CSS Tips Part 2 - text-wrap: pretty will make your text feel intentional
Go beyond balance. Learn how text-wrap: pretty improves readability, reduces awkward breaks, and makes your UI feel more polished.
Design & User Experience
Thoughts on design systems, user experience, and creating products people love. Bridging the gap between design and development.
55 articles in this topic
You are not your user. Except when you are.
"You are not your user" is fundamentally good advice. It's also occasionally wrong, but in a very useful way.
The Zeroth Loop: They Don't Quit, They Forget
Most habits don't fall apart because people quit. They fall apart because they aren't sticky.
The Science of Spotting Hidden Product Ideas
The best product ideas hide in plain sight, in your habits and everyone else's. Watch what people actually do, not what they say they want. Build for that.
The Psychology Hack Hiding in Great Products
Every message is a moment of influence. Make the nudge helpful and you'll create power users and build loyalty.
AI and the New Language of Human-Centered Design
Software has always required people to think like a computer. AI flips it on its head: people expect computers to work the way they think.
Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Design
Good design is good design, no matter what you're building.
Beyond Click Counts: Finding the Right Signals for Good Design
Click counts are noise. Real design success is measured in signals that show whether people actually achieved what they came to do.
Stop Counting Clicks
Too many clicks isn't the problem. It's a signal that your design isn't successful.
Design's Shakespearean Curse: Good UX Should Never Be Noticed
The best UX design goes unnoticed. Learn how invisible design shapes digital experiences, and why great designers embrace the paradox of their work going unseen.
Content creation workflow: my writing process
Learn how I write and publish content on my Next.js site using Markdown and MDX, and a custom content creation workflow.
First principles for UX design
Using first principles in UX will make your product more intuitive and more enjoyable for your customers, while making your job easier.
Don't just listen. Interpret feedback wisely.
User feedback is your product's compass. Listen intently, act wisely, and stay true to your vision to navigate towards success.
Nobody Wants a Big Reveal: Why Keeping Secrets Hurts Your Work
Avoid the temptation of the dramatic reveal. Here's why openness and transparency are your real competitive advantages in product development.
How Contrast Elevates Perception
Why a seamless experience can make your work feel superior - even if it's not.
Inter and the Power of Fonts: Why Typefaces Matter More Than You Think
Open up the potential of your designs with a deeper understanding of what variable fonts like Inter can do.
How you do one thing is how you do everything
How you do one thing is how you do everything. This is a phrase that has been around for a long time, but what does it really mean? In this article, we will explore the meaning of this phrase and how it can be applied to your life.
Your tastes will always outpace your skill, and what to do about it
Powerful advice gleaned from a quote by Ira Glass - your taste will always outpace your creative abilities.
Open Sourcing my Design System
I'm open sourcing the Figma file I use to design and create images for my personal site.
Statistically, nobody has used your app
People spend most of their time on sites and apps other than yours. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect
When building something new, what's more important: that it works, or that it looks good? The Aesthetic-Usability Effect says that users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs as easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.
The Endowment Effect: why useful trials make for sticky products
The endowment effect is a psychological phenomenon where people value things more highly simply because they own them. How can you use this to make your product stickier?
Beyond the walled garden: what Spotify and Substack get wrong
It's natural for big companies to make mistakes - but when they do, it's a great opportunity for smaller companies to build something better.
Designing for hospitality
"Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara outlines how to making customers feel exceptionally special. Let's bring these hospitality principles to tech, by creating memorable experiences, and using hospitality to elevate customer satisfaction in product design, engaging with the people using our products.
I hate Tailwind CSS. Here's why I use it.
Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that I've come to love. Here's why I use it and why I think you should too.
Gestalt: Design principles every developer should know
Ever felt that you've seen a design that just makes sense to you, but you couldn't quite put your finger on why? There's rules for that. Let's talk about Gestalt
Using Satori and Next.js to generate dynamic images
A YouTube live coding stream where we explore how we use a variety of dynamic images with Next.js using Satori.
Build, measure, listen, rebuild
Building better products involves skills you won't learn in computer science school, or at a boot camp. Find success through testing, learning from real-world feedback, and adapting.
The product design spectrum: crowdsourcing, user research, and the myopic approach
In product design, there's a critical difference between crowdsourcing ideas and feedback, and user research.
The Decoy Effect: More options for an easier choice
The Decoy Effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to have a strong preference between two options, when presented with a third option that is inferior to one of the original options.
Chase your interests to build something useful
Explore the power of hyperfixation on the internet, from tech enthusiasts diving deep into topics to engineers creating innovative solutions. Discover how curiosity can lead to expertise and groundbreaking tools.
Breaking the cycle: Data-driven product descisions
Learn how to escape common product development pitfalls using data-driven decisions. Read how Craftwork used analytics to optimize their user experience.
Continuous self improvement and the morning ritual
Reflecting on my morning ritual, journaling for clarity, and podcasts for your morning walk
Two truths and a lie: what Meta got right with the Threads launch
Meta's new app, Threads, is a Twitter clone that launched last week. It's not perfect, but it's a great example of a product launch that went extremely well.
Maximize user retention: the cognitive science approach...
Understand how multitasking affects your customers' memory, and improve your product design and engagement with cognitive psychology and the Zeigarnik effect.
Intellectual humility: how to be wrong productively
How to use being wrong to improve UX and product design. Learn how to embrace mistakes and create better products for your users.
Cognitive load, UX, and why you should care
Cognitive load is a concept that is important to understand that is often overlooked, and has a huge impact on both UX and the lived experience of building your product.
Your portfolio is a timeline of your growth
At some point in your life, you will look back on the work you did when you were just getting started with a new skill, and see everything you did wrong. Let's talk about how to channel that feeling for good
Why Liquid Death's branding is murderously effective
Discover the science behind naming and branding, and how the Bouba/Kiki effect can help you create a brand identity that resonates with your audience.
The math behind why cafes should have round tables
Though we don't often think of it this way, the objects and buildings around us are the result of a series of design decisions.
The finicky nature of color in product design
Choosing colors for your product can be a difficult task. There are cultural, historical, contextual, and even physiological factors that can influence how we perceive color.
Perception and unexpected tricks of the mind
Explore the fascinating world of perception and cognition in the Tiny Improvements newsletter. Uncover the unexpected tricks of our minds and learn how to make tiny improvements in our cognitive abilities.
These are the books that shaped my career
A sampling of books that have had a fundamental impact on my career as a designer, developer and startup founder.
Customer experience, quality, and the hype cycle
The Gartner Hype Cycle, and its relationship with customer experience for new products and companies.
5 Design rules everyone should know
For most of my life, I would not have described myself as a creative person. As it works out, nobody is inherently creative. It's all about following rules.
The way we talk about our things
This we we talk about intentional use of language and how it can affect subconscious behavior.
The Orton Effect - dreamy photo effect in CSS and React
Implement the Orton Effect in CSS and React. The Orton Effect creates a surreal, dreamy image effect, named after photographer Michael Orton.
The third place - the secret to a happy life for remote workers
The Third Place is thought of as a space different from home (the first place) and work (the second place), where people can socialize and find community.
Hey, influencers: be careful with ChatGPT
Powerful AI tools like ChatGPT make it super easy to generate inaccurate and dangerous and inaccurate content. Relying heavily on AI to write can be messy.
Don't center align paragraph text
Stop using centered text. It's bad for usability, accessibility, and eye scanning -- and nobody anywhere wants to read like that.
Has it been four years already?
MLK, presidential inauguration, time illusions, new features in Gatsby, and designing for musicians.
On seasonal change, open source, and carbon offsets
Cognitive science and the framing effect, Open Source software and Working in Public, language learning, creating online courses, and reforestation.
CSS talk: you should really know about the ch unit
This is an article about CSS and usability. The ch unit in CSS was a revelation for me, and I promise that if you don't know about it already, you're gonna love it.
Egg them all: a fundraiser for New Zealand
Get yourself some of these eggtastic stickers - gun violence is intolerable, and we need sensible gun reform. 100% of proceeds go to charity!
Stop speaking into the top of your Blue Yeti Microphone
No, really, it doesn't work that way. It will sound loads better if you stop talking into the top of your Blue Yeti mic. It's an easy mistake to make.
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