Design
I spent 6 weeks building a feature that saved users 40 minutes per week. Then I skipped it in user onboarding because “it felt too advanced” and “we didn’t want to overwhelm new users.” Discovery rate after 90 days: 27%. 73% of users never found it. Not because it was bad. Because I decided not…
I spent three months tracking settings usage across one product. 127 total settings. 89 visible by default. Users changed an average of 4.7 settings. Not 89. Not 31. Not even 12. 4.7. Democracy in action: you built 89 options, users touched 5% of them. The other 95% just made onboarding take 18 minutes longer and…
I audited a SaaS homepage last year that took three paragraphs to explain what the product actually did. Bounce rate: 73%. Time on page: 11 seconds. The founder was confused. “But our sales team loves the copy. The investors said it was compelling. Legal approved every claim.” Cool. Your buyers still don’t understand what you…
I rewrote an error message last month. Changed it from “Oops! Something might’ve gone a teensy bit wrong 🙈” to “This failed. Here’s why.” Form completion rate went from 64% to 91%. Same form. Same functionality. Different product copy. Your product is too nice. Everything says “maybe.” Every modal wants to know if it’s a…
I ran a UX audit on a SaaS product last year. The founder wanted a redesign: “Everything feels cluttered. Users get confused. We need to start fresh.” The audit revealed 47 features in the interface. Users actively used 12. The other 35? Dead weight. Legacy toggles from 2019. Settings nobody changed. Flows that led nowhere.…
A client came to me with 18 months of traction, 2,000 active users, and an MVP that looked like it was styled with inline CSS and prayers. Which it was. The founder defended it: “It’s scrappy. It works. Our users don’t care about design.” Then I showed him the dropout metrics: 47% abandoned signup at…
I launched a new dashboard tab. No bugs filed. No complaints. No support tickets. My team celebrated: “Clean launch!” Three weeks later: 23% churn rate. The feature nobody complained about was the feature nobody used. They didn’t rage-quit. They just drifted away. Silent churn is the worst kind of failure. It doesn’t show up in…
I shipped a “Save draft” button that didn’t save drafts. For three months. The button looked active. It had hover states. It showed a success toast: “Draft saved!” It did everything except the one thing it promised – actually save anything. The backend wasn’t ready. The feature was planned. Marketing needed screenshots. So I left…
I caught a critical signup bug three days before launch by pretending to be a 69-year-old librarian with trust issues. The bug? If you backspaced in the password field and then tried to paste, the form silently failed validation but didn’t tell you why. It just… sat there. Blinking cursor. No error message. No progress.…
I redesigned Notion’s empty states without permission. Took me 4 hours on a Saturday. Notion didn’t ask. They probably don’t care. But I learned more in those 4 hours than I did in a month of client work. This isn’t a pitch. It’s not a teardown. And it’s definitely not spec work. It’s a reflex.…
