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My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!
Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me. After stints in academia, journalism, advertising, and music, I poured myself into web design in early 1995. I understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and rose faster than I probably deserved—until the summer…
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Pete’s Presence
It was a spring that felt more like winter last week in New York; suddenly it feels like summer. After my air-conditioned bedroom, the living room and kitchen was like a walk-in oven. A weirdly…
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The Courage to Stop
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
Design
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Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers
The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot. Wisdom from Lucas Radke.
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A die-cut above
Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom Brigham, a high school student and friend of mine the year the LP was released, had not yet invented morphing…
My Glamorous Life
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Too Many Notes
Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required. If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an…
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My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist
Remembrance of beats passed.
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American healthcare
Cooling my heels at the drugstore.
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Cold Storage
Good UX is what companies do when they have to. A company that has your stuff locked away doesn’t have to.
the Daily Report
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Jimmy Carter was right
What Carter did in his speech was something rare in the annals of democratic government: he confronted the people with the truth—about his own failings, about the reality of the world around them, and most…
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Dine ’n em-dash
The best defense is to write humanly.
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RSS creator on Bluesky & AT Proto
Bluesky can’t abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give the protocol to a standards body while catching up on UX.—Dave Winer
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What a year that was.
Know your web design history.
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Advice for job seekers
Pitching isn’t bragging.
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The salad bar theory of UX professionalism
Less, but better? Not this week.
Cornerstone content
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