Articles

Users arrive with a model of how your product works before they see a single screen. When your structure disagrees with it, they do not learn yours. They work around it.

Removing steps is the default instinct in product design. In flows where the action cannot be undone, the step you delete is often the one holding the whole thing up.

Internal tools get the leftover design budget and the leftover thinking. They are also where the business actually runs, and where good design pays back fastest.

At a large enough audience, every default is a policy, every edge case happens thousands of times a day, and a change that tests well can still be the wrong change.

Most design systems do not fail on craft. The components are fine. They fail because nobody decided who is allowed to change them, and what happens when a team needs something that does not exist.

The further you get in this profession, the smaller the proportion of your time that involves drawing anything. Here is what replaces it, and why that is not a loss.