Author Archives: John Gibbard

Jun 26 2025
work

The Art of Owning Less: A Manifesto for a Simpler Life

“A photo-realistic, wide-angle shot of a minimalist, industrial-style room. At its centre stands a mid-century wooden table holding a vintage shoebox of old photographs and a neatly folded wool jumper. Soft sunlight streams diagonally through a tall warehouse-style window, casting warm light across the bare concrete floor. A single linen armchair sits off-centre, turned away, suggesting recent human presence. The scene is calm, curated, and quietly reflective.

We are drowning in stuff. Not because we need it, or even want it, but because we’re conditioned to accept that accumulation equals progress. The shelf groaning under unread books. The kitchen drawers overflowing with gadgets of single, niche utility. The wardrobe packed with ‘just in case’ items for situations that will never arise. We are not only possessed by our possessions, we’re buried under them.

Minimalism, at its best, is not about an aesthetic. It is not an Instagram-perfect arrangement of neutral-toned objects, nor the breathless fervour of bin-bagging everything you own because an influencer told you to. It is, simply, about knowing what you have and choosing to have less of it.

The Great Clothing Cull

I have watched every episode of Sort Your Life Out. Stacey Solomon and Dilly are the nation’s best mates, empathetic therapists disguised as decluttering gurus. They don’t arrive, Kondo-like, with mystical pronouncements about joy. Instead, they open up a warehouse, making you confront your past in a clinically lit aircraft hangar, and then gently shame you into ditching 99 odd socks, 2,000 greetings cards, and a spoon collection that could fill the drawers at Blenheim Palace.

It is the perfect decluttering show because it understands the British psyche. Where American organisation porn offers up pristine linen-clad perfection (hello Duchess Sussex), SYLI makes people sort their stuff in hoodies and leggings, exhausted and occasionally tearful, before finally seeing it all artfully categorised in a set of MDF storage solutions. But the key is this: it works. When Stacey’s crew is on your side, urging you to let go, you listen. She is not just helping people tidy up, she is their therapist, helping them face their own histories, attachments, and deeply ingrained anxieties about waste, memory, and identity.

I have recently paid someone (not Stacey) to come and help me sift through the detritus of my past: the things my parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw out when they cleared their loft, the remnants of a flat fire where possessions had already been forcibly edited down to a fragile minimum. And yet, still, there is more. So much more. Three house moves later, I’ve used each relocation as an excuse to cut back even further, paring things down to the essentials. But I needed this lady’s detachment from all that past, a task none of my family could have done with the necessary emotional distance required.

The wardrobe, a microcosm of the wider problem, is a particularly cruel landscape of regret. The clobber that fit a different physical version of me, a me that went out more. The memory-laden jumper you will never wear again but feel unable to part with. The shoes bought for a life you simply do not live. We keep these things not because they serve us, but because they whisper to our guilt, our shame, our aspirations. A curated wardrobe isn’t (just) about looking good, it’s about dressing with clarity, wearing only things that make you feel yourself, and being free from the burden of choice paralysis.

Let’s be frank: no one needs more than two tea towels, two sets of bed linen, and five pens. And yet, the natural order of modern life is to acquire. But if we follow the principles of good curation (the ruthless discernment of museum conservators) we begin to ask the right questions. Not ‘is this useful?’, because almost everything is potentially useful. But: Does this belong in my collection? Does it contribute meaningfully to my life? If I were choosing afresh, would I buy it again?

The Swedish Death Cleaning Perspective

There is a rather beautiful, if slightly morbid, Scandinavian tradition called döstädning – Swedish Death Cleaning. The principle is simple: do not leave your clutter for others to deal with when you are gone. Live lightly so as not to burden those left behind. It is a concept I think about often as the people around me age and I see what I’d be burdening my kids with. The weight of inheritance, not in money or property, but in boxes of ‘important’ things that, in reality, were just never thrown away.

Glenn Adamson, in How to Curate (Just About) Anything, argues that past the tidying stage, a more capacious process awaits when we curate. To curate is to care for, to actively maintain rather than merely accumulate. It’s a conscious approach to ownership that applies as much to possessions as it does to the books we choose to keep, the tools we use, the spaces we inhabit. The museum metaphor is useful: a curator doesn’t ask if an object is interesting in isolation but whether it adds something valuable to the collection as a whole. This is the mindset that makes for a lived-in, personalised home, rather than just a sterile, thoughtless minimalist, emptier one.

Melissa Norberg, in How to Have Less Stuff, touches on the psychology behind our attachment to things. She agrees that possessions often carry emotional weight, representing past selves, aspirations, or anxieties about the future. If you’ve ever held onto a stack of unread magazines (hello my pile of the stunning Road Rat), convinced that one day you’ll work through them, you know the feeling. But as Adamson reminds us, keeping something present in your awareness doesn’t mean keeping it physically, it means keeping it alive in your mental space.

The Digital Declutter: A Different Kind of Clutter

Of course, physical clutter is just one part of the problem. If my wardrobe has been whittled down to a sharp, functional selection, my Mac is the opposite: a sprawling archive of files, downloads, half-finished projects and forgotten PDFs, all strewn across the digital ether.

Here, though, the challenge isn’t one of tripping over stuff, which is why Stacey never gets involved, it’s the sheer complexity of filtering through it all and making the right judgments. Does it even matter, when storage is effectively infinite? Unlike a teetering stack of books or an overstuffed wardrobe, a bloated hard drive won’t physically intrude on my space. But the real problem in the digital world isn’t just what to delete, it’s what to retrieve, and how to retrieve it when I actually need it.

My Google inbox, for example, is a graveyard of correspondence stretching back over 20 years. And yet, every so often, a search dredges up an email that provides some vital context, a forgotten thread of a past conversation suddenly relevant again. Last week I called up the hotel I stayed at in Stockholm in 2016 for a friend of mine. The digital hoarder in me justifies keeping everything, because what if? But what if the problem isn’t too much data, but too little clarity? What if I’ve reached the point where I don’t even know what I have?

The real digital tidy-up isn’t about mass deletion, but smarter organisation. Tagging instead of mindless foldering. Search over structure. Curating a system where the past is accessible, but not overwhelming. After all, what use is owning less if I can’t actually find what matters? It goes without saying almost that AI and machine learning will be game-changing here.

Conclusion: The Art of Living With Less

This is why I now own fewer clothes than I ever have. It is why I keep only the books I truly covet. It is why my kitchen is free of pointless single-use utensils that promise efficiency but deliver only clutter. Living with less is a conscious act, not a sacrifice. It is an escape from the tyranny of choice, the stress of mess, and the dull headache of ownership.

Marie Kondo asked us if our things ‘spark joy’. I think a better question is: Does this deserve space in my life? And if the answer is no, we must learn to let it go.

Let us stop hoarding for the past, or stockpiling for an imagined future. Let us live in the space we have, unburdened. The art of owning less is, in the end, the art of living more.

AI disclosure: This piece was written by me, but I used AI to help refine the copy, generate the image, and nudge the tone into shape. Think of it as a sub-editor with better memory and no ego.

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Jun 20 2025
socio-cultural

What We Took for Granted

A boarded-up British pub on a quiet street, its windows covered with metal shutters and faint graffiti. The pub’s old signage is faded but visible, and a chalkboard by the door still displays a “What’s On” message. Overcast sky, soft light. The scene feels abandoned yet oddly dignified, capturing a sense of cultural pause, not decay.

I’ve been on a career break since November. For the first time in years, I’ve moved at the same speed as my own community. I’ve dropped off at Scouts and nursery, sat in waiting rooms for doctors and dentists, queued at the post office. I’ve watched the builders’ vans come and go, the Micras pull up with cleaners, the conversations in cafés and allotments and playgroups unfold in a hundred different tongues and tempos. And yes, I’ve got older. My parents are reflecting. And I’ve started to reflect too.

It starts with something you didn’t realise you’d miss. A sandwich from my old Fitzrovia café favourite, The Daley Bread, warm, under a fiver. The musty tang of a church hall where the windows rarely get opened. A pub that had been quietly open for 140 years, now covered in armoured window shutters and graffiti, but still with the chalkboard ‘What’s On’ by the front door, clinging on like it remembers something.

None of these moments ever asked to be remembered. That’s why they lasted.

When Queen Elizabeth II died, something snapped. Not just a reign, but a rhythm. Not of empire or deference, but of expectation, that the fabric of everyday life, the England of hedges and hymn books and heat-damaged laminated menus on brittle café tables, would hold. That continuity, once taken for granted, would continue.

Now, I’m not sure it has.

At the end of winter, I felt it most clearly in the waiting room of Teddington Memorial Hospital. A red-brick Edwardian building with high ceilings and cloudy glass, whose entrance still hums with a kind of institutional memory. But the waiting room felt… unfamiliar. Around me, a few families who might have stepped out of my childhood. And many more who hadn’t. Different languages, cadences, faiths, mannerisms. No hostility. Just a disconnection. Like arriving late to a meeting and realising everyone else has a different perspective.

And yet, a month or so later I sat in my old school hall at BGS surrounded by seventy mostly grey-haired Old Boys in suits and sang Auld Lang Syne, said grace, and reminisced about our headmaster’s pipe smoke, the tuck shop, and flinging cheese triangles at the walls. Despite our best intentions, I doubt this traditional dinner will be remotely the same in ten years’ time.

That isn’t about race, or even nationality. It’s about rhythm. What felt legible once, now feels opaque. I know that what felt predictable to me may have felt excluding or limited to others. But predictability, even flawed, creates cultural ballast.

I grew up in Wormshill and went to school in Rodmersham, a Kentish village with fewer than 40 pupils. The building was Victorian, the sort that smelt faintly of floor polish and instant, milky coffee. It had a scullery where knees would be patched and cabbage boiled. Thursday nights meant karate club in an old church in Sittingbourne; Sundays were Sunday school. Tuesdays were cubs at the village hall. At camps, we drank weak squash and sang around the fire with an eccentric leader belting out “Ging Gang Gooley”. We had birthday parties at the Beefeater. You got a balloon and a home-made cake and it was all unremarkable. It was meant to be. That was the point.

The pub on the high street smelled of cigarettes and damp bar towels when you walked past on a Saturday morning aged eight. It was still there with the same name when you went in at sixteen. Still there when you came back from uni at twenty-one.

Now, nothing sticks. Even that sandwich shop I loved in the 2010s, The Daley Bread in Fitzrovia, staffed by a lovely working-class London couple, is long gone. Probably turned into something pop-up and forgettable. I don’t so much miss the sandwich. I miss the assumption that it would be there tomorrow.

We’ve replaced endurance with churn. A coffee shop lasts two years if it’s lucky. Pubs close, reopen as “The Lemongrass Thai”, then vanish. Housing estates arrive with names that pretend something was saved, The Pines, Mill Way, The Courtyard. Everything designed to sound like memory without having any.

Some of the erasures feel personal. A genial old neighbour in a 1930s local authority house who clipped his borders with quiet pride and watered the pavement in summer won’t be replaced. There are almshouses in Thames Ditton still holding a kind of timewarp grace – wind chimes, bird feeders, Zimmer frames at the door. But these are remnants, not structures. Continuity lives there, but only in hospice.

It’s why I comment frequently on planning applications now. Not because I think nothing should change. But because the way, and velocity, with which things change feels so incurious. The Café Rouge in Esher (formerly the Orleans Arms) will inevitably be demolished and replaced with another brushed-steel block with clip-on balconies and a vape shop at the bottom. The building was tired, of course it was, ‘nothing special’, unless you happened to have met your spouse there, or cried into a pint after the races at Sandown, or, as I recall, sat with Jo and picked over a difficult argument. Soon its memory will be preserved only in the awkward bend of the pavement.

Polyapes Scout Camp, still rich with woodsmoke and wild scrub, is next. Hemmed in by housing developments that promise a “landscape-led vision” and end with a private driveway named after a tree that never grew there.

Even when reuse is done well, it’s never quite secure. The gym I (should) go to in Long Ditton occupies an old waterworks. You can still feel the ghosts of its past—the workers crossing the cobbles (still visible on the pavement entrance) with rolled-up sleeves. But places like this feel like a reprieve, not a precedent.

Some say it was always thus. That even in 1982, people mourned the loss of the corner shop. Maybe. But they mourned loss. We’re mourning speed. Things didn’t use to disappear before you’d had a chance to learn the barista’s name. A shop might close. But it didn’t become a poke bowl kiosk, then a dog-groomer, then a boarded-up shell all in one electoral cycle.

We don’t inherit places anymore. We iterate them.

Even our rituals have thinned. Colleagues don’t go to the pub after work; they go to the gym. They don’t marry in church with tailcoats and hymns; they book a morning at the registry office, then host a party at a hotel. No criticism. But it means that when the pub closes, or the Scout hut is converted into flats, nothing stands in its place. The cultural function simply vanishes.

Even COVID didn’t give us a unifying story when we thought it would be our 39–45. It could have bound us. It didn’t. We emerged resentful, atomised, and uncommemorated. There are no statues. No ceremonies. Just a sense that it happened, we handled it badly, the pan-banging was cringeworthy, and we’d all rather not mention it. A shared trauma, now quietly redacted.

And yes, there’s the harder part to say. The part you can’t raise without sounding like a closed curtain twitching. I walk through Sittingbourne, Surbiton, or Kingston, or Esher and I don’t recognise what I hear. The shouting of Eastern European builders. The clipped conversations of families I don’t know how to read and who aren’t there for post-office queue small talk. Not hostile. Not impolite. But sharp-edged. Voices I can’t quite tune into—not the words, but the mood beneath them. What feels like cultural drift to me may well feel like arrival to someone else. But it’s the lack of overlap I notice most.

I’ve worked with plenty of diverse people who are diligent and decent and warm. But I still feel unmoored. Because the culture I knew wasn’t defined by skin or origin, it was defined by shared grammar. The knowledge they grew up listening to the same music, eating the same crisps, watching the same Saturday night TV and playing the same games in the park. A tempo. A way of being in public. That’s gone.

And with it, something unspoken: the idea that England could remember itself.

And anyway, it’s not just the voices, it’s the way people move through the world. The delivery riders who weave between cars in summer heat, knees flapping under handlebar skirts, bundled in puffer jackets like it’s February. The SUV parents who inch through the school run with all the urgency of an urban tank convoy, it boils my piss that not one of them waves a bloody thank-you when you let them through. And the vape-sucking driver in the pickup, lunging up onto the kerb to grab six cans of Monster from the Co-Op, to hell with the sight-lines, the pushchair, or the old fella on his walking frame.

There are still traces. Churches with rusted gates and ageing choirs. Pubs with Monday quiz nights and hand pumps. Allotments. Scout groups. Carol services. Street parties with bunting and that weak squash. But they feel more like re-enactments than institutions. More like memory theatre than civic rhythm.

We thought we’d miss the buildings. It turns out we miss the punctuation. The pauses, the greetings, the knowing what came next. When that goes, it’s not just a different place, it’s no place at all.

If your pub still has a snug, go. If the Scout group needs a hand, turn up. If your church still lights candles, show your face. Wave a thank-you if the car waits for you in a gap. If there’s a planning notice on the thing you loved, write the objection. Even if it’s ignored.

Because otherwise, the last trace of it all will be a street name. Something vaguely commemorative. Almshouse Mews. The Glebe. The Old Vicarage Place.

And no one will remember what they meant.

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May 21 2025
work

Striving for Imperfection: Why Flaws Make Things Feel Real

Perfection has become a tell. Too smooth, too balanced, too… AI. In a world of generative everything, we’ve reached a strange inflection point: human-centred design now demands imperfection, not as a flaw, but as a feature.

Because friction is fidelity. And too much polish starts to smell synthetic.

When Random Doesn’t Feel Random

Apple’s original shuffle algorithm was mathematically pure, each track had an equal chance of playing. But users complained. It didn’t feel random. Why? Because true randomness includes clumps, repetitions, patterns that seem suspect. A couple of U2 tracks in a row and suddenly the algorithm was “broken.”

So Apple redesigned it to be less random, so that it would seem more random. Illusion of imperfection, engineered.

It’s the same with LLMs. Outputs that are too balanced, too polished, ring false to human ears. We need to start prompt-engineering flaws into our copy, because believability demands mess.

Breath Marks and Broken Grammar

I have a playlist I use to test audio (car stereos, headphones, my hi-fi separates). Not for punch or clarity. For something else. For breath, for scratches, for the hiss of it all. Those tiny artefacts left in because they mattered. Because someone chose to keep them.

Same applies to writing. I’ve airbrushed things too, of course I have. Smoothed over copy that should have stung a little. A good sub-editor knows when to let a clause run ragged. When tidiness would kill the tone. And when grammar should yield to cadence. On LinkedIn, where polish often passes for credibility, that kind of mess is rare, although the smell of all that polish is punget.

The Pratfall Effect, Real Beauty

The Pratfall Effect teaches us that we trust people (and brands) more when they’re good and a little flawed. A genius who spills coffee. A leader who admits doubt. We warm to it.

Brands have learned this too. Dove’s Real Beauty Playbook (developed by Unilever) resonates because it shows unedited reality: pimples, pores, and all. At a recent session in London, Bianca Mack (WongDoody) reminded us of the campaign’s emotional resonance and shared new research on how people respond to AI-generated images and the labelling thereof.

But who decides when an image is ‘too perfect’? That wasn’t clear.

One crucial gap: that research didn’t appear to distinguish between image types. As I explored in my previous piece, “The Complexity and Nuance in Human-Centred Design: Beyond the ‘Average’ User” (Nov 2023), we don’t experience products or content generically, we interpret them through the lens of context, emotional expectations, and domain norms. We tolerate gloss on cars and watches. But we demand scars and breath in human faces.

Against the Plinth: Notes from JLR

When I led UX at AccentureSong for Jaguar Land Rover, we had this tension constantly. The art directors wanted visual purity: architecture that gleamed, cars posed like sculpture, not vehicles. But my team pushed back. We knew that real customers didn’t experience their Range Rover on a plinth. They experienced it on wet roads, in dim light, with children kicking the back seat. Our interfaces and imagery needed to feel lived in, not gallery-lit.

There was always a pull between the pristine and the plausible. Between the brand fantasy and the user reality. The best work came when we embraced the rough edge.

This picks up the argument I made in “The Complexity and Nuance in Human-Centred Design”, that designing for an average user strips out useful extremes. Here, it’s visual: perfection may be aesthetic, but it’s not trustworthy.

Prompt Engineering with Bruises

If you’re using LLMs for writing, design, or strategy, you’ll notice: the cleaner it reads, the less it lands. That might sound odd, but the flaws make it human.

Try this instead:

  • Prompt for contradiction: “Add a small, unresolved tension.”
  • Prompt for failure: “Include a misstep or wrong decision.”
  • Prompt for tone: “Make this sound slightly defensive.”

These aren’t weaknesses. They’re realism. They’re humanity.

You don’t say it’s real, you show it.

Which brings us back to humans. We now have a new role: not just creators, but curators of believability. If you let a model spit out 800 words of polished perfection and ship it unchecked, don’t be surprised if your readers scroll past. They know what machine-made sounds like.

In Bianca’s research, people wanted to know when something was AI-generated, but perhaps more importantly, we want to know someone’s checked it. Because a watermark is more than a label. It’s a sign of judgement.

Just as we caveat car ads, ‘closed course’, ‘professional driver’, we’re now being asked to signal artifice across digital domains. Not to apologise for it, but to own it.

It’s not easy. As an industry we’re conditioned to edit out blemishes, not protect them. Maybe we’ve all just got too good at pretending we know what authenticity looks like.

Closing

Perfection doesn’t reassure. It can repel. If you want something to feel real, it needs to breathe. To blink. To bruise. In a world of frictionless content, the rough edge is where trust begins.

This isn’t a stylistic preference. It’s a principle.

AI was used to sub-edit this piece according to my personal tone of voice guidelines, it was also used to generate the cover image, WordPress excerpt, tagging recommendations and tighten the LinkedIn tease for it.

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Apr 29 2025
socio-cultural

Absent Dads, Absent Truth

The Mayor of London has been urged to “champion relatable, positive male role models” to stop boys being radicalised online, which is exactly the sort of thing you suggest when you’ve already decided not to talk about the real problem.

Instead of facing the collapse of family structures and the chronic absence of fathers in too many boys’ lives, we get a proposal for an information campaign. A Toolkit. A few posters. Maybe Southgate can record a reassuring YouTube video.

Apparently, the hope is that if we churn out enough branded content about ‘healthy masculinity,’ it will somehow fill the gaping hole left by Dad never being there at all. As if boys are just a design challenge, a user group to be nudged away from extremism by better comms.

Of course, and I can’t stress this enough, some fathers should not be in their children’s lives at all. Where there is violence, cruelty or fear, absence is protection. A boy and their mum are better off fatherless than poisoned by a man who teaches him that domination is love. No argument there. None.

But that’s not the majority story.

The real crisis is the steady normalisation of fathers absenting themselves, through neglect, indifference, casual abandonment, and the refusal of politicians to say so, for fear of sounding judgmental.

You don’t fix fatherlessness with a toolkit.

But modern politics is allergic to root causes. Safer to pretend it’s a branding issue. Safer to talk about awareness, feelings, “positive role models.” Anything except the one thing that actually matters: Dads. Ordinary, everyday Dads, who stay, love, protect, and teach, often imperfectly, but crucially.

Until then, you can print all the Toolkits you like and put out the PowerPoints in a special school asssembly. The boys will still go looking for their fathers, and if they don’t find them at home, they’ll find them online.

And that won’t be Gareth Southgate.

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Apr 10 2025
work

Designing in the Grey Zone: UX Strategy Between User Needs and Compliance Risk

“We want this to feel seamless … but we also need explicit consent, mandatory disclosures, manual checks, and legal disclaimers.”

Every seasoned designer recognises this paradox. Designing in the grey zone where intuitive user intent meets institutional paranoia; this is the real art of UX. It’s here, away from idealised personas and tidy journey maps, that experienced designers earn their keep.

There’s an invisible brief beneath every customer-focused requirement: a shadow brief shaped by compliance, legal, and operational anxieties. Good designers learn not just to sense this, but to actively probe it. Ignore it, and your project spirals into endless revisions, stakeholder reviews where the work is designed by committee, subtlety is lost; engage it early, and you gain clarity – and allies.

Take pattern fatigue. Users tire of repetitive consent modals, disclaimers, and (in most but not all cases) friction-heavy journeys. Businesses, meanwhile, cling anxiously to these same patterns as safeguards against imagined or real regulatory backlash. But real trust isn’t built through relentless checkbox rituals. It’s earned through clear, respectful experiences that make the necessary feel intentional, not a cover-your-arse afterthought.

Collaboration here isn’t confined to design reviews or user testing, it happens in office kitchen conversations, Teams/Slack channels, and impromptu chats. You learn to engage risk, legal, product, and ops stakeholders early and often, folding their concerns into the design narrative without allowing the process to be swallowed whole.

I don’t just write about this stuff. I’ve done it.

In regulated finance journeys, instead of burying disclosures or making them intrusive, my team always sought to reframe the moment as part of proactive user education, clear, transparent language turned obligatory checkboxes into moments of genuine value.

For an automotive e-commerce flow, this meant legal mandated conspicuously disruptive copy and impenetrable ‘maths stacks’. But by carefully segmenting the messaging and testing contextual placement, the caveats turned into trust-enhancing affirmations rather than flow-breaking interruptions, and those maths stacks became useful summaries of the (complex) product the customer was buying.

Other projects at Aviva and Standard Life involved compliance from day one, not as gatekeepers but co-designers. The result, I hoped users would see, was surprisingly intuitive UX – and a more collaborative approach next time around. Aligning regulatory demands early creates space for creativity rather than stifling it.

Early in my career, it’s fair to say I viewed legal and compliance as blockers (and they saw digital as suspiciously nebulous, much harder to sign off than print). Now, I see them simply as constraints: like network latency, budget, or screen size. And like those, they can be designed-for intelligently and creatively.

Art moves in to Tate St. Ives at street level and must be able to move into the galleries at different levels. (c) Jamie Fobert Architects

I always come back to something Jamie Fobert said about designing Tate St. Ives. Parts of the building were shaped around a core problem: how to get large-scale artworks in, move them through the space, and install them cleanly. Instead of fighting the constraint, they made it central to the solution. Form followed function, but with elegance. That, to me, is how I work with compliance now. Not a hurdle. Just part of the brief.

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Mar 19 2025
running, socio-cultural

The Gym Is Not What It Used to Be. And Neither Are the People In It

There was a time when the gym was a pure place. A functional place. You went in, suffered, left. The weight machines were occupied by normal people doing normal things: lifting the weight, putting it down, moving on with their day.The stretching area was a low-ego sanctuary, where the post-menopausal women and men with questionable knees could collectively ignore one another while attempting to salvage some basic mobility.

That was ten years ago.

Now? Now the gym is a stage. It is a theatre of performative masculinity, a TikTok production set, a social experiment in misplaced confidence.

The Era of The Sub-Influencer

There is an insidious new species of gym-goer. You know the type. Not quite an influencer, not quite anonymous, just self-important enough to believe the world needs to see their Romanian deadlifts from three slightly different angles.

They do not train for anything, as such. They train for content. Their tripod is their training partner. You now have to navigate not just the people in the gym but also their carefully-curated camera angles, lest you accidentally wander into someone’s life-changing fitness transformation montage.

Their workouts too are a nonsense. Not a single compound movement in sight. Just an infinite sequence of variations, each with a brand-new wrist strap configuration.

And because they’re influencing, they’re not moving quickly.

Nobody Uses a Machine for Less Than 20 Minutes

There was a time when people would finish a set, wipe the bench, and fuck off. That time is gone. Now, a single incline bench is home to one man, his girlfriend, three resistance bands, a mini tripod, a protein shaker, and the ghosts of everyone else who once hoped to use it.

The three-set rule? Dead. What we have now is nine micro-sets, interspersed with two-minute reflection periods, a quick check of the pump in the mirror, and a series of deeply unsettling vocal self-affirmations.

Children. There Are Children Here.

3 PM.

Thursday.

This is not a time when schoolchildren should be anywhere but school.

And yet, they are here, occupying space, dressed like extras from a Love Island spin-off, attempting to bench weights they have no business even looking at. They should be in PE class, but it seems that PE class has relocated to Nuffield Health, Surbiton.

You watch two 19-year-old men in socks sparring in the functional training zone, boxing gloves on, common sense fully off. You make eye contact with a woman in her 50s trying to do some basic hip mobility exercises in the same area, and there is a mutual understanding. This place is no longer for us.

The Gym Is Now a Financial Illusion

One might assume that a gym with an entry fee north of £80 a month would filter out the worst excesses of the Gen Z energy drink economy. That it would be an enclave of working adults, former athletes, people with mortgage agreements, herbaceous borders and creaking joints.

It is not.

It turns out this Nuffield is part of the modern financial miracle, wherein a generation of people who claim they can’t afford rent somehow have active subscriptions to HelloFresh, Netflix, Gymshark, MyProtein, and a £17-per-day vape habit.

And Yet, I Still Go

I could leave. I could accept that this is no longer my world. That I have been phased out. That the gym, once a place of quiet suffering, is now an open-plan ego festival.

But I won’t.

Because I refuse to let a man in a Under Armour hoodie filming himself doing isometric curls be the reason I surrender my back mobility.

So I stretch, awkwardly, in the corner.

And I endure.

Because I was here first.

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Mar 17 2025
work

From Envelopes to Algorithms: Navigating Personal Finance in the Subscription Era

Back in 2009, I reflected on our innate habit of mentally earmarking money, noting:​

“If it turned out that I wanted a laptop costing £1,200 and I had £700 in savings and £600 in my current account, I could technically afford that laptop, but I wouldn’t buy it because, in my head, I only had £700 in the allocated savings account.”​

This behaviour mirrors the traditional ‘envelope system,’ where individuals physically divided cash into envelopes for specific expenses, ensuring disciplined spending.​

Fast forward to 2025, and while cash has largely become a relic, our desire to compartmentalise finances persists. Digital banking has adapted, offering virtual equivalents to these envelopes. For instance, Monzo introduced “Pots,” allowing users to allocate funds for specific goals, while Starling Bank offers “Spaces” for similar purposes. Revolut provides “Vaults” and “Pockets,” enabling users to categorise and manage their money effectively.​

However, alongside these advancements, we’ve witnessed an explosion of subscription-based services:​

  • Streaming Services: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and perhaps that niche platform you trialled and forgot to cancel (hello, History Hit).​
  • Software Subscriptions: Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, and various productivity tools.​
  • Lifestyle Boxes: Weekly deliveries of meal kits, razors, supplements, or even socks, because who doesn’t appreciate fresh socks monthly?​

These recurring charges, often modest individually, can cumulatively strain our finances, especially when forgotten or underutilised. The convenience of “set it and forget it” often leads to the latter.​

While digital banks have empowered users to segment their funds, managing the myriad of subscriptions remains challenging. Most banking apps display transactions chronologically, placing the onus on users to identify recurring payments. Some apps offer features to visualise upcoming direct debits, but proactive management tools remain limited.​

To enhance user experience in this subscription-saturated era, banks could implement:​

  1. Subscription Dashboards: A dedicated interface highlighting all active subscriptions, their monthly costs, and renewal dates, offering a clear view of recurring expenses.​
  2. Smart Notifications: Alerts for impending renewals or price hikes, such as, “Heads up! Your monthly fee for ‘Obscure Streaming Service’ is increasing from £5 to £7 next week.”
  3. Simplified Cancellation: One-click options to terminate unwanted subscriptions directly from the banking app, streamlining the often cumbersome cancellation processes.​
  4. AI-Powered Analysis: Tools that analyse usage patterns and suggest downgrades or cancellations, e.g., “We’ve noticed you haven’t logged into ‘Premium Meditation App’ in three months. Consider cancelling to save £10 /month?”

However, a significant challenge lies in the fragmented nature of these subscriptions. Some are direct debits, others are continuous payment authorities linked to cards, and many are managed through platforms like PayPal or the Apple App Store. This dispersion complicates holistic management.​

Enter Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs), a feature of open banking that offers more control and transparency than existing payment alternatives. VRPs allow customers to set parameters for recurring payments, such as maximum amount and frequency, providing a more seamless and secure way to manage subscriptions. ​

While digital envelopes have evolved, so have our spending habits. Banks that acknowledge and adapt to the subscription economy’s nuances can empower users, ensuring our hard-earned money doesn’t silently seep away. Achieving this requires a combination of excellent user experience design and tight integration of open banking standards, allowing a comprehensive view of all our financial commitments. Until then, vigilance across multiple platforms remains essential to maintain financial well-being.​

AI disclosure: AI supported background research, analysis of 2009 blog post, minor thematic development, and refining of narrative flow. Image generated using Dall-E.

All final article content, style, and opinions remain solely the author’s own.

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Mar 13 2025
work

The Great Touchscreen Con Job

Some mistakes happen in a moment. A quick lapse of judgment, an ill-advised decision at 3 a.m., an email sent to Reply All. Others take years, unfolding in slow motion as warning signs are ignored, reasonable objections are silenced, and people in boardrooms nod sagely at their own catastrophic short-sightedness. The mass adoption of touchscreen-only controls in cars falls into the latter category.

Volkswagen has now admitted the error of its ways, vowing that physical buttons are back for good. “We will never, ever make this mistake again,” said their Chief of Design, as if they’d been tricked into it by some mysterious force, rather than actively championing the change.

It raises a bigger question. How did it happen in the first place? How did entire teams of HMI experts, human factors specialists, and UX researchers – people whose literal job is to stop this kind of nonsense – allow it to happen? Were they asleep at the wheel, or were they simply drowned out by design teams infatuated with minimalism and finance teams rubbing their hands at the thought of fewer moving parts?

The answer, of course, is all of the above.

The cult of minimalism, confusing more screens with innovation

At some point in the last decade, car designers decided that buttons were offensive. They cluttered up dashboards. They broke the sainted, uninterrupted lines of modern interior design. Worse, they weren’t futuristic. The ideal was a sleek, unbroken surface, like an iPhone, only larger and more expensive to replace if it b0rked.

This obsession with minimalism went unchecked because it looked fantastic in concept renders. Screens glowing with digital promise, smooth and uninterrupted by the ugliness of function. Never mind that the only reason buttons existed in the first place was that they worked. Never mind that people could reach for a dial without taking their eyes off the road, adjusting the temperature by feel alone, a level of usability that no amount of software updates could replicate.

Rob Tannen, a human-centred design specialist, summed it up recently on LinkedIn: “Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them.” In a moving vehicle, that isn’t just bad design, it’s dangerous.

The significant point here though is that this was not a revelation. UX researchers have known it for years. The car industry had, in fact, already worked this out in the 1980s, which is why it spent decades refining tactile, mechanical controls that allowed drivers to focus on the road and remain at arm’s length. But in their rush to be seen as technologically advanced, OEMs decided to throw that institutional knowledge in the bin.

The accountant’s dream, confusing cost-cutting with innovation

Touchscreens are cheap. They replace dozens of mechanical components with a single panel of glass, a bit of wiring, and some off-the-shelf software. For car manufacturers looking to shave costs wherever possible, it was an irresistible proposition. Instead of painstakingly engineered switches, they could throw everything onto a digital interface and call it an upgrade.

Charles Mauro, a veteran in human factors (HF), called this for what it was: “We only have touch screens in vehicles because such interfaces provide a marketing and sales boost to new cars by lending the impression of ‘high-tech’ and modern feature sets. From HF’s perspective, they remain highly impoverished interfaces.”

In other words, it wasn’t about what was best for the driver. It was about what looked best in a press release.

But removing physical controls isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s actively worse. Simple tasks that once took a split-second, a quick flick of a switch, a half-turn of a dial, became a (painstaking) exercise in menu navigation. Climate control settings buried in submenus. Hazard lights requiring two taps and a prayer. Windscreen wipers accessed through a system designed by someone who apparently lives in the desert (i.e. Tesla).

The real irony? Some of the most expensive, high-end cars, the ones that supposedly define luxury, ended up with the worst interfaces. A £120,000 SUV with a laggy touchscreen that freezes in winter. A luxury saloon where temperature adjustments require you to gesture-swipe on visuals of air vents. The tech-driven future, they said.

The Silicon Valley delusion

Blame Tesla. When the upstart EV brand introduced its monolithic, screen-heavy interior, traditional carmakers panicked. If Tesla was doing it, surely that was the future?

OEMs, desperate not to look outdated, decided they had to copy the software-defined model. Everything should be digital, infinitely updatable, infinitely customisable. Who needs buttons when you can have a dynamically shifting interface?

This was a critical misunderstanding of why Tesla got away with it. Tesla’s approach worked (to an extent) because the entire car was designed around it. But for traditional manufacturers, retrofitting touchscreen interfaces onto vehicles that had been developed with physical controls made for a UX disaster.

The dream was that everything would be intuitive. The reality was that even basic tasks became a chore. Ford, in an attempt to embrace this brave new world, introduced ever larger screens into its cars. The result, as The Verge put it, was predictable: “Surveys have shown growing customer dissatisfaction with in-car tech, especially touchscreen software. People are overwhelmed, and Ford’s response seems to be to add more screens, which is not a guarantee for success.”

The data problem

There’s a particularly dangerous kind of UX research that looks at how often people use controls and decides that if something isn’t used frequently, it should be buried.

This is how Tesla ended up hiding the wiper controls inside a screen menu. Their reasoning? “People don’t use them often.” A brilliant insight in California, somewhat less so if you live somewhere with rain.

This logic led to cars where drivers had to dig through menus for basic functions. The entire point of a car interface is that when you do need something, it should be immediately accessible and context really, really matters. Nobody wants to enter a submenu for demisters when their windscreen is fogging up at 70mph. Auto Express’s report is well worth a read here. 

The Return of Sanity

Volkswagen’s public climbdown marks a turning point. Hyundai has followed suit. The backlash has been strong enough that manufacturers are now scrambling to put buttons back in their cars, pretending that they always intended to.

But it wasn’t customer complaints that forced the change. It wasn’t common sense prevailing. It was regulators.

Euro NCAP has mandated that, from 2026, cars will need physical buttons for key functions to qualify for a five-star safety rating. The industry had spent a decade ignoring drivers, but when the threat of lower safety scores loomed, suddenly they rediscovered their enthusiasm for good UX.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The great touchscreen experiment is over. Car interiors are moving back towards hybrid interfaces, a balance of digital and physical that prioritises usability over showroom aesthetics. Manufacturers are rethinking software-defined controls, realising that while over-the-air updates are useful, core functions need permanent, intuitive access.

Most importantly, UX research in automotive needs to be taken seriously again and their voices heard right up the product development and engineering chain. Not just as a box-ticking exercise, but as a genuine guide for what works.

For now, though, it’s a relief to know that the button is making a comeback. It turns out that some of the most futuristic technology in modern cars was there all along.

AI disclosure: Some article research was supported by AI, themes consolidated, article excerpt was AI generated. Article copy entirely author’s own.

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Feb 12 2025
work

Amazon’s UX: Why Customers Ignore the Chaos

Amazon’s interface is a mess. Everyone knows it, doesn’t matter if you’re in the industry or you just use it to buy lightbulbs, the odd book and some fancy Tupperware. It’s the digital equivalent of a hoarder’s house, clutter everywhere. A friend of mine once memorably described looking for something as like “rummaging through a warehouse with a torch”, but [she does it because] “I know the bloody thing I want is in there somewhere”. On any given part of the site there’s inexplicable stacks of unrelated items, and a sense that at any moment, something might fall on you. My particular hate are sponsored listings, intruding like pushy sales reps with their irrelevant nonsense while you’re on the way to buy the actual thing you searched for (although sometimes the actual thing turns out to be a not-quite-there copy from some random far-east factory). Genuine customer reviews also get buried under an avalanche of SEO-stuffed nonsense, and yet, dear reader… here I am, ordering 90% of what I buy from Amazon. And you do too.

However frustrating the experience, it isn’t bad enough to drive people away. Fast delivery, sheer product choice, and a checkout process so frictionless it should be flagged with Gamble Aware. All of this outweighs the UX sins.

So, Does UX Even Matter?

It is a question worth asking. If a platform’s core proposition is so compelling, with cheap prices, instant gratification and no meaningful alternative, does the user experience really determine success? Or does it just need to be functional enough?

The Amazon Conundrum

Armchair critics love to dissect Amazon’s UX. In the dark corners of the UGC web, Reddit threads are full of users raging against the chaotic interface. Tech journos lament the aggressive Prime pushing, the pay-to-win search results. On paper, it’s a usability horror show. But let’s be clear, Amazon isn’t neglecting UX. It employs entire teams of UX designers, researchers, and engineers who are constantly refining the experience. Not to make it more elegant, but to make it better at selling things. If adding another sponsored listing increases revenue, they’ll do it. In 2022 alone, Amazon made over $31 billion from its advertising business, largely driven by these placements, making it a core part of their revenue model (Vox). If customers still find something to buy despite the friction, then as far as Amazon is concerned, the system is working just fine. The difficulty we have as UXers is understanding and reconciling this. Because we see ‘Sponsored’ listings trump the actual best-result search listing we say “This is wrong, users hate this!” but somewhere deep in Amazon HQ is the data to say, “You know what, they actually don’t, and here’s some more $” (EcommerceFuel and others provide further context on how Amazon’s sponsored listings work and why they persist). The same logic applies to other blunt instruments like relentless pop-ups (deeply irritating but demonstrably effective at nudging hesitant users into making a decision) and those blinking, anxiety-inducing countdown timers all over that Instagram brand’s shop aren’t there by accident either.

When UX Takes a Back Seat

Of course, Amazon is hardly alone. Plenty of other sites with objectively terrible UX remain dominant because their value proposition is simply stronger than the frustration they cause:

  • Booking.com drowns you in pop-ups and ‘Only 1 left at this price!’ warnings. Yet its vast selection and competitive pricing make it impossible to ignore.
  • British Airways’ website looks and feels like it’s been trapped in 2009, but people still book flights because, they will always believe the brand stands for something British and the pilots are the best trained and most decent in the skies.
  • Vinted The latest upstart eCommerce brand is having a runaway success in the UK but this is absolutely down to the simplified sell-send logistics and payment process, and definitely not to the bloody awful filtering and product exploration UX (seven different ways to filter on Ralph Lauren sweaters anyone?).
  • GP surgery websites, National Rail, car park booking systems, there’s a vast ecosystem of poorly designed necessities that survive because users effectively have no choice or poorly rationalise their value/essentialism.

This phenomenon isn’t anecdotal or lost on UX thinkers. As David C. Wyld argues in The Endless Battle Against Bad UX, poor usability is pervasive in major companies, and fixing it isn’t always a top priority. Similarly, The World is Running on Bad UI (Michal Malewicz) notes how many essential services and platforms operate on clunky, outdated interfaces yet remain functionally irreplaceable. Their insights reinforce the central argument here: bad UX doesn’t necessarily mean bad business.

The Captive Audience Factor

The obvious point here is that there is a difference between platforms like Amazon, where the UX is frustrating but functional, and services where users are stuck with whatever’s available. The difference with Government portals, legacy corporate systems, anything remotely tied to infrastructure is that these things aren’t just designed badly; they are fundamentally unmotivated to improve.

It’s not even a matter of UX being ignored (again, plenty of these organisations are populated by skilled and well-meaning design folks), it’s often a mix of limited budgets, outdated tech stacks, bureaucracy (many hands), and the sheer pain and complexity of rebuilding something that’s been patched together over decades.

The same logic applies to countless internal systems in large organisations, where usability takes a backseat to bureaucratic inertia and legacy technology. Everyone grumbles about it, but change is slow, and innovation rarely prioritises the dull but essential parts of work life. Just as no one is investing to replace the office microwave that’s been there since the turn of the millennium, so we continue to suffer through whatever shitey interface we’re given.

The Reluctance to Overhaul

Could Amazon wholesale overhaul its UX if it wanted to? Technically, yes. But would it be worth it? Probably not. The site is a sprawling ecosystem of millions of products, channels and third-party sellers, advertising deals, and logistics chains. Trying to impose a sleek, minimalist interface would mean unpicking the very mechanics that drive sales at an enormous cost.

The same goes for other massive platforms. The bigger and more layered a system becomes, the harder (read more expensive) it is to rebuild from the ground up. This is exactly the scenario I described in The Local Maximum Problem, where businesses become trapped in cycles of micro-optimisation rather than taking bold steps toward meaningful UX improvements. Businesses, especially ones as enormous and entrenched as Amazon, often optimise for small, short-term gains instead of taking the risk of a complete overhaul. They’ve reached a peak where micro-adjustments keep the machine running, even if they don’t solve fundamental UX flaws. Redesigning from scratch is a leap into the unknown, and when the current setup is still printing money, who would take that risk? Maybe they update a search filter. Maybe they tweak the layout slightly. But the underlying experience remains a Frankenstein’s monster of competing priorities.

So, Does UX Matter?

Yes, but not in the way purists would like to believe. Good UX reduces friction, increases trust, and improves efficiency, but it doesn’t always dictate whether people use a platform. When the value proposition is strong enough, users will tolerate a lot.

The idealistic view is that platforms should improve out of respect for their users. But what do you think? Have you ever abandoned a platform because of its terrible UX, or do you find yourself sticking with frustrating experiences because the value proposition is just too strong? Perhaps if people keep clicking, why fix what isn’t broken?

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Sep 13 2024
running, work

Asics Overcomplicates the Runner’s Journey

What’s worse than realising your favourite running shoe has finally given up the ghost? Watching someone else avoid that realisation for 18 months and risk an almost inevitable injury as the shoe disintegrates before our eyes. That someone, in this case, is the mother of my children, and the dearly departed in question is her much-loved, overworked Asics Gel-DS Trainers. Those shoes have put in a hell of a shift. Thousands of kilometres on pavements, parkruns, and everything in between, and she’s been putting off replacing them because Asics, in their infinite wisdom, decided to discontinue them. Ironic, really, considering they now offer what seems like an ever-expanding collection of new models that are aligned to a hundred sub-genres of our sport.

So, armed with determination and a misplaced sense of optimism, I ventured onto the Asics website, thinking, “How hard can it be to find a suitable replacement?” Fool. Absolute fool.

What followed was not so much a straightforward shopping experience as a complex game of hide-and-seek with 100+ models of women’s running shoes. I began narrowing things down: size 5.5—okay, now we’re at 80 options. Neutral pronation—down to 54. Road running—down to 46. Surely, at this point, I’d found a clear path. Instead, I was still faced with an onslaught of variants. The Metaspeed, for example, comes in Edge+ and Sky+ (for stride runners and cadence runners, respectively). Then there’s the Nimbus with a Platinum version, because apparently, even running shoes need luxury trims these days. Add in the Cumulus GTX, Lite-Show, and Noosa Tri, and it quickly started to feel like I’d stumbled into Asics’ fashion line instead of a practical search for neutral road shoes.

The Asics Maze
Even after filtering, I was still staring at something like 46 items. Surely, price could help narrow things down? Not quite. More expensive didn’t necessarily mean better, and so using price as a guide only added to the confusion. Was the extra cost because of space-age tech, or was it just a fancy colourway? No way to tell.

Take the Metaspeed and Superblast—both at the top end of the price range. Are they substantially better than the Gel-Pulse or Magic Speed? It depends on what you’re after. The pro models may have carbon plates and advanced cushioning, but that doesn’t mean they’re always the right choice for someone looking for a lightweight, fast shoe for 10k runs.

In the world of running shoes, price can mean anything—or nothing at all. Sometimes minimal, no-frills shoes can be cheaper simply because they don’t have much in them. Other times, pro-level shoes are expensive for performance reasons. Either way, price is a poor guide to what’s actually suited to you.

The Absurd Complexity of Asics’ Product Strategy
By this point, I was beginning to wonder who Asics had in mind when they designed this labyrinth of choice. Surely, even they must know that offering this many variants doesn’t create more positive choices—it just creates more confusion. I’d managed to reduce my options to 10 models across 16 variants, but there was still no sign of the shoe closest to the Gel-DS Trainer—the GT-2000. Apparently, Asics decided it belongs in the “stability” category, even though it offers nearly the same stability, weight, and cushioning as the Gel-DS. So there it sat, hidden in plain sight.

From a product strategy perspective, this is inefficient at best and counterproductive at worst. Developing, marketing, and maintaining so many similar models must be both expensive and confusing for the customer. Asics are doing a fantastic job of overwhelming the very people they’re trying to help, all while bloating their own production processes.

Fixing the Problem
So, what’s the fix? It’s not rocket science. What they need is a simplified, user-friendly approach that doesn’t leave customers feeling cognitively drained before they’ve even tied their laces.

Let’s start with better filters. The current system is too blunt. Instead of “road” or “neutral,” how about additional more useful filters like “lightweight,” “minimal cushioning,” or “designed for 10k runs”? Filters that speak directly to the practical needs of runners would make the entire process far more intuitive.

And, of course, an AI-powered product recommender would go a long way. Imagine inputting a few key details—distance, surface, weight preferences—and getting a personalised recommendation that actually fits your needs. No more second-guessing whether the Metaspeed Sky+ is right for you or why the GT-2000 doesn’t even show up. Other industries have embraced AI to simplify decision-making, and there’s no reason Asics can’t do the same.

Finally, streamlining the product range. Asics just doesn’t need so many variants of the same shoe. And when you consider they’re competing with the likes of Nike, Adidas, Hoka, and others, all with their multiple model variants chasing the same customer, it makes even less sense. Simplifying their product line would not only help the consumer, but it would also cut their own operational costs. Less clutter, more clarity—it’s a win-win.

In Summary
In the end, trying to replace the Gel-DS Trainer wasn’t just about shoe shopping—it turned into a case study of how not to design a user journey. Asics, with their 100+ models and endless variants, have created a labyrinth that even seasoned runners struggle to navigate. And in doing so, they’ve not only alienated customers but also made their own operations less efficient.

What Asics needs is a return to basics: a simplified product range, a streamlined user experience, and filters and tools that actually reflect the way runners think and shop. Less focus on obscure variants, and more on clear, understandable options that meet practical needs. An AI-powered recommender and better faceted filters are two easy steps to fix this.

Because, let’s face it, nobody should need a flowchart to buy a pair of running shoes. In a world where brands like Asics are meant to help runners perform better, they have forgotten the most basic rule: make the choice simple—and let us make the running bit as hard as we like.

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