UXcellence Exploring excellent user experience

Welcome to UXcellence

This site is a love letter to user experience design, front-end development, building products, and making the world a better place to live one pixel at a time.

What makes an experience that stands out? What’s the difference between a passable experience and a delightful one? Why do some ideas, products, and websites succeed while others fail? What things can any website or product implement to improve the experience of using them? How can everyone on your team connect and empathize with users? How can anyone on your team positively affect the user experience?

I hope to answer these questions and more as I explore them here.

About this site

I believe that the best products come from teams that focus on building a quality experience together, not from specialists individually focused on that goal. User experience is not a role but an aspiration. We can always do better, and it takes everyone to truly make something remarkable.

Every member of your team can positively affect the end experience. In many UX circles, it's easy to get caught up in the notion that the UX specialist is the ultimate authority. In reality, engineers, content creators, marketers, and customer support play a huge role in how users perceive the end result.

My hope is that this site will be a valuable resource for everyone who wants to have a positive impact on their users, whether they have UX in their title or not.

I’m Ste Grainer

I’ve been creating things on the web for over 20 years, as a designer, developer, writer, and researcher. In the last few years, I’ve focused a lot of my attention on user experience, working as a UX designer with startups, state agencies, retailers, and consultants.

I’m always learning when it comes to the research, process, and principles that UX professionals thrive on. My goal for writing is to share what I learn, which helps me to more fully absorb it.

Want to learn more about me?

Visit my website

In the weeds

Style guide

The style guide captures the visual design guidelines used as the foundation for this site.

Content principles

I wrote a set of content principles that drive what I write and how I write it.

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