UX Design
Research, information architecture, interaction patterns and the craft of design critique.
The Person on the Other Side
Mechanics before technique. An interface is a machine for a brain with known limits — learn the limits first, and every rule that follows stops being a matter of taste.
- The Door That Lies: What UX Actually IsYou pulled a door that had to be pushed and felt like an idiot. You weren't the one who made the mistake — and that shift of blame is the whole profession.
- Four Knobs in a Row: Mental ModelsA person doesn't use your product — they use their idea of it. Everything you know about the system reaches them through one channel: what it looks like.
- The Eye Doesn't Read: Hierarchy and GestaltIn the first seconds nobody reads your screen — they scan it for something that looks like the answer. Design decides what that something is.
- What You Make Them Carry: Cognitive LoadEvery number a person has to hold, every choice you hand over, every millimetre to the button — it all comes out of the same tiny budget.
Finding the Real Problem
A beautifully solved wrong problem is the most expensive thing a designer produces. Four ways to find out what people actually do — and to turn a pile of notes into a task worth solving.
- The Tapper and the Listener: You Are Not the UserIn your head the melody plays in full. The other person hears knocking. That gap is why designing by intuition fails so reliably.
- Ask About Yesterday: How to InterviewEveryone says they'd use it. Nobody downloads it. The fix isn't better people — it's never asking about the future.
- The Path Worn Through the Grass: Observation and MetricsPeople will tell you which way they walk. The grass will tell you the truth. Learn to read both, and to know which question each one answers.
- From a Wall of Notes to One SentenceResearch that never becomes a decision is a hobby. Synthesis is the step everyone skips, and it's where the value of the whole stage is either created or lost.
Designing the Thing
Structure, path, composition, controls — the four layers every screen is assembled from, in the order they have to be decided.
- Where Would You Look For It: Information ArchitectureThe hose clamp is in plumbing, in car parts and in fasteners — all three are logical. Structure isn't about being right; it's about matching where people look first.
- The Happy Path Is a Fifth of the WorkFour beautiful screens where everything goes right, and nothing for the day the network dies mid-payment. Real design is mostly the other four states.
- Six Sizes, Not Fifty: Layout and TypeTwo screens, the same content, the same components. One looks professional and one looks homemade. The difference is usually a list of allowed numbers.
- Don't Reinvent the CheckboxOriginality is a budget with a fixed size. Spend it where your product is actually different, and be boring everywhere a convention already works.
Checking It Against Reality
Everything above is a hypothesis until someone else touches it. How to build something testable cheaply, watch it fail, make it work for everyone, and say it in words that fit.
- Cheap Enough to Throw Away: PrototypingA prototype is a question, not a small product. The moment it becomes too polished to discard, it stops answering anything.
- Five People and a TaskThe whole method is one person, one real task, and you keeping your mouth shut. Almost everything that goes wrong is you talking.
- The Curb Cut: AccessibilityThe ramp was fought for by wheelchair users and is now used by everyone with a pram, a suitcase or a delivery trolley. That pattern repeats every single time.
- The Interface Is Mostly WordsDelete every word from a screen and nothing works. Yet the text is usually written last, in ten minutes, by whoever happened to be free.
Working as a Designer
Craft is only half the job; the rest is defending decisions, keeping a product consistent, working inside real constraints — and a practice loop that keeps you growing after this roadmap ends.
- Defend the Decision, Not the DrawingSomeone says they don't like the blue, and twenty minutes later the whole room is discussing blue. The skill is turning reactions into information.
- Eleven Different ButtonsNobody decided to have eleven button styles. They accumulated, one reasonable decision at a time — which is exactly how every inconsistent product got that way.
- The Only Design That Exists Is the One That ShippedThere is the design in your file and the design people actually got. Everything a designer is worth lives in the distance between them.
- Building the Eye: How to Practise DesignYou've read the whole path. Reading it is not the skill — and the years between knowing what good looks like and being able to make it are the ones that decide everything.