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…
The most common advice for building an audience is “just be yourself.” This is terrible advice. Sarah spent 6 months testing it. Posted every real struggle. Every unfiltered opinion. Every messy process photo. The vulnerability everyone said algorithms reward. Result: 247 followers (64 were bots), zero client inquiries, one LinkedIn message asking if she was…
When $50/hour ends up costing more than $150/hour — the math nobody wants you to see. Last quarter, a SaaS company contacted me about their UI design outsourcing disaster. They’d been outsourcing design for 18 months to “save costs.” They wanted to know why their design quality had tanked, development cycles had doubled, and their…
Here’s what works when you use AI for UX research — and what almost made me design for the wrong problem. Late 2023, Deutsche Telekom data hub redesign. 8 interviews, 6-week deadline. After transcribing the first two interviews manually (6 hours), the math broke: 6 more = 15+ hours. Plus synthesis, analysis, recommendations. Would need…
Something broke between February and August 2025, and I have receipts. I was working on client team headshots in August. Ran the first photo through my usual background removal tool — the same one I’d used reliably for two years. The edge looked chewed. Like someone attacked it with a chainsaw set to “drunk.” My…
If you’ve been avoiding social media because it feels like a scam, the algorithms just caught up to your instincts. A designer friend spent six months torturing herself with “growth hacking.” Posted three times daily. Used 47 hashtags per post. Follow/unfollow tactics. Bought engagement to look legitimate. Took every course on social media marketing essentials…
After designing mobile apps that made everyone miserable, I figured out which clients are worth the headache. Some 10 years ago, I’d take any UX/UI design project that walked through the door. Mobile apps, SaaS dashboards crammed into phone screens, e-commerce apps with seventeen-step checkout flows, productivity tools that required a PhD to understand. I…
