Five years ago, I hired a UX designer with exceptional soft skills. Articulate in meetings. Diplomatic with stakeholders. Created beautiful presentation decks. Responded to Slack within minutes with encouragement and emoji. Three months later, the project failed because they’d agreed to every terrible idea anyone suggested. Seventeen stakeholder requests. Fourteen contradictory features. Zero pushback. The…
Last month, a SaaS founder asked me to review their onboarding. “We implemented every best practice,” they said. “But activation is terrible.” I opened their app. Welcome screen with value props. Account setup wizard with progress bar. Interactive product tour with twelve hotspots. Empty state illustrations with cheerful CTAs. Contextual tooltips on every button. Profile…
Your perfect onboarding just got killed by someone who never saw it. I watched a $50K ARR deal die in a conference room last year because of a question our SaaS onboarding never answered. The product worked. The user loved it. She’d completed our beautifully designed onboarding in 8 minutes, explored features, and was ready…
The project was fine. Good product. Clear brief. Reasonable timeline. They paid on time. Nobody yelled at me. I delivered everything they asked for, and they were happy with it. And I was fucking miserable. Four stakeholders. That’s all it took. But here’s what nobody tells you: this is why your product looks like everyone…
Part 2 of the series on social media marketing for designers who’d rather be doing literally anything else. In Part 1, I told you that authenticity beats polish. That algorithms finally reward genuine content over growth-hacking bullshit. That your design instincts about quality were right all along. All of that is true. Here’s the part…
When $50/hour ends up costing more than $150/hour — the math nobody wants you to see. Last quarter, a SaaS company contacted me. They’d been using UI design outsourcing for 18 months to “save costs.” They wanted to know why their design quality had tanked, their development cycles had doubled, and their designers kept quitting.…
Here’s what actually works when you use AI for UX research — and what’s just expensive procrastination. I resisted using AI for UX research for longer than I probably should have. Not because I’m anti-AI or think it’s going to steal jobs. But because most “AI research tools” seemed designed to help you skip the…
You’ve probably noticed your AI design tools getting weirder. Here’s why that’s happening and what you can do about it. Something strange has been happening with AI design tools over the past few months. That background removal tool that used to work perfectly? Now it occasionally gives you results that look like someone attacked the…
If you’ve been avoiding social media because it feels like a scam, the algorithms just caught up to your instincts. I’ve watched designers torture themselves trying to learn marketing for years (oh, hi, Ira!). They take courses on “growth hacking,” force themselves to post clickbait, and generally feel disgusted about the whole thing. Meanwhile, marketing…
After designing eleven mobile apps that made everyone miserable, I figured out which clients are worth the headache. Five years ago, I’d take any mobile UI UX design services project that walked through the door. SaaS dashboards crammed into phone screens, e-commerce apps with seventeen-step checkout flows, “productivity” apps that required a PhD to understand.…
