Last year, a SaaS company paid me to fix their onboarding. Churn was 23% monthly. Brutal. First call, the CS lead opened their dashboard. Gorgeous interface. Real-time health scores. Customer journey maps. Risk alerts. Engagement tracking across seven touchpoints. “We have complete visibility.” I asked if they knew why customers were leaving. She pulled up…

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…

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…

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 when supervised. Dangerous when left unsupervised. I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-theatre. I use…

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.…

Founders love hiring. It feels like progress. A full-time designer on payroll? That must mean you’re a real startup now. Except most of the time, that hire ends up babysitting a Figma file for three months while the product spec changes fifteen times and your runway quietly dies. Here’s what actually works: a senior UI/UX…

If you’ve ever opened a Figma file and wondered whether the designer actually met a developer in their life, this post is for you. The $28K Handoff That Took 6 Weeks to Untangle B2B SaaS company. 35 employees. Growing fast. Hired an agency for their product redesign. Agency delivered 50 screens. Beautiful work. Clean layouts.…

This post isn’t a polite reminder. It’s a cautionary tale. A reflection, really — on every well-funded, well-intentioned product team that decided to hire a UI/UX designer… and then slowly suffocated them in a pile of Slack threads, Notion checklists, and “just a quick thought” Figma comments. Let’s call it what it is: pixel micromanagement…

Got brought in to help a well-funded American startup with their “revolutionary” product. They’d already spent $250K on branding. Had a complete brand book. Army of marketing consultants. Pre-approved UI kit. Moodboards for days. Looked impressive in investor presentations. Then I asked to see the actual product flows. “We’re still finalizing those,” they said. “But…

Got a call from a designer friend last year. Voice sounded tired. “Remember that client I was excited about? The fintech thing?” “I’m two months into fixing what a design package agency did. It’s all garbage. And the client’s out of money.” “Yeah, what happened?” (This is how most design package stories end.) The Setup:…