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Clarity in product
Good product decisions can still make a shitty product.
That’s the part worth talking about.
The Cognitive Budget Model
Your users start every session mentally exhausted. The Cognitive Budget Model reveals how to design for reality, not ideal conditions.
Why the hell do I need a designer anymore?
You do. But the answer might not be what you think, and there’s more than one reason.
I’ve been building websites for almost thirty years and use AI tools daily, so I’m hardly neutral. Hold that thought.
The hardest part of a chat interface was the graphics
In the late ’80s a friend and I made a text-based “game” on a Commodore 64, because graphics on the 64 were too much work. In 2025 I designed another conversational interface, and the graphics were the hardest part again.
We built everything the buyer asked for. Then nobody used it.
The deal looked like a success. The interface told another story: every promised feature gave sales more to show and users more to understand.
If your product keeps growing but feels harder to use, and harder to sell, the cause may be hiding in the deals everyone is celebrating.
Your product doesn’t have a design problem. It has a writing problem.
A surprising number of “design issues” start with the words.
If people can’t tell what something is, why it matters or what happens next, rearranging the layout won’t solve much.
Clarify your message
If your product takes ten minutes to explain, you have a problem.
Let’s talk about why — and what to do about it.
Why is the web so afraid of feeling?
When music matters to the person arriving, silence says something too.
Before they read a word, sound can tell them whether they are in the right place.
Generic, soulless AI copy is shit. And that’s why your customers hate it.
I kept asking AI to make me sound more impressive. It worked, until I sounded like a narcissist.
Your homepage hero is boring AF
The launch got sparkling wine. A month later the bounce rate was 87%, and dozens of rewrites later it was 84%.
Question the obvious
I get suspicious when everyone agrees something is obviously better.
That's usually when it gets interesting.
One person can do an unreasonable amount of work now
Two years ago a friend of mine was burned out and certain he’d never go back to work.
When I asked recently how he was doing, he started listing things he’d made, faster than I could follow. Most of them were already running.
AI is very good at doing the wrong thing
AI can follow a bad brief with impressive speed.
I’ve found it most useful when I treat the first answer as something to question, not something to ship.
A simple screen can take a lot of arguing
Old web portals tried to fit the whole internet onto their homepages. Google offered a search box and a way out.