Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt
In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were b...
5 min readAnalytics
Data analysis, big data, and business intelligence
How to Sell UX Research with Two Simple Questions
Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives th...
5 min read
Breaking Out of the Box
CSS is about styling boxes. In fact, the whole web is made of boxes, from the browser viewport to elements on a page. But every once in a while a new feature comes along that makes us rethink our desi...
5 min readThe Wax and the Wane of the Web
I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the ...
5 min readOpportunities for AI in Accessibility
In reading Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism that he has for AI in general as well as for the ways that many have been usin...
5 min readI am a creative.
I am a creative. What I do is alchemy. It is a mystery. I do not so much do it, as let it be done through me. I am a creative. Not all creative people like this label. Not all see themselves this way....
5 min read
Humility: An Essential Value
Humility, a designer’s essential value—that has a nice ring to it. What about humility, an office manager’s essential value? Or a dentist’s? Or a librarian’s? They all sound great. When humility is ou...
5 min read
Personalization Pyramid: A Framework for Designing with User Data
As a UX professional in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s increasingly likely that you’ve been asked to design a personalized digital experience, whether it’s a public website, user portal, or nativ...
5 min read
Mobile-First CSS: Is It Time for a Rethink?
The mobile-first design methodology is great—it focuses on what really matters to the user, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a common design pattern for years. So developing your CSS mobile-first sh...
5 min read
To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop
Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either wa...
5 min readDesigned for a Dead Language
Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves will teach you. In 1788,...
5 min readGood designers, bad websites: a proposal
I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are ...
5 min readDesign for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna
Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments...
5 min readDesign Dialects: Breaking the Rules, Not the System
"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior." — Kenneth L. Pike The web has accents. So should our de...
5 min readAn Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership
Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has th...
5 min readFrom Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.
As a product builder over too many years to mention, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months. Financial p...
5 min read
User Research Is Storytelling
Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things t...
5 min read
Sandbox bypass flaws in Cursor IDE highlight prompt injection as an RCE vector
Researchers have discovered two vulnerabilities in the widely used Cursor AI-enabled integrated development environment (IDE) that can be exploited through prompt injection to achieve remote code exec...
5 min read
The Best July 4 Grill and Griddle Deals: Weber, Traeger, Recteq
Fourth of July weekend is the last great grill and griddle sale of the summer, including $250 off my favorite pellet smoker.
5 min read
Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions
'We can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it,' say maintainers who previously called the flood of vibe-coded pull requests 'demoralizing'
5 min read