Category Archives: work

Jul 24 2025
work

We Don’t Know How to Argue Any More

We’ve just established that perfection is a bit of a con. That smoothness and polish can feel synthetic, that flaws, handled well, make things real. That was true of design. It’s true of parenting. And it’s true of conversation.

So let’s apply the same logic to how we talk to each other. Especially when we disagree.

Because somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten how to argue.

Not the red-faced, festive episode of EastEnders kind. Not the long, finger-pointy online threads ending in a half-hearted “do better.” I mean real disagreement. The sort where two people actually try to figure something out, not just dig trenches and hold the line.

Everyone talks about “civil discourse” now, as if etiquette is the issue. But most of that still sounds performative. What I miss are arguments with friction and humility. Ones where both sides know they might walk away changed. Where doubt isn’t seen as a weakness but a sign you’re still listening.

We’re a long way from that now.

Many years ago, I was in the school debating society, travelling around Kent in numerous competitions, even appearing at Westminster School and later representing the University of York up at Durham, where, amusingly, my debating partner was supposed to be Jonathan Isaby, a well-known Conservative voice. However, he mysteriously never showed up until the competition was over. But the principle was simple: listen, engage, persuade. Not demolish. Not deflect. Just make your case, and be ready to refine it when someone made a better one.

Somewhere along the way, we swapped that for something else.

Now, we reward the ‘gotcha’ moment. Certainty is treated like strength. Doubt is weakness. If you admit you’re unsure (or worse, that you’ve changed your mind) it’s seen as a loss of face. We’re so busy performing our identities that we’ve lost the ability to revise our thinking. It’s tiring. And it’s stagnating us.

You see it in culture, in politics, in everyday conversations. People don’t talk to win understanding anymore, they talk to stay on brand.

I’ve done it too. I argued hard for Brexit. Believed in it. Spoke up for it. Framed it as independence, as a chance to reimagine things, to step away from bloated bureaucracy and do things differently. I meant it. I still think the instincts weren’t all wrong.

But the outcome? Messy. Fragmented. Slower than promised. And ultimately, let’s be honest, not the reset we sold ourselves. The deals didn’t arrive. The country didn’t come together. The optimism curdled into something else. That was hard to admit. Still is. But it’s true.

And what’s the alternative? Digging in forever? Pretending clarity is betrayal?

I’m not interested in performative U-turns. But I am interested in being the sort of person who can say, “I’ve reconsidered”. And hearing someone else say it, without pouncing.

You can blame social media for this shift if you want. The outrage economy. And yes, that’s part of it. But it goes deeper. We’ve built entire identities around never backing down but it’s not brave, it’s brittle.

Changing your mind is not a flaw. It’s a feature. Same as in design. Same as in writing. Same as in life. You revise because you care. You argue because you want to know more, not because you just want to be right.

We don’t need more hot takes. We need cooler heads. Conversations that can hold heat without boiling over.

So next time you’re mid-argument (online, in a pub, at home) ask yourself: Am I here to win? Or am I here to learn something?

Because only one of those has a destination and frankly, I’d like to get somewhere.

I used AI to assist with this post. Specifically to help generate the excerpt, tags, image prompt, and to refine the structure and rhythm of the piece in my own tone of voice.

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Jul 16 2025
work

The Pram in the Hallway: Why Distraction Isn’t the Enemy of UX Design

A softly lit hallway in a Scandinavian home with pale oak flooring and unvarnished wooden bannisters. A black Thule Urban Glide 2 buggy is positioned near the stairs, slightly in the way but undisturbed. On the floor lie a single child’s beige shoe and an open picture book. A wool jumper is draped casually over the bannister. The walls are off-white, and natural morning light fills the space. The scene feels unstyled and honest, capturing the quiet residue of family life.

This is the third in an accidental series of essays about design, constraint, and real life. The first explored ownership and editing, the second mapped those principles onto systems thinking. This one’s about the myth of the uninterrupted workspace, and what raising small humans has taught me about creative process, product integrity, and emotional design.

Last week I was catching up on some unplayed podcasts and heard Marina and Richard mention the Cyril Connolly line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” It’s a tidy little number but, like a lot of pithy mid-century takes, it doesn’t hold up brilliantly under daylight. So, as I continue to navigate our Thule buggy at the foot of the stairs, I thought I’d take a 2025 view.

It’s not just the casual misogyny (though yes, there’s that). It’s the deeper implication: that creativity requires retreat. That meaningful work, especially in design, happens at hushed desks; free of crumbs, notifications, or anyone yelling “Shoooooesies.”

This idea still carries weight in design and UX culture. You see it in reverent desk photos on Instagram and podcast guests earnestly waffling on about ‘flow state’, as though uninterrupted focus were the only path to quality. But what if that’s backwards? What if the mess of real life (parenting, caregiving, the emotional admin of being human) doesn’t dilute our creativity, but sharpens it?

Parenting compresses time like nothing else. Afternoons vanish. Tasks bleed into one another. The illusion of ‘ideal working conditions’ gets quietly shelved between snack prep and bedtime logistics. And yet, in those gaps, between drop-offs and Teams pings, on walks to see the cows, while fishing blueberries out of cardigans, some of the sharpest thinking gets done. Not in spite of distraction, but because of it.

Writers like Stephanie Merritt and Jude Rogers have spoken to this: how urgency and containment recalibrate creative priorities. You triage ideas fast. Half-baked ones don’t survive. The good ones clarify themselves under pressure.

In UX, we talk a lot about constraint as a catalyst. Creativity thrives on boundaries. But we rarely apply that logic to ourselves. Parenthood doesn’t just add constraints, it shifts your perspective. You’re no longer thinking about the user. You’re living with one. Or two. One tantrumming in the hallway, the other arguing about their Prep.

Design culture still clings to the myth of the monastic workspace: noise-cancelling headphones, immaculate desk setups, flow-state rituals. As though life must be suspended for work to begin. But most of the things we design are for people whose lives don’t pause. Parents in mid-tantrum. Carers juggling logistics. People buying insurance, ordering groceries, trying to rebook a dentist while coaxing a child (back) into trousers.

We design for frictionless experience, yet fetishise workflows that rely on silence. On having both hands free and the truth is: proximity to real life doesn’t dilute our design work. It deepens it.

You stop wasting time on polish and start noticing what actually matters. You develop an emotional radar: spotting friction, pre-empting dead ends, sensing what might quietly delight (or indeed quietly break) someone. And as I wrote recently, perfection has become a tell. In a world of generative smoothness, what we trust is the textured, the slightly improvised, the things made while someone was also making lunch.

Most importantly, you stop designing for personas. You start designing for real humans, chaotic, distracted, interrupted. The same kind of people we talked about when designing for enough. The kind who don’t need more features. They need clarity. Mercy. A digital space that behaves well under pressure.

Creativity and caregiving aren’t in conflict. In fact, it’s often caregiving that teaches us how to notice. To prioritise. To mean it.

This piece was edited with the help of AI, to shape rhythm, reference tone, and trim the fat. The excerpt, tagging and image were the result of carefully considered AI prompts. The words and arguments are mine. The tempo is deliberate. The polish is, therefore, human.

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Jul 02 2025
work

The Doughnut Is the Point

A pale Scandinavian hallway with a single raincoat hanging and boots below, lit by soft daylight. Calm and quietly intentional.

There’s a jacket hanging by the door in my house that I haven’t cleaned in two winters. A Stutterheim. Patina-stained cotton lining, scuffed hems, smells faintly of trains home. It’s not there for effect. It’s there because it does the job, and does it well. Keeps me dry, holds its own in a cold wind, and feels like continuity. Like something I’d pass on.

I think about that jacket sometimes when I work on digital products.

Because that jacket belongs in the doughnut. Not the jam-filled kind, the one drawn up by economist Kate Raworth. A model for living that rejects the old story of perpetual growth. (Aside: I came across Kate after listening to her talking with Wendell Berry on an old Start The Week. I’d gone on a recommendation from a friend to listen to Wendell Berry but it was Kate’s words which stood out).

In her diagram, the inner ring marks the essentials everyone should have access to: housing, education, dignity. The outer ring is the ecological ceiling: carbon, biodiversity, planetary boundaries. The goal is to stay in the middle. A safe and just space for humanity. Not too little. Not too much.

If that sounds like the Swedish concept of lagom, it is, except Raworth turns the cultural instinct into an economic framework. Lagom is what you feel in a table spread done right. The doughnut is how you design a city, or a system, to honour that logic at scale.

I like that the analogy might be in the Scandi larder: leftovers, carefully labelled. No waste, no lack. Just enough. The doughnut was already there, sitting quietly behind the knäckebröd.

And it maps cleanly onto UX.

The inner ring is what users genuinely need: clarity, trust, human-scale interaction. The outer ring is where the harm begins: deceptive patterns, compulsive loops, the kind of design that counts your seconds, not your needs. The good space, the space between, is where most digital products ought to live. Few do.

I’ve sat in rooms where product success was measured in taps and minutes. “More engagement,” someone would say, as the design team quietly recalibrated the interface to make it just sticky enough. I once worked on a platform where the proudest achievement was a spike in repeat logins. But when you zoomed out, those logins weren’t signs of confidence, they were symptoms of anxiety. People checking their accounts too often, not because the experience was smooth, but because the world wasn’t.

The real win would’ve been a design so clear, so calmly informative, so self-contained that users didn’t feel the need to check at all. But that wouldn’t have shown up on the dashboard. So we built noise instead. Goodhart’s Law anyone?

Doughnut thinking asks: what if we stopped designing for addiction and started designing for enough?

That principle runs through how I live. I’m not a minimalist, but I edit constantly. I favour things with integrity, materials that soften over time, ceramics that stack properly, garden tools that can be sharpened and passed on. When I write, I do so in iA Writer not because it’s clever, but because it clears the room. No distractions. Just text, gently weighted. A space with boundaries. A space that respects my focus. The writing comes better that way, less like performance, more like sorting the drawers in your head.

Same goes for the shelves at home. They hold only what earns its place. Books we’ve read. Things we actually use. Jackets that walk. Nothing there for the feed. Just our curated, persistent things.

Raworth talks about moving from extractive to regenerative economies. I think homes can be regenerative too, giving back emotionally, energetically, even ecologically, if you can. They absorb chaos. Offer rhythm. Ask less from you over time.

What does that actually look like?

There are just enough chairs for the family and the odd visitor. You can find a corkscrew without rummaging. There’s PIR lighting that flicks on as you walk from the landing to the bathroom at night. The house soaks up the mess. Fewer decisions when you’re tired. You can sit down without having to clear a pile of crap off the sofa. You can find your bloody keys.

It offers rhythm because your day moves more smoothly. And it asks less of you because it doesn’t make you work just to function.

My old boss used to moan that he couldn’t do a simple task at home because, to do that, he first had to find the tool. To find the tool, he had to get into the garage. He couldn’t get into the garage because the door was jammed. And on it went. That’s the opposite of regenerative. That’s a house that’s extracting energy from you just to stand still.

I wrote recently about the psychology of our stuff—the emotional residue it carries, the complexity it adds, the space it quietly swallows. The art of owning less isn’t about minimalism. It’s about clarity. About asking not ‘is this useful?’ but ‘is this mine to carry?’ That same lens applies here. Whether it’s a shelf, a digital feature, or a mental habit, we need to ask: is this giving something back? Or is it just squatting in the system?

And if that principle holds for homes, it can hold for digital spaces too. Interfaces, when well-designed, have the same potential, not just to serve, but to settle. To restore a little order. To give back time, attention, clarity. The question in both cases is not just what they contain – but how they behave when no one’s watching. Do they hold their shape under pressure? Or do they reveal they were only ever designed for the demo?

That’s what I try to bring into my UX work. Not scale for its own sake, but structure. Not novelty, but fidelity. In one recent project, we reduced a sprawling mass of order summary calculations by half. It had grown lopsided: multiple totals, stacked qualifiers, contradictory line logic. It looked thorough but made people pause. Double-check. Drop off.

We didn’t cut because someone asked us to. We cut because the excess wasn’t helping anyone. The business didn’t love it at first, there was concern we’d sacrificed transparency. But the users did. Completion held. Conversion held. No one missed the clutter.

You don’t need to call it Doughnut Economics. You don’t even need the diagram. Just ask: is this too much, or just enough? Is it serving someone, or keeping them circling?

I’m learning the same rules apply emotionally. The inner ring is what I need to function: rhythm, ritual, some quiet between the noisy pulses of family life. The outer ring is burnout, distraction, the endless need to ‘improve’. If I stay within those boundaries, wake early, behave deliberately, write when the coffee’s still hot – I do better work. I’m a steadier father. Less reactive. More intact.

We’ve built systems that confuse excess for success. But maybe the most humane thing we can do now is not build something. Or build something simpler. Or design the thing so well it doesn’t need us anymore.

Like the coat. You don’t notice it most days. But when the rain starts, you’re glad it’s there. And when you finally pass it on, it still fits someone else.

This piece was refined using AI. I used it to generate the image prompt, the tags, the excerpt, and to help sub-edit the copy while keeping my tone intact. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine. The tools just cleared the room.

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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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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 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 17 2025
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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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