• Brand Destruction

    Lately, I have seen some examples of brands being obliterated. The two that stand out are HBO and Twitter. HBO Home Box Office has been around for half a century. It existed at the dawn of the “cable” revolution. Before cable, we had only broadcast television and movies. Cable expanded…

  • Apple should acquire Lucid Air

    I was thinking about the new Visio Pro goggles from Apple. I can not, for the life of me, understand why Apple thinks business people are going to strap a computer to their faces to have a zoom call. It seems ok for gaming, but nothing special to me. This…

  • Qualities of a great designer

    When I am hiring a designer, I often look for things that are hard to teach. I can teach you Figma skills. I can teach you technique and vocabulary and a bunch of design details. I started compiling a list of things I value. Let’s take a look. It’s also…

  • UX Design Challenge v7

    As usual, I keep changing my design challenges. I just can’t help myself. This one incorporates the ideas from my GMail settings post. I actually think every new designer who is interested in B2B products should give this one a try. It makes a good portfolio piece one way or…

  • Design Research

    I think research is one of the most misunderstood and complex parts of the tech design world. There are so many angles, so many facets, and of course, so many opinions. It all adds up to a confusing hairball that is hard to talk about. I will do my best…

  • Hand Crafted

    I was recently in Prague and noticed something about all of the sidewalks and many of the streets. They usually looked something like this: It looked pretty and had a cool pattern, but I didn’t think that much of it until I saw these guys working. They had simple tools:…

  • Judgement Driven

    Someone recently asked me if I was data driven. I asked them “what counts as data?” Does my experience count as data? This led me to think about what drives my decisions. My conclusion was that I was judgement driven and that I generally like to hire people with good…

  • Walking in Bangalore, India

    I recently spent a week in Bangalore, India for work. As usual, I looked at everything around me. I observed how the streets and sidewalks were built and how the design of the city affected the culture and usability. Of course, I only saw a sliver of the whole city,…

  • Good Governance

    Sorry. This is a long meandering post. It’s not about UX, so I hope it’s not too annoying. It’s just been on my mind lately. It’s easy to say government is inefficient or wasteful, even if it’s not true. We hear it repeated over and over. All well-crafted propaganda is…

  • Where to live?

    I recently talked about the time zone troubles in California. This TikTok guy is saying the same thing about the macro-economic situation. I think the brain drain from California (and the US) will continue in the coming decade. Knowledge workers will move to cheaper locations and companies will continue to…

  • UX Design Challenge v6

    I am building design and docs teams right now in Prague and Bangalore as well as on-boarding a large team in Tel Aviv. Because of time zones and the poor location of California, I am forced to change my normal process. For certain candidates, I am pointing them to this…

  • GMail Settings

    Have you looked at GMail settings recently? I noticed they haven’t changed in about 20 years. Now take a look at Chrome settings. It’s pretty clear that Google has a pattern using Material Design to make these kinds of settings. The Chrome example look just good. So why in the…

  • Italy Trip 2022

    After Tel Aviv, I met my family for a 10 day trip in Italy. Rome, Florence, and then Venice were our destinations. This is mostly for my personal journal, but maybe you will find it useful if you ever visit. Rome Rome is a weird city. It ruled the known…

  • Tel Aviv 2022

    I have been busy building the UX and Docs teams for work. California has been difficult for me as the time zones are so different. The center of gravity in the company is on the other side of the world including centers in Tel Aviv, Prague, and Bangalore. I decided…