Writings
Typography is a lot like music
I've been exploring type scale relationships. It turns out, good type solutions are a lot like musical chords.
I told our designers their Sketch files were full of trash—Here’s what happened next
In this article, I discuss how I brought the team around to cleaning up their Sketch files, and the results the team achieved from the effort
Designing the Design Experience
Designers radically believe that Design can solve anything—including the design experience itself.
Introducing Sleuth for Sketch
With Sleuth for Sketch, you can easily measure impact of your shared libraries across your team’s sketch files. We’re releasing this tool for free to help DesignOps teams everywhere.
Standing Up DesignOps At Keap
DesignOps amplifies the impact of design at scale. In other words, it helps managers, directors, and executives understand and utilize all of the various things design has to offer, while helping designers collaborate and deliver work more effectively.
Styling SVG icons with css
We use a custom SVG icon set in our apps. Here's how I've navigated some of the pitfalls — and there are a lot of them.
My switch to Figma
I made the switch from Sketch to Figma a month ago. Here's what I learned.
Designing builder tool ecosystems in layers
I design tool sets that need to interact with each other within the context of a larger ecosystem of apps. Here's a framework for describing the different layers involved.
10 Common design system traps and how to disarm them
You set out to build a design system, but you fell into a few common traps along the way. Disarm those traps before they put your efforts to a premature end.
Onward
I'm moving from a career I loved at Tallwave to start a new adventure at Keap
Dungeons, dragons, and design workshops
While hosting my first D&D campaign, I realized that hosting a tabletop game session is similar in many ways to facilitating a design workshop.
This planet deserves to be hacked - or - Why I hacked a better spellchecker for Sketch
This article is about why I hacked a better spell checker into Sketch, and why the world needs designers to get hacking
In Defense of Staircases
Sometimes we have to let go of rigid principles to meet the needs of all users. Many times, that requires making special accommodations for the different devices they have.
Heuristic #10: Error Handling
Error is so much a part of the Human Experience that we should plan a significant occurrence of it in our interfaces.
Heuristic #9: Clarity
Clarity, in interaction design, is when content and microcopy are concise and direct. Clarity makes users feel empowered.
Heuristic #8: Simplicity
I measure the simplicity of an experience by looking at the most complex parts of an experience and determining if any of it can be eliminated.
Heuristic #7: Affordance
Affordance is about letting the user know about how to successfully interact with your digital experience.
Heuristic #6: Legibility
Legibility is the simplest heuristic optimize for. Nevertheless, it is a common issue on many sites and apps.
Heuristic #5: Reactivity
Nobody wins awards for being ordinary, so break the mold, and break the rules a little bit! Make your interactive experiences noteworthy, but don't leave your users behind.
Don't miss your industry's Brexit
Do you know who your customers are and why they should vote for you? Learn how to apply lessons from from recent elections to improve your marketing.
Heuristic #4: Wayfinding
Wayfinding is a heuristic that gauges the ease of navigating an app. It's about telling the user where they are as well as how to get where they want to go.
Heuristic #3: Awareness
Awareness is all about how an experience uses the data it has to provide the user a better experience. It's also about taking data the user enters and using it for their benefit.
Heuristic #2: Aesthetics
The aesthetic quality of a web site or app is subjective. Yet, I use aesthetics as a key heuristic when evaluating these experiences. Find out how.
Heuristic #1: Accessibility
Accessibility is the first of the ten heuristics I use to evaluate digital user experiences. The reason it is number one because it is the baseline. It's table stakes. If your experience isn't accessible to your customers (including the disabled), at minimum you're leaving money on the table and may be opening yourself up for lawsuits.
My 10 heuristics for UX design
Announcing a blog series about 10 Heuristics I use when evaluating UX designs
Secret Messenger — Keep Nosy Neighbors from Peeking
An app that helps people hide their messages from people seated nearby (Idea)
Is your digital experience frictionless?
You've been live for a year or two. You’re receiving tepid app store reviews and customer feedback. You need an outside perspective to articulate issues with your UX.
Journey Mapping — You’re Doing It All Wrong
By using journey mapping essentials such as ethnography, you can make sure you're not missing any pieces to your journey map puzzle.
Introducing Inkling: A responsive email framework for modern web developers
When tasked with building out a few custom responsive email templates, we naturally sought out some ways we could streamline that process. Inkling came about as a by-product of seeking to improve the user experience of coding custom HTML emails.
Accessible Design: Raising the Tide
As a young designer of electronic interfaces, accessibility used to an afterthought. What I found out was that thinking of disabled people like second-class-citizens was at worst limiting civil liberties and at best merely leaving millions of dollars on the table for our competitors to swipe away.
Progressive Disclosure
When designing something with a lot of information that the user may not need to know all at once, you need progressive disclosure. Users see something and decide they want more information about it, or to see things related to it. So they “zoom in.”
UX Patterns for Adding To Cart
Any time a customer wants to buy something, they need to add it to their cart. But what happens when the user clicks that magical button?
Mobile Navigation Menus
Mobile navigation menu UX has been a hot topic the last few years. There are a couple of UX patterns that have emerged recently and some things that appear on their way out.
New Credit Card Form UX Patterns
Credit card forms are necessary to take payment online. They are one of the last necessary steps to completing a purchase, so it’s very important to get it right! These last few years, there have been several popular innovations in credit card form design.
Affording Horizontal Swipes on Touchscreens
With the increasing adoption rate of mobile devices, I have noticed that more and more apps and web sites utilize horizontal swipe gestures on touch screens to access different functionality. Of course, this interaction isn’t very helpful unless the user knows that it’s there.
Authentication UX: Gestures, Biometrics, and Multi-Factor Authentication
For a very long time, we have dreamed of ways to unlock things or gain entry where we don’t need to remember something or carry some kind of token. As computers get better and companies experiment with more powerful hardware and software, this dream edges closer and closer to reality.
Authentication UX Patterns – Passwords & PINs
On many web sites, one of the most-used features is the password reset tool. We UX'ers must design our applications to accommodate the failings of human memory, which is why the password reset function exists. But perhaps we should strive for something higher than the illusion of security at the expense of user experience. In this article, we are going to explore different methods of authenticating, and how human memory limitations collide with security requirements.
Creating User Patience with Loading Indicators
No matter how zippy we make our applications and sites, there will often be something that takes time to process. Loading indicators, often those swirly circle graphics like these , generally show up when something takes longer than a second or two to process.
The User Experience Design of Address Forms
If you've ever worked on a site that needs to process payments or mail something out to a physical address, you've encountered address forms. This post covers some innovations in address form design that show us that perhaps these forms need special attention.
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