I’m a huge hater of disabled component states and will proselytise about it any chance I get. At the same time I’m trying to collect examples of when a disabled element was actually the best tool for the job. I currently have one (1)

The thing with genAI is that everything is flawless but also incredibly mid. My mother (bless her heart) sent me a picture of my cat “in the style of Van Gogh” knocking over a vase. Wasn’t even briefly tempted to chuckle. Meanwhile I still laugh every time I think of this post

LLMs are trained on nearly unfathomable amounts of human-made data. It really makes you wonder about the motives of many of the people behind it – instead of framing it as accessing a never-ending wealth of human wisdom and ideas it’s “machine” learning and “artificial” intelligence.

Was just in a meeting where someone said “I guess we can hit this whole thing with the UX/UI bat too” … what does that even mean

Honestly I breathed a real sigh of relief this morning when I got a message about our company-internal “diversity month”. I didn’t think it was going to be cancelled, but this year I extra appreciate the thought and effort going into it.

Me, to designers, constantly: Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.

I don’t love the squirrel – I had been thinking we’d probably replace it with something that better illustrates the purpose of the app – but it gives people a moment of joy amidst a stressful work day. Anyway @figma.com please don’t take our pals 🥲

I create interfaces for B2B/B2E contexts, and you’d be surprised how important these little islands of joy are, especially in the workplace. While doing user research for a redesign, we had multiple people explicitly ask us to please not take their squirrel away.

We’ll all have the opportunity to observe something interesting when Figma inevitably removes their April Fools FigPals – what happens when you *take away* moments of delight?

My head is so full now, but so is my heart. What a great event! 🙌

Spoke at a Friends of Figma event today and had an absolute blast. Community is so important, it’s easy to forget that.

Just watched a snippet from a BBC programme about the early internet from 1994. Wish that thing was still worthy of the name “information superhighway”

Very cool, I’m hoping it’ll eventually offer APCA values as well!

Ages ago when our design system team was ready to commit murder-suicide over the difference between chips, tags and badges there was a video about someone flipping on their devs for wasting their entire budget on buttons. I’ve never been able to find it again

I’m not even arguing that LLMs can have their uses. But why is it that people say “I asked ChatGPT” with the same kind of childlike conviction of a 5-year-old explaining that Santa has to be real because “that’s what dad said”?

That’s such a cool resource! I work with a lot of teams that don’t have access to their own designers let alone researchers but are still trying to get a handle on user requirements. This seems like it could really help them.

Duolingo renaming “User Experience” to “Product Experience” accurately reflects the changes the app has gone through in the nearly 1500 days I’ve maintained my streak. Couldn’t help but notice that the announcement never wrote out what “UX” stands for, because “We’re over User Experience” sounds bad

Had a discussion about web accessibility with someone who came into it already angry because of the cost for small businesses (also “the free market will take care of it”), and when I told them I wasn’t interested in an argument with someone who was already angry had the gall to call *me* dogmatic.

A good read! Pretty bleak, but pretty honest too. www.late-review.com/p/the-eterna...

UX design is in disarray. The idea of design-for-use has been replaced with design-for-sales, and its incentives (make more features so that you have more shit to sell) don't align with user-centered work. In this issue, I investigate the ground-level view of how this happened and how to stop it.

All interfaces with well-intentioned designers behind them fall somewhere within this diagram. The further away from the centre, the worse. Duolingo for instance is sitting squat in aesthetic/delightful territory and moving farther from functional every day.

So many genuinely useful terms turn into tooth-grinding annoyances when overused. I don’t have a “mental model” of this JIRA board, I’m going to bite you

"The European Accessibility Act requires things to work for disabled people. It does not require things to conform to a specific accessibility standard. So we should use the standards, such as WCAG, to guide our work. But we must make sure what we design and build actually works for disabled folks."

Irretrievably closed my perfectly arranged browser tabs. Send thoughts and prayers in these trying times

its time to start over computers got too dumb. new hardware new os new internet lets get going

Very charmed by the recurring appearance of this thumb in an archived user guide for the oN-Line System on computerhistory.org

I just think that if this was the computer that greeted me on my desk every morning I’d be off to a cheerful start immediately

Almost unbelievable that Skype didn’t make it. It was the tool that got my wife and I through two years of long distance, and it was the office-to-office communication tool at my first job. RIP!

People are like "I use AI as a partner" but their process has one step and it's this

Yeah, it's Inspiration Wednesday! Do you love patterns as much as I do? Then, I got something for you: Pattern Club, a curated list of patterns, organised in different categories: patternclub.io/

Having a 16year-old intern for two weeks was interesting! She didn’t know what the shift key was but knew how to make fantastic video edits on her phone in minutes. Watched her fall for every dark pattern in the book but she knew almost instinctively how to design responsive pages. I learned a lot.