Design Methods, Metrics & Power
How you do the work: research tricks, design systems, AI tools, metrics, modularity and the ethics/power behind UX decisions.
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Good for: senior ICs, leads and strategy-minded designers who care about method, not just outputs.
The submission went in on a Tuesday. Formal prose. Technical subject. Revised three times. The kind of writing that takes longer than it looks. The editor came back Thursday. The ai checker said 100%. Policy required disclosure or rejection. I wrote every word of it… You submit something to a publication. The editor runs it…
The research is done. Six weeks. Twelve user interviews. A 47-slide synthesis deck with themes color-coded in four shades of blue. The researcher presents to the cross-functional team on a Thursday afternoon. Everyone nods. Someone says “this is really valuable.” Someone else says they’d love to dig into the data more when they have time.…
This article was originally written for external publication, yet ended up here instead. Enjoy! Design review went well. Everyone liked the screens. The prototype tested clean. The team shipped. Eleven weeks later, activation was down 19%. Support volume had climbed. A retro produced fourteen action items and no root causes. Some UX design mistakes only…
I’ve been designing products for enterprise SaaS companies for eight years. Deutsche Telekom, IQVIA, D.E. Shaw Group. The kind of products where a bad UX decision costs millions and ruins someone’s quarterly bonus. Never mine, unfortunately. Technical debt is familiar territory: ship fast, promise “we’ll refactor later,” codebase gets messy, developers slow down. UX debt…
Last month a design lead showed me their adoption metrics dashboard. Figma library: 97% connected. Component usage tracked across 47 teams. Monthly reports with color-coded progress bars trending green like a very healthy plant. “Fantastic adoption,” they said, clicking through to a slide about governance wins. “Can I see your team’s Slack?” I asked. They…
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…
I was working on client team headshots in August 2025. 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. Bad photo, I thought. Tried three more. Same artifacts. So I did something that…
If you’ve been researching the same problem for three months, you’re not being thorough — you’re being scared. There’s a special kind of hell reserved for product teams drowning in UX iceberg syndrome. You know the type: every decision needs another user interview. Every wireframe requires a deeper dive into personas. Every button placement sparks…
Every SaaS team hits the same wall around 10-15 features: the interface feels inconsistent, new features take longer, and someone suggests building a design system. Six months later: 83 Figma components, 40 pages of documentation, developers using it about 23% of the time. The rest is cowboy code with “urgent deadline” justifications. I’ve watched this…
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…
