I’ve just listened to Rick Beato break down “What’s My Age Again?” — Blink-182’s second biggest hit. Funnily enough, he kicked off his "What Makes This Song Great?" series with their biggest hit — "All The Small Things". One person commented: I can’t believe you started the series with All The Small Things when it’s all the small things that makes the song so great. In the chorus of “What’s My age Again?”, Rick points out how most bass guitarists would play continuously, but Blink-182 left a...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I’ve just listened to Rick Beato break down “What’s My Age Again?” — Blink-182’s second biggest hit. Funnily enough, he kicked off his "What Makes This Song Great?" series with their biggest hit — "All The Small Things". One person commented: I can’t believe you started the series with All The Small Things when it’s all the small things that makes the song so great. In the chorus of “What’s My age Again?”, Rick points out how most bass guitarists would play continuously, but Blink-182 left a...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I didn’t start out as a designer. I started out as a frontend developer. I cared about the craft and spent a lot of time trying to master HTML, CSS, JavaScript and accessibility. Over time, I learned how these technologies affected UX, so as a dev, I started to suggest design changes to improve usability and accessibility. But most of the designers I worked with ignored my suggestions. Years later I transitioned to design. I tried to hide my engineering past because I was worried other...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Last week I read a post by designer and frontend dev, Theodore Soti: Stop clearing forms with JavaScript.The browser already knows how. I still see a lot of apps using custom code to track inputs and reset state. But for many forms, you can just use the native reset button. <form> <!-- Your inputs go here --> <input type="submit" value="Submit"> <input type="reset" value="Reset"></form> That reset button restores every field to its initial value.Text inputs. Checkboxes. Radios. Selects....
2 months ago • 2 min read
GroupCollect helps tour operators organise trips for groups. Their biggest market is school trips. The form below allows tour operators to send announcements to parents to chase late payment or tell them about a change to the itinerary: On the face of it, the form looks straightforward: The trip name, date and location appears at the top for context The h1 heading clearly explains the purpose of the form The fields look like fields (with clear borders all around) The submit button is aligned...
3 months ago • 2 min read
This week I demoed some flows I’d been redesigning to a room full of product managers and stakeholders. The programme I’m on is huge. We’re redesigning a highly complex, enterprise-grade, case-working system. There are many feature teams, each with their own product manager. I’ve been on the programme for 6 months now but it’s so big I’ve not met many of them. The meeting was meant to present the before/after of the redesigns to show what it looks like to just use the simple and accessible...
3 months ago • 2 min read
I will answer this question, but it’s best explained with me telling you about the post I wrote on LinkedIn last week. Here it is: Github’s Design System has banned toast messages. Toast messages are little messages that appear on top of the UI to give you feedback about an action you just took. Banning toast messages is an excellent decision because they’re not accessible and have bad UX. Here’s a few reasons why: (1) They disappear automatically after a few seconds - at best this is...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Last week, I wrote an article about “one thing per page”. In short, I said that instead of putting multiple fields on a page, you should put each field on its own page: Tom, one of my new subscribers, messaged me: “I read your article about one thing per page - doesn’t your sign up form have two fields?” Here’s the form he was referring to: He’s right - it does have two things on a page. But like I said to Tom: It’s an exception to the rule. You could argue that I don’t even need to ask for...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Last week, I attended a design crit. One designer shared a multi-step form - here’s what one of the pages looked like: Here’s the last step: Another designer raised a concern that all the change links under “Applicant details” go to the same page. She said: “I’ve seen issues in the past because every change link takes you to a page that has multiple fields. For example, users can get confused when they select to change “emergency contact name” but when they arrive on the page they only see...
5 months ago • 2 min read