for hours on sunny days developing film and then printing the same image over and over, dodging and burning with homemade cardboard tools until the smell of those chemicals made…

Do I regret going into the UX field 13 years ago? Absolutely not, but I have considered leaving multiple times. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t thought about quitting who has done it for as long as I have. That all said, there are some things that I wish I…

I think about user experience every time I get off an airplane. Every single time the fasten seat belt sign shuts off, anarchy always ensues. The guy in the back of the plane shoves his way forward, someone insists on moving forward to get their bags, and none of this…

I would take a bet that when a designer first started as a designer that they would have thought, even for just a little bit, that design as a profession would be “future proof”. …