Yesterday, I took advantage of Black Friday sales to buy a Bluetooth speaker since my old one stopped working. Although I have worked designing technical systems for over two decades, I still needed help figuring out how to turn the speaker on. In my defense, there are three round buttons…

If there is anything that I dislike more than those “UX vs. UI/Product vs. UX” images on Instagram or LinkedIn, it’s the comments that always appear every time one of those images gets posted. It’s always the same commentary: “this image sucks”, “I hate this”, “this is wrong”, you get…

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…