Enabling micromanagement at scale

The designer’s role will always be evolving, but it’s obviously still needed. 🙈

hallo, I am hiring again! - SF Digital Services is looking for a new Engineering Director careers.sf.gov/role/?id=374... This reports directly to me, & I’m looking for a practical & flexible technical expert with excellent communication & coaching skills, who is excited to do both. More below...

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website. accessibilityforeveryone.site The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

Someone must have told their PMs to AI-all-the-things, because my remote light switches now offer hearty winter soup recipes and evening exercise routines.

Why did the Google Maps team make audible driving directions less usable recently? “Go past Irrelevant Road, then take your second left onto Correct Street toward Another Irrelevant Road.” Let me guess—LLM creep? Increasing driver cognitive load is a safety issue.

Hey authors! Check to see if Anthropic stole your book to train their slop generator on. You’re entitled to $1500 per stolen Work. Look up your work, and if you’re in the database, file a claim secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/

Managing all the different apps where everyone wants to share their AI meeting notes seems more annoying than just…taking notes?

iOS26 promoting its visual style updates 🥱 instead of celebrating that it can finally screen text messages

Almost every time I teach interview data analysis, someone asks if they can use software to automate it. The point is to understand the data, not to produce a report. Learning takes time and messiness.

“Simple mode: A simplified app for older adults.” Seriously? Just admit you’ve crammed too much poorly-organized garbage into your app, instead of building ageism into your UI.

The whole thing is dreadful for so many reasons, but 288 accessibility issues on a one-page site? Apparently this is “America by design”

Google: You really should let us automate your Nest thermostat & save the planet. Also Google: Here, try another AI feature you don’t need.

As I’ve said before: Whether your org cares about design doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether they care about humans.

if you care about government tech, OR about your data & who has it, this is really something

Noooooooo is is too early for Christmas ads

It’s like they’re trying to see how many usability issues they can pack into a single form field

“The designers come in at the end, to make sure it matches the style guide”

I’ve yet to see much discussion of how forcing someone else to deal with your bot sends a strong “I have more power / status” signal www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

There will always be debate about the boundaries of product vs. user responsibility, but some of these LLM use cases are like building a lawnmower with exposed blades

I am not a fangirl about many people, but Tressie McMillan Cottom is such a brilliant observer of culture, politics, & human nature

Even our little town had a strong showing #nokings

Sure, @nytimes.com, let’s treat the unraveling of democratic norms like a DK Eyewitness book

Love this take on the California state flag.

Me, the minute Apple puts the “liquid glass” design language on my devices:

Your metrics should definitely include how well your app supports particular user goals. But you can’t assume every potential goal is relevant to every user—people who don’t care about something often won’t know how to rate it.

We are oddly selective about the government services about which we will say, they operate at a loss. Commuter rail, we are often told, operates at a loss. But we spend even more on street and highways, and take in little direct revenue from them. Yet no one ever says they are operating at a loss.

If you work in tech, you need to see this conversation about the hostility of making everything digitally mediated

No, really, don’t do this with pie charts.

Clever public art: a giant, ten-foot sculpture of an electrical outlet on the exterior of an electrical substation building.

❗ The Trump Administration is planning to falsify government records to declare alive people dead. This triggers a nightmare, cutting them off from benefits, banks, credit, insurance. If they can do it to one group, they can do it to anyone--in error or in malice www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/u...

United’s app is great at delivering just-in-time info. Too bad it’s often wrong. (International arrivals don’t go straight between gates—you can’t clear immigration, bag claim, customs, security, & a much longer walk in 11 minutes.) Data quality is UX, too

In addition to all the heinous fuckery happening in the NC Supreme Court election--where the loser is trying to throw out 60,000 votes--the form that caused the problem in the first place did so because it neglected to list NC drivers license or last four digits of your SSN as a required field.

Every day is a reminder that humans aren’t always good at rational choices.

Rodents Of Unusual Size do exist! And they are chill enough for phone photographs

I do know how to open a door. And yet…

Resorting to the old-school hotel curtain hack

Mystery espresso UI (and better yet, the buttons blink)

Today’s hotel design mystery: 3 controls printed on glass, with no raised texture whatsoever to help you find them in the dark (and no labels to help you figure out what they do in the first place) 🤔

A refreshing take on the generative AI hype cycle: bsky.app/profile/tres...

the behaviors an organization chooses to tolerate are in many ways a better indicator of their culture than the behaviors it actively incentivizes.

former colleagues from 18F have asked me to share this open letter widely - please pass on 🙏 🇺🇸 💻💪 18f.org

Hey everyone -- Moms of Liberty and Dept of Education launched a snitch line portal today to rat out teachers and anyone promoting anything DEI. FLOOD THE PORTAL Spam the hell out of it. Pass it on! It works! enddei.ed.gov

Why we need the administrative state, exhibit 1,427 this week:

The GOP in Congress is pushing a bill that would require every American to show a passport, birth certificate, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote. But more than 21 million Americans don’t have easy access to such documents.

I don’t know if Google can top this, their finest work to date

Rental car UI is always an adventure.

A reminder that the first edition of Conversational Design is available as a free download. www.mulebooks.com/conversation...

If you're going to read one thing today it needs to be this: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

On Friday night, HHS ordered CDC to take down all flu vaccine campaign materials from its website. Materials are starting to come down. For example, a campaign explaining that flu shot can reduce flu severity from "wild to mild" is now offline. Left image is from Friday, right is now Meanwhile...