• Building Blocks to a Great Experience

  September 8, 2016 — In the rush to learn the latest tools and techniques of user experience design, it can be easy to overlook the basic foundations.

• Sketch Plugins: 14 Useful Tools to Level Up Your Design Game

  May 27, 2016 — With its built-in plugin architecture, you can level up Sketch with even more nifty tricks. Whether you want to generate placeholder content, improve how you work with others, or simply design more efficiently, there’s probably a plugin to help!

• Sketch Hacks: Little Tricks to Improve Your Sketch Workflow

  April 15, 2016 — Sketch gets a lot of things right compared to other UI design tools. Here are some of the tricks and differentiators that make it a joy to use.

• Design Inclusive Visuals: Images, Icons, and Color

  November 12, 2015 — Creating an inclusive visual design means re-evaluating the imagery, icons, and colors you rely on, and understanding how your visuals could embrace or exclude potential users.

• Use Diverse Personas and Better Scenarios to Light Dark Alleys

  November 6, 2015 — Let’s stray from the happy path, light up the dark alleys, and design a better experience even for those times when things go wrong.

• Get Out of the Coffee Shop

  November 5, 2015 — Thinking inclusively starts with your research. Take the time to seek out current or potential users who don’t fit your demographic norms.

• Design a Better Product with Product Principles

  November 4, 2015 — A solid set of product principles can cement a vision to unite your team and define a universally inviting experience.

• Designing Inclusively

  November 3, 2015 — As designers and developers for the web, we must take our influence seriously and consider how we can help create a more positive, inclusive future.

• We’re All New at This, and That’s OK

  November 2, 2015 — The web has only been around for a little over two decades. We've come a long way in that time, but we still have a lot to learn when it comes to what works best. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!

• Conversational Design: How to Craft a System that Listens

  November 1, 2015 — How do you distill a complex series of context-dependent questions and make it seem easy? Have a conversation with your users!

• Wearing the Future: How Disney’s Magic Band Sets the Bar for Wearables

  April 27, 2015 — I’ve worn the future, and it felt like magic. Within the closed ecosystem of their parks, Disney has created a vision of the future that’s positively seamless.

• Nice Touch: Smart Defaults in Kickstarter Payments

  February 19, 2015 — Every second we can save someone trying to get through a form can improve the process for both sides. Kickstarter used smart defaults and data inference to save me a few steps when backing a project.

• Notes: Better Product Definition Through Lean UX and Design Thinking

  January 17, 2015 — By combining the principles and practices of design thinking and Lean UX, we can mitigate much of the risk inherent in building new products by framing our ideas as experiments and validating them as cross-functional teams.

• What’s Cooking in UX for 2015?

  January 8, 2015 — I won’t attempt to predict what unexpected things may happen in 2015 that could alter the course of web development or user experience. Here are the things from 2014 (or earlier) that I’m excited to see develop further in 2015.

• Thankful

  November 27, 2014 — Having been making things on the web for nearly two decades, I have a lot to be thankful for. I took some time to publicly thank the many, many people and tools who have contributed to my own career and passion for the web.

• iOS 8: Better Isn’t Always Obvious

  September 20, 2014 — There's more to building great features and products than adding new visual enhancements. Sometimes the best improvements are an investment in the future.

• Nice Touch: Multiple Routes to Editing Slack Messages

  September 9, 2014 — Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. Slack makes it super easy to edit typos in your messages through a number of different routes, depending on the way you work or think.

• Book Review: Creativity, Inc.

  August 23, 2014 — 78 highlighted passages. I’m not the type of person to highlight books, but there were too many great thoughts in Creativity, Inc. that I wanted to remember.

• Getting Past Blank: Fueling Up and Building Momentum

  August 6, 2014 — Process can be a way of overcoming the inertia of the blank page and building momentum. While the concepts of inertia and momentum come from physics, I think they can just as easily be applied to ideas and creativity.

• Notes from “Customers Included” by Mark Hurst

  July 17, 2014 — I attended Mark Hurst’s presentation of Customers Included. He covered several fascinating case studies of companies that listened to customers and companies that didn’t.

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