User-First Design

28 posts

0→1 Product Work Is Supposed to Be Messy
Early product work is not an architecture competition. It is not the moment to prove how scalable, elegant, or technically impressive your system can be. It is the moment to find out whether anyone ac…
22 Jun 2026
Human-in-the-Loop Is Not a UX Pattern
As organisations adopt AI systems for increasingly complex work, “human-in-the-loop” has become the default answer to concerns about trust, accountability and oversight. The idea sounds sensible: let …
12 Jun 2026
Good Design Starts With Utility
A lot of modern design is optimised to be seen rather than used. Interfaces are polished, animated, and visually impressive, yet somehow harder to navigate. Brands become more minimal while also becom…
4 Jun 2026
Ask yourself: are users better off?
A lot of product and engineering teams say they are user-focused. Far fewer actually organise themselves around user outcomes. That distinction matters more than almost anything else. The strongest pr…
28 May 2026
Designing Agent Interfaces for High-Stakes Decisions
AI systems are increasingly moving beyond summarisation and copilots into something more consequential: decision support. Across regulated industries, and some national infrastructure, organisations a…
21 May 2026
The Forward-Deployed Designer
“Forward deployed” started as a term in engineering and consulting. It describes people who work directly with the customer instead of sitting at a distance from the problem. In practice, it means bei…
19 May 2026
Agentic Interfaces: Beyond the Chat Window
For the last few years, AI product design has largely revolved around one thing: the chat interface. Prompt in, response out. But the next wave of AI products is shifting away from “chatbots” toward a…
12 May 2026
Systems thinking > pixel perfection
For a long time, product design has been closely associated with visual polish. Spacing, typography, alignment, colour. The details that make something feel “finished.” Tools like Figma became central…
15 Apr 2026
The Design Process in 2026
Design tooling has fundamentally changed with the latest and greatest vibe-coding tools. It’s now faster than ever to get high quality, high fidelity prototypes up and running. This is a job advert fo…
2 Apr 2026
AI and ML Design Resources for UX Designers
I’ve come across a few really good resources for UX Designers getting into or involved in designing for complex apps and AI-enabled software. Let me know of other great links and I will add them to th…
29 Dec 2025
A User-First Approach to AI Strategy
“Enterprise AI strategy” is something you’d find on a consultant’s slide deck with lots of arrows, maybe a few buzzwords, and a roadmap that stretches into some hazy, futuristic quarter where everythi…
25 Oct 2025
Product Designer Portfolio Tips
I have reviewed about 100 product designer portfolios in the last couple of weeks for 2 open midweight product designer roles we have at Faculty. I want to help product designers get jobs. These 100 p…
26 Sept 2025
Thumbs Up to the Humans in the Loop
Back in the early days of building apps, when we were still deploying things with FTP and debugging with alert(), one of the most thrilling moments was just watching someone use your thing. Not a simu…
1 Aug 2025
Why you should listen to your superusers over your metrics
Most users don’t care about your product. That might sound harsh, but hear me out. For the vast majority of people, your app is just another utility — something they open, tap around in, and close wit…
22 Apr 2025
Let Users Touch the Product: Designing for Agency
Too many apps and digital products treat users like passive observers. They surface dashboards, deliver reports, and walk users through prescribed paths. But they stop short of what really builds enga…
3 Apr 2025
The Technical Service Blueprint: Bridging UX and Engineering
In many digital projects, user experience (UX) and technical architecture are treated as separate tracks. Designers focus on flows and interactions, while engineers dive into APIs, data models, and pe…
21 Mar 2025
Thinking beyond chat interfaces for human-agent interaction
From Chat to Click Chat-based interfaces are the go-to solution for agent interactions, helping new users of agent systems navigate complex workflows. Chat is a flexible interface, and can return diff…
15 Mar 2025
How do you design explainability in Complex Systems?
AI has become a driving force in software from personalised recommendations to critical decisions in healthcare and finance. This creates a challenge for users: how do we ensure that AI systems remain…
28 Jan 2025
The Importance of a Tangible Interface
Humans are tactile creatures. We’re wired to understand the world by touching, feeling, and interacting with the objects around us. We pick things up, turn them over, bash them together, and toss them…
27 Jan 2025
Designing from 0 to 1: Meet Users Where They Are
When designing a new product or feature, the excitement of innovation can tempt us to jump straight to the “big idea.” But if we skip the crucial step of understanding where users currently are, our l…
13 Jan 2025