Two readers, one page. The agent never sees the surface you designed; it reads the structure underneath. AI assisted. The semantic structure screen readers have used for decades now also decide whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity can read your page at all. In 2016 I had a series of calls with the federal government’s top accessibility expert as the leader of a design team, and I

For fifteen years, the design process kept growing while the time left for making the product kept shrinking. Continue reading on UX Collective »

The painting that introduced me to the power and purpose of art Continue reading on UX Collective »

When a traffic line bends, newsrooms reach for the oldest kit in digital design. The readers it costs are the ones they most need. Continue reading on UX Collective »

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers. “Today, my house and life are painfully void of craft. I live in a new build with pumped out, builder-grade (aka cheap) materials. I have plastic wood lookalikes rather than hand-carved wood. None of my furniture causes that moment of awe where you stop to marvel at it. My dining room table is a constant reminder of how far we’ve depart

On empty seats, metaphors, and the useful parts that don’t quite fit Continue reading on UX Collective »

The complexity never left the building. It changed hands, and nothing printed a receipt. AI assisted. AI did not remove the complexity of software. It removed the interface that told you where the complexity went, and who is now paying for it. Larry Tesler is the reason you can cut, copy, and paste. At Xerox PARC in the 1970s he and Tim Mott built Gypsy , the first editor where text stayed editabl

Human-centered design demands a limited use of AI-generated personas, if at all A big debate among UX researchers is whether to use synthetic users in their studies. There’s one group of researchers who consider it no less than an abomination, unethical to use an artificial persona to test a product that serves humans. The second group defends it as a helpful tool that makes user research more eff

Why I’m reconsidering a principle I’ve believed for years. I’ve always believed that imperfect research is better than no research at all. Synthetic users have made me reconsider that. When synthetic responses are treated like findings from real users, they can create something far more dangerous than uncertainty: false confidence. What I mean by “imperfect research” Until synthetic users entered

The call for problem discovery, the freedom to wander, and craft in the age of AI I grew up surrounded by 17th- and 18th-century architecture my stepfather salvaged from around the world. My mother had a knack for convincing him to put some of his salvaged pieces in our house, which meant I got to enjoy them before they went up for sale. The awe of the well-built antique craft inspired me even as