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User Research Is Storytelling
Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And…
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From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.
As a product builder over too many years to mention, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few…
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An Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership
Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking…
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Design Dialects: Breaking the Rules, Not the System
"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior." — Kenneth L. Pike The web…
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Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna
Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird…
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Designing for the Unexpected
I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine?…
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Voice Content and Usability
We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through…
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Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt
In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it…
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Design for Safety, An Excerpt
Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but…
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A Content Model Is Not a Design System
Do you remember when having a great website was enough? Now, people are getting answers from Siri, Google search snippets, and mobile apps, not just our websites. Forward-thinking organizations have…