I write on this blog weekly. Nobody edits me. Nobody tells me to “soften the tone” or “add more tactical takeaways.” I also pitch articles to other publications. They have editors. Standards. Opinions about what their audience wants. Sometimes they publish them. Sometimes they send polite rejection emails that say “not quite right for us”…
The founder sent it the night before our first call. “Background reading,” he said. “So we’re not starting from zero.” It was a UX design competitive analysis. Thorough doesn’t cover it. Fourteen competitors mapped across 23 dimensions. Feature matrices with colour-coded cells. Pricing tables. Screenshots of onboarding flows annotated with commentary. A section called “UX…
A client – B2B SaaS, 34 employees, Series A, scaling fast – needed a contractor for a 3-month engagement. Dashboard redesign, onboarding flow, design system foundations. Senior-level work. $8,500/month. They asked me to help evaluate candidates. I look at portfolios, sit in on one call, give a recommendation. Not a formal arrangement – just something…
It was a referral. Good sign, usually. The brief was four pages. Also usually a good sign – someone had put in effort, thought things through, written it all down. Then I got to page two. “Required UX design skills for this engagement:” What followed was fourteen bullet points. User research. Information architecture. Interaction design.…
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…
You know how this goes. Three weeks on the portfolio. Rewrote the case study twice. Rebuilt the layout because something felt off at midnight on a Wednesday. Sent it to two designer friends who said it was strong. Found the right contact on LinkedIn, personalized the message, attached the link. Three days later: automated rejection.…
The first week of UX design 101, you learn about the double diamond. Research, define, ideate, prototype. Clean phases, logical sequence, satisfying diagram. The first week of an actual project, you learn that the research phase is two conversations with one customer your PM happens to know. Define phase: a Slack thread that went sideways.…
Six months into her first junior role, she kept doing something her manager couldn’t figure out. Every time a PM overruled a design decision, she just… did it. No pushback. No “here’s why that creates a problem.” She’d nod, open Figma, and make the change. Her manager asked her about it once. “Why don’t you…
Someone at an event, after I mentioned the book. “You wrote about AI and design. Did you use AI to write it?” No. “Really? Not even for editing?” No. They looked confused. Not skeptical – just visibly puzzled, in the way people get when they encounter a choice they wouldn’t have made and can’t immediately…
