Design

When “make it pop” meets “increase conversions by 400%” — spoiler: math doesn’t work that way either. Last year I turned down a marketing website project. Six figures. Dream client. The kind of work that pays for nice vacations and good therapy. I said no anyway. Four years ago, I would’ve said yes before they…

Your beautiful portfolio won’t survive first contact with a real stakeholder meeting. Here’s what no UX design in education program wants to admit: most of what they teach you is performance art. You’ll spend months learning to create pixel-perfect prototypes, conducting user interviews about hypothetical problems, and crafting case studies that read like design fiction.…

If you’ve been researching the same problem for three months, you’re not being thorough — you’re being scared. There’s a special kind of hell reserved for product teams drowning in UX iceberg syndrome. You know the type: every decision needs another user interview. Every wireframe requires a deeper dive into personas. Every button placement sparks…

If the demo can’t prove the headline in 60 seconds, change the headline. Most campaigns are expensive fiction. We dream up the perfect customer journey in a conference room that smells like optimism and dry-erase markers. We comp visuals that would make our mothers proud. We buy reach like we’re collecting Pokémon cards. Then someone…

Everyone says they want simple web designs. Then they brief a carousel, three gradients, abstract shapes, and a brand film with soft‑focus office plants. That isn’t simple; that’s a costume. If the page only works when it’s dressed up, it doesn’t work. In simple web design, words and order do the heavy lifting. My rule:…

Docs are presales. If they’re thin or hidden, your saas website is unfinished. In saas website design, docs and changelog are part of the product, not the footer. Here’s a simple truth most “marketing” Saas websites ignore: high‑intent visitors don’t believe headlines — they believe documentation. If I’m a CTO, a staff engineer, or a security‑minded…

Slow pages don’t just annoy people; they change their minds. A landing page isn’t a gallery. It’s a decision surface with a clock running in the background. Every extra 200ms is a chance for doubt to creep in, for a tab to steal attention, for a calendar reminder to win. Speed is UX. Treat it…

Good UX is deciding what matters, in what order, for whom, under constraints you don’t control. That’s the job. AI in UX can help, but it doesn’t do the deciding. Think of it as a tireless junior: fast, keen, occasionally delusional. Useful, supervised. I’m not anti‑AI; I’m anti‑theatre. I use AI in UX design every week, but…

I’ve lost count of the founders who’ve come to me after buying a “starter” or “small business” website design package. Same story every time: a tidy PDF proposal, a fixed number of pages, a timeline that fits neatly into a calendar, and a site that looks vaguely competent but somehow does nothing. Pretty. Punctual. Pointless.…

Most UX audits are long, expensive, and full of beautifully formatted reports you’ll never read twice. This isn’t that. This is the UX sanity check — the quick-and-dirty, seven-question sweep I use when I want to know if a product is healthy enough to survive the week. It’s not a replacement for a proper deep-dive audit, but…