Design
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.…
We built a tool. That’s it. That’s the post. Okay, not quite. But yes — https://curated.dnsk.work is just a simple, slightly obsessive tool we made to track the startups we keep accidentally redesigning in our heads. It’s not a lead gen gimmick. Not a case study hub. Definitely not SEO-driven (sorry, robots). Just a lovingly…
The final days of Pesach are about walking forward. Not escaping anymore – moving. Through the sea. Into the unknown. So this is a story about control. About what happens when product design becomes fear-driven. And about why trying to manage every click, every user move, every pixel of behavior ends up hurting the people…
We’re deep into Pesach season. A time of freedom, storytelling, and asking difficult questions. And as odd as it sounds, it’s also a perfect time to talk about dark patterns in UX design. Because the Exodus isn’t just a historical escape – it’s a metaphor for systems that trap versus systems that liberate. And too…
I rejected a designer last month whose portfolio had perfect case studies, consistent branding, and a clear CTA to “Request Full Deck.” It looked like every other portfolio I’d seen that week. Which was the problem. The work was fine. The presentation was polished. But I couldn’t tell how they thought, how they handled ambiguity,…
