Latest posts
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The 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 hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When…
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Opportunities 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 using it. In fact, I’m very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft as an accessibility innovation strategist…
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Design 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. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that…
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Design 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 design systems. Design Systems as Living Languages Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words,…
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An 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 the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem.…
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From 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 products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on…
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Get more customers without advertising: Show up where they can find you
How the Roofer Nailed Marketing Guest Post by Chris Brogan Let me tell you about an experience I had in a little diner in Lewiston, Maine. I sat at the counter of a busy Maine diner slinging breakfast to a crowd of mostly locals, it seemed. One guy a few seats away from me did…
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Voice Content and Usability
We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last…
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Designing for the Unexpected
I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented? Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design When I first started designing websites, my go-to software…
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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 beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. But on May…