I have a lot of friends who work in Growth, but I never really knew exactly what they did. Whenever our conversations turned towards “growth stuff”, I would always just smile, nod, and occasionally contribute a, “that’s really cool!” It’s not like I was clueless. I mean, I had an idea of what “Growth” meant — growing users, making money,… Read More ￫

Communication plays a vital role in design — it’s essential to establish a clear connection between the website and user and to help your users accomplish their goals. When we talk about communication in web design context, we usually mean text. Typography plays a vital role in this process: “More than 95% percent of information on the web is in… Read More ￫

Over the past year, I’ve been mentoring students on Designlab, an online bootcamp for new designers. During weekly 1:1 sessions, I help answer any questions that students have. One of the questions I get asked often: What should I know to succeed at my first design role? Here are the things I wish I knew before starting my first design gig,… Read More ￫

Accessibility enables people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web. Imagine a world where developers know everything there is to know about accessibility. You design it and they build it… perfectly. In this world, only the design itself can cause people with disabilities to have trouble using a product. These guidelines will cover the… Read More ￫

Chances are, if you are reading this, you work in the tech industry. Chances are, you are currently, have recently, or aspire to be involved in the creation of a modern digital product. This article aims to give you a deep understanding of the role of Product Design in this process. The answer to what it means to be a… Read More ￫

Conversational interfaces have reduced user experience down to a few lines of text. With chatbots, UX becomes conversational, products talk back, and persona’s now go both ways. Every chatbot has a voice — which means every bot needs a personality. If conversational computing means personality is the new user experience, how do we approach the design of these nuanced digital… Read More ￫

In the age of AI and “Human Centered Machine Learning”, it’s essential that we understand the needs and behaviour of our users. This is doubly true as a UX designer. In order to create work that better serves the needs of our users, it’s important to understand some basic psychological principles. Which is why I want to share with you… Read More ￫

In the first part of this article, “Are Grid Systems Still Relevant in Digital Product Design?”, I took a look at the history of grid systems and their practical advantages. In short: grids are still useful for interface design, but the screen is much more complex than the printed page, as both the output media and content are highly variable…. Read More ￫

I recently worked on defining the spacing system for Practice Fusion’s EHR (Electronic Health Record) product, to ensure improved readability and consistency across all pages. I came up with 3 spacing rules (hint: rule of 3 C’s) and 4 spacing values, which worked harmoniously well with the new typographic system. The problem “When positioning elements vertically, the designer has to… Read More ￫

A selection of prototypes, photos, and learnings from Design Club at a special CoderDojo We recently joined CoderDojo London to deliver two days of workshops for 7–17 year-olds. We were hosted by UCL at Base KX, near Kings Cross. There were tables dotted about, offering coding activities. There were computers everywhere. Except on our table. We we were unplugged. Okay,… Read More ￫

“Dashboard”, “Big Data”, “Data visualization”, “Analytics” — there’s been an explosion of people and companies looking to do interesting things with their data. I’ve been lucky to work on dozens of data-driven interfaces throughout my career and I wanted to share some thoughts on how to arrive at a distinct and meaningful product. Many people have already tackled this topic,… Read More ￫

When the term ‘Design Thinking’ first emerged on the scene, I found it completely puzzling. People were treating it as if it was a revolutionary new methodology to produce better products and services. They were talking about how entire companies were adopting this new approach, and those companies were becoming more competitive in the marketplace and seeing huge increases in… Read More ￫