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Have you ever gotten to the end of a long work day and realized you’re no closer to your goals? I have. Sure, I was doing a lot of stuff. But I wasn’t pausing to ask whether I was doing the right stuff. Or whether my approach was working. Or if I was spending the right amount of time on it. My fingers were moving but I wasn’t really thinking. So I needed a reliable way to interrupt my “unproductive productivity” and actually think. The obvious solution was a timer. Unfortunately, if you use time...

I’m the person my friends and family come to for computer-related help. (Maybe you, gentle reader, can relate.) This experience has taught me which computing tasks are frustrating for normal people. Normal people often struggle with converting video. They will need to watch, upload, or otherwise do stuff with a video, but the format will be weird. (Weird, broadly defined, is anything that won’t play in QuickTime or upload to Facebook.) I would love to recommend Handbrake to them, but the user in...

An objective, external world is a non-falsifiable assumption. The prevailing theory is that our subjective experiences correspond to an external reality. However, they may simply be subjective through and through. That which we claim to be evidence of external reality is actually subjective experience, which may or may not have an external and objective cause. Any test devised to prove objectivity is evaluated within subjectivity and therefore does not require objectivity to explain the result. ...

Code forces humans to be precise. That’s good. Computers need precision. But it also forces humans to think like machines. For decades we tried to fix this by making programming more human-friendly. Higher-level languages. Visual interfaces. Each step helped, but we were still translating human thoughts into computer instructions. AI was supposed to change everything. Finally, plain English could be a programming language. No syntax. No rules. Just say what you want. The first wave of AI coding ...

“I like to use sketches to validate ideas quickly, without a lot of investment in the wrong direction.” The Challenge The computing power that runs the world is hidden away in data centers that few people get to see. While many data centers are lights-out operations most of the time, people are still needed to update them, keep them running, and prevent and resolve outages. Those people need to know where their critical assets are in the labyrinth that is their global data center network. They n...

In 2018 I worked with argodesign on an artificial intelligence client project, and Fast Company published an article on our work: This Is The World’s First Graphical AI Interface . For confidentiality reasons I can’t publicly go into more detail on the project than to link to that article. For the full case study, please contact me at [email protected] . AIGA Event During my time at argodesign we held an event with AIGA, the professional association for design, during which the team explai...

During my time at frog, I lead a team of designers to transform a secure file transfer app owned by IBM. In addition to leading the team in Austin I helped manage designers working out of frog’s new studio in India, reviewing their work and setting priorities. frog itself has a long and storied history in design, and I felt lucky to work with such an amazing team of serious veteran designers. Research The first part of the program was spent on research, interviewing stakeholders and gaining an u...

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When you hear “atomic design,” you probably think of Brad Frost. Interestingly, he was not the first person to develop that method of delivering design as components, or even the terminology. Brad published his atomic design article in 2013. While digging through the archives at frog , I’ve learned that Mark Rolston developed and applied an atomic framework as early as 1998. The description found on the Index page, now 20 years old, embodies every bit the same spirit as the recent design systems...

“We had to display a lot of information at once and help them make sense of it. There are many ways to do that wrong and only a few ways to do it right.” The Challenge The client came to us with a problem: They had paid for a custom tool that didn’t do what they needed. They had expected ease and efficiency. What they got was frustration and unnecessary manual effort. What they needed was a tool that could help them plan. How much more work could their team take on right now? Did their team have...