A lot of us are used to thinking of job interviews like exams: go in, sit down, answer the questions, and then get graded on the answers. But job interviews are also the only opportunity for you to find out whether the role will be fulfilling, if your contributions will…

If you’re like me and have had to quickly get up to speed on new domains, PACT is a great framework for learning everything a designer needs to know, finding opportunities for research & helping your team identify contradictions in their own mental models. In my design career, new roles…

Interviewing is more of an art than a science. Design portfolios, in theory, are supposed to help with that: examples of a designer’s past work tell the interviewer how good the candidate is. Except, well, they don’t. A design is only as good as its effectiveness at addressing some problem…

My first UX design job was at a SaaS startup. As in many startups, the main challenge was finding product-market fit, and as in many startups, the strategy was to ask companies with deep pockets what features they would like us to build for them. Sometimes, this was done through…

Outside of a few baroque design trends, “function defines the form” has generally been an unassailable axiom. When UX designers put cursor to canvas they typically make their design decisions based on a conceptual model of the objects and tasks involved. Those tasks form the constraints of what a product…

Every once in a while, we get hype about some new breakthrough in AI that will replace this job or that job. In the case of design, those tools have consistently flopped. …