Writing
Notes on the craft and practice of product design.
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How I give feedback without crushing someone’s confidence
Early in my career, I watched a senior designer tear apart a junior’s work in a critique. Technically, everything she said was correct. The hierarchy was off. The spacing was inconsistent. The interaction pattern didn’t hold up under edge cases. But she said it in front of the team, with no context nor curiosity about the designer’s intent. It was just a list of everything wrong. The junior designer never fully recovered.
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The internationalization mistakes that don’t show up until launch day
We tested everything. The strings fit. The layout looked clean. QA signed off. Then we shipped in 7 languages, and the problems started showing up in places no one had thought to look. Some internationalization failures are obvious in development. The ones that really hurt you are the ones that pass every internal review and break in production. Here are the patterns I've seen over and over.
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Accessibility as a foundational principle
Accessibility often gets treated like a checkbox. Something you bolt on at the end of a project, right before launch, when everyone's rushing to get committed features out the door. But you can't bolt on a foundation. You build on one.
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What “0 to 1” design actually means
There's a phrase that gets thrown around in product and design circles: "0 to 1." But in practice, most 0 to 1 teams are hard to distinguish from teams who have been iterating on an existing product for years. These teams treat 0 to 1 like any other design challenge, and that's where things go sideways.
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