Tag Archives: user experience

Feb 11 2026
work

Beyond the Meme: A High-Fidelity Defence of the Ferrari Luce

I took my time (!) before I posted my wildly popular critique of the rail clock, but the noise around Jony Ive’s work on the Ferrari Luce interior is so loud and so utterly ignorant and misinformed that I couldn’t let it slide without getting my just-off-the-boil take on it.

The short story is that Ive’s LoveFrom team, with Marc Newson (more on him later) collaborated with Ferrari to produce the cockpit for the new and first full EV from the marque, the Luce.

I watched a long video that walked through the glorious little details, and I confess I was seriously impressed. But reading other people’s postings all over our favourite ‘professional’ social media, I simply couldn’t reconcile their takes with what I was seeing. Of course, much of it was ‘iPhone on wheels!’ ‘Lazy Jony just repeats himself’, some of it was the ‘not Ferrari’ commentary, from people who even plainly stated they were not Ferrari owners, nor ever likely to be. This criticism is for the birds; it’s as shallow as a puddle and, worse still, it ignores the brief.

The purpose of LoveFrom’s work here was interaction architecture first, styling taste second. Form followed function.

Photo Credit Jordon Golson

Let’s think about the context within which Ferrari is operating. This is their first full EV. A product which by its nature will be shorn of the usual mechanical theatre: the sound of the engine, the vibration, the drama of the gearbox. To this, the answer from Ferrari’s competitors and the sector in general has been to ‘tech it up’ with drama replaced by screens. Ive et al. sought to question “What replaces visceral connection in an electric Ferrari?” Very Emotional Design of them, I’d say. This is a challenge grounded in reality.

The stated principle is that an electric powertrain does not need to be represented in a fully digital interface. Connecting physicality to this electric vehicle is an intentional design move. It’s been at least a four and a half year exercise with Ferrari and LoveFrom, certainly not a quick styling pass. Golson reports that before they drew a single line, they spent over six months on research and produced four books covering philosophy, design history, Ferrari’s cultural meaning, human attention plus physical interaction. Ignorant of this, clowns on LinkedIn confidently assert that “they don’t get the brand”. Presumably, their Miro mood boards do a better job. Benedetto Vigna is quoted as still reading those books, and that they have forced Ferrari to re-examine why things were done a certain way – a specific example being a discussion about steering wheel spoke angles that drove them back to test drivers. That’s quite a rare admission: research artefacts being used internally as a continuing design governance tool, not a theatre prop. Flavio Manzoni, Ferrari’s Chief Designer, gave LoveFrom autonomy for the first months; at the six-month mark after the “first handshake” they returned with a cohesive proposal across exterior, interior, and UX, and it was described as “very disruptive.”

Let’s be clear too that Jony is a car man. He owns a Europa (from which the Nardi steering wheel inspiration came) Newson too, both of them demonstrate they have serious literacy in automotive. They have instrument and horological mentalities. They are obsessed with materials and process. Working together on this skewers both the idea that this was “Ive doing iPhone again” and that this is not for drivers.

There are multiple areas in this cockpit which show considerable attention to detail that bridge the historic innovation with the new sophisticated precision and digitalisation of objects. The three-spoke heritage steering wheel with integrated force-sensitive buttons and switchgear, the moving binnacle, a multi-layered OLED cluster with convex lenses, an adaptive multigraph with independent aluminium hands, the glass key and magnetic dock. Of course, it will run CarPlay (not everyone does), though not, it appears, CarPlay Ultra.

These are matters of real substance and not a simple case of ‘putting buttons back’ in the driver’s reach. LoveFrom have treated each part as an object in its own right, and while the “buttons are back” message is a neat meme, it simplifies the human factors win that when your hand is reaching, having a physical datum that allows you to locate and operate a control is unbeatable and safe.

Photo credit: Ferrari/LoveFrom

Personally, the most naive and juvenile critiques are those that frame Jony’s work here as repetitive, and optimisation led, and both are absurd for different reasons. Firstly, repetition is not a negative when one considers that this is about principles, not a signature style. LoveFrom under Ive is in demand for the former, not the latter. You know when you hire Ive (and to be clear, he can choose who he wants to work with) that you are going to be working with someone that’s going to abstract this design problem to an atomic level and do so with a human-centred approach, then render it with the most exquisite sense of object and materiality. That he chooses to do this with aluminium, glass, clean geometry, and reduction is much the same as how any artist chooses their palette.

To further insist that this is optimisation and not creativity is then to take the most narrow definition of creativity as if optimisation is not a most vital part of creativity and especially in the context of automotive where frankly the last decade has shown anything but: the irony that as cockpits got simpler with fewer or bigger screens that our cognitive load soared and even the regulators got windy about what this meant for safety.

Perhaps just as naive was the assumption that the Ferrari model had been lost along the way as the project moved into the reality of production and execution. LoveFrom undertook the lion’s share of the design, and as San Francisco took on the design and coding, it was left to the Italians to engineer and driver test, along with the product development. A popular view is that this has somehow holed Ferrari’s ‘personalisation’ upsell model, as if this is what keeps the execs up at night in Maranello. It’s not. They sell arguably the world’s most desirable supercars; this cockpit is absolutely in this mould. If a customer wants personal stitching, a tweak here, a tweak there, of course, they’ll still get it, but this interior will, like the engine, be based around Ferrari’s view of perfection. The customer’s bespoke layer is on top of that.

Photo Credit: LoveFrom / Ferrari

Naturally, the criticism can be levelled at me that I am fanboying over those involved and, whilst I admire Ive, I’m not without my beliefs that he’s made some mistakes in the past. It’s also fair to say that I wonder how much his view of this project was ever robustly challenged vs. being waved through. Did the research depth give it such credibility and momentum that it was a foregone conclusion? PRNDL notes both Ive/Newson and Manzoni are quoted as saying it barely changed from that initial proposal, changes were more about proportion and ergonomics than fundamental rethinking.

I question too the manner in which these proposals can scale, age and remain serviceable.

Jewellery-grade interior components are lovely on a plinth and less charming after 30,000 miles, UV exposure, expensive moisturisers, and a few winters of grime. Whether parts can be repaired and replaced without becoming a boutique restoration exercise is a real question. The car being ultra-high-net-worth doesn’t remove the problem; it changes who pays for it and how quietly they complain.

The reveal was notable for being a left hand drive setup. OEMs have got accustomed to reducing physical mirroring of cabin elements, harnesses. No doubt screens and disappearing buttons have assisted them in delegating this to a software switch. Given how driver-centred some elements are in LoveFrom’s design, it’s an open question whether Ferrari will fully mirror the high-fidelity interactions for UK/Japan/Australia, or accept a ‘good enough’ conversion. This could be the strongest tell as to whether Ive and Newson’s principles can withstand operational and financial realities. If they mirror these interactions properly, it strengthens the whole “human-centred, truthful function” argument. If they don’t, it exposes it as geographically parochial.

Can this design language be reproduced across future models? It took LoveFrom five years to get this far with Luce, and they’re unlikely to be on retainer to roll out variants for other products down the line. I’m sure Newson and Ive have left behind a whole bunch of principles and specifications but, without the coach on the field, I wonder how successful the in-house teams will be at sticking to the playbook, especially as once the forcefield of Ive and co. has left, the bean counters and manufacturing value-engineers begin to circle.

It’s fair to dislike the look. It might even be funny to meme its similarity to a Fisher-Price wheel, but lazy shorthand isn’t grown up criticism, and I think it’s hugely important to celebrate a process where design has mattered deeply to everyone involved and that has been executed with real care for the end user and the craft or materials, manufacturing and objects. Ultimately, this has been a serious attempt to solve a product transition problem, to invigorate the brand for a new epoch in electrification, and the real test will be on the roads and the tracks, not in screenshots.

AI: I used Ai to sub-edit, do a bit of fact-checking and then generate the tag list and excerpts. That’s it.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Feb 05 2026
work

Behavioural Science Comes of Age

I remember when behavioural economics was the clever bloke at the party. Late 2000s. Slightly rumpled like its genial flag bearer, Rory Sutherland1. Saying interesting things while everyone else was still banging on about best practice.

And as a one-time Psych grad, I swallowed it whole. Loss aversion, scarcity, social proof, that small but seemingly ever-growing catalogue of cognitive quirks that explained why perfectly rational adults turned into anxious pigeons the moment you asked them to choose between two identical hotel rooms.

Then I did what most of us early adopters did. I took those ideas and applied them to all the booking flows, creating a second layer of UX and UI polish. “Only two rooms left!” “Five people are looking at this right now.” Little interruptions multiply in the corners and the shouty bits of the checkout. I told myself it was science. But mostly it was just persuasion dressed up in pseudo-academic language.

And the internet did what the internet does. It copied and pasted the same mechanics and ran them into the ground. More fake scarcity. Countdown timers. Urgency theatre. Some of this was just cheeky pestering, the digital equivalent of a shop assistant hovering, but plenty of it crossed a line into deception: designed to manufacture urgency, hide real costs, or make ‘no’ harder than it has any right to be. That was a dishonesty that’s technically deniable but emotionally obvious. Users learned the patterns, practitioners got squeamish. Behavioural’ became shorthand for ‘manipulative’, and anything adjacent to nudging got lumped in with deceptive patterns, née dark patterns2, for reasons that still feel faintly performative. Sometimes these labels were applied fairly, sometimes lazily.

Meanwhile, Rory didn’t really change. The medium did. His style, heavily anecdotal, contrarian, the world slightly upside down, really suited the algorithmic churn of social feeds far better than it ever suited a conference room. And irritatingly, he’s still right about a few core things: humans are not neat rationalists; context does more work than features; and the “obvious” fix is often the wrong one.

So you end up with this weird stalemate. Practitioners don’t want to touch behavioural ideas because the last decade trained them to associate them with cheap tricks. Users don’t trust anything that looks like psychological leverage. Theorists keep publishing, but the bridge from theory to design practice is messy and full of bad incentives.

So, herewith the awkward admission: I still use behavioural thinking constantly. I just don’t tend to label it. If you’ve worked on complex journeys, you can’t avoid it. Sequencing, defaults, framing, expectation-setting, reassurance, when to show less rather than more, darling, that’s all behavioural design, whether you call it that or pretend you’re simply reducing friction.

Ergo, the real problem is where in the journey it got applied. When behavioural economics becomes synonymous with end-of-funnel UI hacks, it’ll always feel grubby, because there it’s operating at the point of maximum vulnerability and minimum patience. To the numbers-fixated, that’s exactly where the temptation to push is strongest, and where user suspicion is most justified.

I think we should want to bridge the 15-year gap to the bigger ideas, and the way back is boring, structural, and I hope therefore, credible.

Firstly, move it upstream. Use behavioural insight to shape the service and the whole journey, not just the microcopy. If the product is confusing, no amount of “Only 2 left” pop-ups will rescue it. If the decision is overloaded with complexity, the win is reducing the choice set, clarifying trade-offs, and placing reassurance where anxiety is highest. That’s judgement, not sleight of hand.

Take the UK’s driving-test booking fiasco: on paper it’s “too much demand”, but behaviourally it’s an uncertainty machine that turns normal people into refresh-addicts and slot-hoarders, so it’s hardly surprising when a grey market blooms. When a system is opaque, time-bound, and framed as a win/lose binary (a slot exists or it doesn’t), you don’t get compliant queueing; you get panic economics: people book anything anywhere “just in case”, cling to dates they’re not ready for (because letting go feels like falling off a cliff), and outsource hope to various apps and bots.

The upstream fix is to stop rewarding speed and start redesigning allocation: move away from pure first-come-first-served and into a batch or lottery mechanism that collects requests over a window and allocates oversubscribed slots randomly, with cancellations rolling into the next batch so you can’t transfer a slot by cancelling and instantly rebooking under someone else’s name. Theory and lab evidence from market-design work on appointment booking shows this structure makes scalping unprofitable because speed stops being the advantage. Add a small, refundable booking deposit (say £5–£10, returned on attendance or timely cancellation) to put a bit of skin in the game without pricing people out, and you’ve damped the casual “book three and see what happens” behaviour that also fuels the chaos. Then fold in DVSA’s change limit (two changes per booking, including swaps) and the restriction on moving test centres, but actually explain these rules inside the journey so learners don’t experience it as punitive post-facto. Once people can predict the system and trust that releasing a slot doesn’t reset their entire life, the gaming collapses under its own boredom; you don’t need scarcity theatre when you’ve fixed the incentives. See, no need to go crazy in Figma.

Secondly, be explicit about ethics. Not an intention or vibes, the actual lines: what behaviour you’re trying to encourage, who benefits, and what the failure state looks like if it works too well. If you can’t say “this benefits the user” without shifting awkwardly in your Herman-Miller, you’ve learned something useful.

Thirdly: replace the anecdote-as-proof culture with evidence that doesn’t insult anyone (this one’s the hardest for me, I love an anecdote). Small experiments tied to meaningful outcomes. Clear reporting. A willingness to bin interventions that, whilst driving short-term conversion, corrode customer trust. Most teams simply need permission to run proper tests and speak plainly about consequences.

Of course, we never stopped shaping behaviour, we simply got self-conscious about admitting we did. The route back is behavioural thinking with its assumptions stated, its trade-offs owned, and its use grounded in real user conditions; people don’t need to be told “nudges are good” in 2026.

My thanks to Tom Harle for the original provocation.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

  1. To be clear: Rory didn’t originate behavioural economics. He became its most visible adland interpreter, a jolly and witty TED-friendly translator of work done by Kahneman/Tversky, Thaler, Sunstein, and others. ↩︎
  2. Dark Patterns were coined by Harry Brignull, who gets too little credit for it. ↩︎

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jan 28 2026
work

From Idea to Spaghetti: The UX Gap Killing Home 3D Printing

Here we are, a month on from Christmas, and a new 3D printer hums away in our home office. Our 11-year-old wants to print a simple fidget toy to show his mates on the school bus. Small object, quick reward, low stakes. The marketing.and the social shorts imply this is exactly what the printer’s for.

The reality is different. The printer works, of course it does, and the model exists. But the user has hit a wall.

That wall is the missing middle between “I want this object” and “here’s how to manufacture it.”

Consumer 3D printing hardware has improved fast: cheaper, sturdier, more reliable. Model libraries are abundant. The breakdown happens in the software, specifically the slicer. This is the gateway to printing, and it’s built like an expert tool.

The mismatch is structural. A beginner wants a reliable outcome; the slicer demands process control. More specifically:

  1. Language doesn’t map to intent
    Slicers expose machine concepts and internal mechanics. They describe parameters you can change: retraction distance, Z-offset, support interface, seam position. These settings are real, and they matter. But they’re barely framed around what the user is trying to achieve.

Beginners don’t think, “I need to adjust my retraction.” They think, “Dad, why’s it suddenly all stringy?” They don’t think, “support roof.” They think, “Dad, how do I get this off without snapping it?”

When labels map to the machine rather than the outcome, users can’t predict consequences. They can only guess, or disappear down Google rabbit holes.

  1. Choice isn’t prioritised
    Most slicers present “available” and “appropriate” as equals. The result is a dense panel of options with weak hierarchy and next to zero guidance on what matters first.

It may be designed with the intention of empowerment and precision. In practice it lands as cognitive burden. For a novice, the implicit message is: if this print fails, it’s because you couldn’t figure out to configure it correctly.

  1. Feedback arrives too late
    3D printing has a slow loop. Prints take hours and failures often show up late, or worse, out of sight. The cost of learning is time, material, and patience. When you’re 11, with limited downtime in the week and busy weekends, the threshold for giving up is pitifully low.

When things go wrong, the slicer rarely helps you diagnose or recover. And when the workflow itself is fragmented, ie. slice on one device, move a memory card, print on another, the feedback loop gets even weaker. People end up in forums, LLMs, and YouTube. There they meet the expertise gap: explanations (from well meaning nerds) built on mental models they don’t yet have.

A home office with a desktop 3D printer mid-print, tangled filament on the build plate, and a child sitting nearby watching the failed print in silence.

The net result is the domestic print system collapsing like a soufflé. The child loses interest because the reward is delayed and fragile. The parent becomes a reluctant technician, spending evenings debugging through YouTube and ChatGPT rather than, y’know, making. Eventually the printer becomes background noise, a source of family tension and, ultimately, a dust collector.

None of this requires better hardware. It requires different system behaviour.

A simpler learning curve would start with intent, not settings:

Does this need to be strong, or just look good?
Is speed important, or a reliable outcome?
Are you OK with supports, or should we minimise them?

Translate those answers into parameters quietly, and surface the trade-offs in plain language:

Cleaner finish = harder support removal.
Faster print = higher failure risk.
Stronger part = longer print time.

Then, add risk detection and guided recovery through intelligent prompting:

“First layer contact looks low for this material; this often fails. Increase it?”
“Stringing likely from this preview; reduce temperature or increase retraction?”

If a print fails, treat it as evidence, not user incompetence:

“It didn’t stick” – ie. adhesion failure – propose bed/temp/first-layer changes.
“The layers are in the wrong place” – ie. layer shift – propose speed/acceleration/belt checks.
“The supports damaged the print” – propose support style/density/contact changes.

That’s the missing middle: decision support, progressive disclosure, supervised recovery. As ever, the software work is not adding more controls to the slicer UI. It’s helping novices get to a successful print without turning a weekend hobby into an apprenticeship.

At this point someone will say, “Plenty of crafts are hard.” True. But many have immediate feedback, you see the mess you make with a brushstroke straight away. Others take longer, ceramics, for example, but typically a coach is alongside you, and you start small.

With 3D printing, the existence of model libraries and exciting videos creates a false sense of readiness. You’re effectively handed the Mona Lisa in week two and told to have at it. Or you’re asked to kick a 40-yard conversion in a stiff breeze, with no useful feedback as to why it fell short or why she’s got a wonky eye.

Until slicers take responsibility for the learning curve they impose, home 3D printing will keep making the same breezy social media promise that “anyone can make!” and delivering the same experience: anyone can… eventually.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, image generation, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 09 2025
1 Comment
work

Christmas Shopping Observations, Part Two

What happens when the system finally learns to listen.

Last week in Part One, I described why Christmas shopping feels hostile, why even the most basic purchase turns into a strange performance of archaeology, jargon and filters masquerading as understanding. The real problem wasn’t the products but the machinery. The fiction that a PLP grid is somehow an acceptable translation layer between human intent and retail stock.

This week is the other half of the story: the thing that replaces it.

Because the truth is, we’ve spent twenty years designing for systems that never deserved that level of obedience. We pretended the homepage was the grand entrance, the digital lobby with its scented candles and seasonal banners. We treated it like the flagship store: polished, high-stakes, endlessly debated at internal stakeholder meetings. Meanwhile, almost no one arrived through it, or if they did, they were there for a split second. Most people dropped in sideways, via Google, a WhatsApp link, an email, or a moment of panic at 11 p.m. The homepage was the UX and UI theatre we performed for ourselves and our clients.

Agentic systems make that fiction impossible to sustain. They don’t care about your reception desk and your neatly prioritised way finding. They don’t even see it. They take what you mean, “something thoughtful, about forty quid, she hates clutter, nothing scented” and drop you straight into the one, tiny corner of the site where the decision will live or die. A place that, inconveniently, most retailers still treat as a functional afterthought: the product-detail page.

A minimalist Scandinavian study at dusk, softly lit by a small desk lamp. Snow falls outside the window. On the wooden desk sits an open laptop showing a clean product page with only a few curated gift suggestions. A small, neatly wrapped present rests beside it, suggesting a calm, intentional shopping experience rather than the usual frantic grid of options.
A glimpse of the future: no endless grids, no filters, no festive panic, just a system that actually starts where you are.

The PDP becomes the real front door because in an agentic journey the start isn’t a place, it’s a sentence.

This is where that old inventory-obsessed model buckles. Catalogue commerce was built on the premise that customers begin at the top and drill down. Agentic commerce begins at intent and works sideways. The sitemap is your fiction, not theirs. The system no longer needs your categories. It needs your clarity.

Be under no illusion though, this ain’t easy. This only works if the agent can explain itself. When a system gives you two options instead of two hundred, you need to know why. Not academically, emotionally. Why this jacket and not the other one? Why this feels like her. Why this fits your mental model of who she is. The explanation is the reassurance loop. Without it, the whole thing becomes another opaque machine; efficient, yes, but untrustworthy in all the ways that matter.

And then there’s the serendipity problem. Efficiency is addictive, but clinical. If we strip out every detour, we drain the pleasure along with the friction. The answer isn’t a return to the grid; it’s controlled looseness. A suggestion or two just off-axis. Something adjacent. Not twelve rows of “you may also like” tat, just enough to keep the experience human. Discovery without the search-and-filter trauma.

None of this is a theoretical exercise for me. I genuinely spent years trying to push natural-language intent into car retail at JLR, long before the technology was mature enough to meet the ambition. I saw how people really shopped: not by wheelbase or trim code, but by anxiety, context, and use-case. “Capable in the mud.” “Seven-seater that doesn’t look ridiculous.” “Can get all the family crap in it for Cornwall, without a roof box.” All perfectly rational human requests – treated as nonsense by the old machinery. The ideas weren’t wrong. They were simply early.

Now the technology has finally caught up. And with it, the entire structure of how we design retail subtly shifts. From catalogue to conversation. From homepage theatre to product truth. From filters to language. From the warehouse to the person.

None of this saves Christmas, of course. But it does save us from the annual pantomime of pretending that people enjoy buying gifts and products more generally through a system that refuses to understand how they think or consume any of the deeper context that matters. The future isn’t more choice. It isn’t more filters. It isn’t even more intelligence.

It’s fit.

Fit between intent and suggestion.
Fit between the context you’re in and the thing you’re shown.
Fit between the human messiness of December and the machinery that finally stops treating you like a clumsy clinical user story.

Christmas shopping isn’t a test of skill. It’s a test of whether the system knows how to listen. And for the first time in a long time, it might.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, the post excerpt, image generation and some sub-editing. Ideas, references, and anecdotes are all mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 04 2025
work

Christmas Shopping Observations, Part One.

Why Christmas shopping feels hostile, and why ‘catalogue commerce’ makes it worse.

December always brings the same rituals. Sitting in front of a website with a sense of mild dread. The kind one reserves for using a train station toilet, or getting into the coffee queue after parkrun. The intended tasks isn’t difficult or unpleasant in theory, just buy something thoughtful for someone you care about, but Christmas shopping always manages to feel like cognitive trench warfare. Retailers would have it as “the season of gifting”, the rest of us call it, problem solving with a shot glass of Baileys.

So, for some context, let’s go back to a couple of of weeks ago when I was trying to get myself a replacement down jacket. A bit like when I was trying to get Jo some new Asics, this wasn’t an extravagant task. It wasn’t even particularly interesting. Just a bit of a like-for-like replacement for a much-abused Rab. All I needed was a sub expedition-grade jacket. Black, simple. I know my sizes, I know I needed about 850+ fill power and I was ambivalent about much else. I had a shortlist of brands I like. But dozens of models, filters that are inconsistent across brands, categories that mean nothing to people outside of the industry and a product hierarchy that is the baffling output of a Content Management System (CMS) that’s been operated by a chimp1.

I wasn’t searching as much as performing archaeology. Sifting through layers and brushing off the irrelevant collateral.

A narrow, snow-dusted street in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan on a muted December afternoon. Warm ochre buildings rise on either side as bundled-up shoppers walk away from the camera. Soft shop-window lights and minimalist Christmas displays glow against the cold, creating a calm, human-scale contrast to typical frantic holiday retail.
The Christmas shopping we think we’re doing, before the dropdown menus, filters, and “Gifts for Her” pages slap us back into reality.


In design terms this is what we might call the Gulf of Execution, or as my colleagues and I at Dare liked to call the Experience Gap: the distance between what a human means and what the system is willing to accept. My intent was simple – “warm, minimalist natural down for standing around on platforms, by sports pitches and walking to the pub” – but the interface insisted I drop that down into a dialect of drop-down, checkboxes and jargonist euphemisms. A human request translated into machine-and-catalogue syntax. Little wonder the whole thing feels like a joyless chore.

And Christmas retail only amplifies this.

Every major high street site trots out its annual performance of “Gifts for Her”, a festival of generic filler: candles, scarves, bath sets, socks. The occasional novelty gift set embossed with typography that looks like it was designed at 4pm on a Friday whilst sucking on a fetid vape. It’s all indexed by price bands: “Under £10”, “Under £50”, “Over £250” – as if women are primarily sorted by budget code rather than, say, personality or taste.

No mother wants another hand cream selection.
No thirty-something woman wants coordinated gloves.
No partner wants to receive something that clearly began life as a procurement exercise.

The whole structure is built around the warehouse, not the person. It’s inventory logic masquerading as emotional intelligence. And the moment you notice it, you can’t unsee it: most “gift guides” reveal almost nothing about the recipient and everything about that the retailer wants to shift.

This is the failure baked-into catalogue commerce. It doesn’t matter which brand you pick; the underlying assumption is the same: that human desire can be expressed through filters, and that personality cab be captured in a category label. It’s tidy, rational and optimised. It’s also completely blind as to what makes shopping human in the first place.

Because real gift-buying begins long before the visit to the website. It begins in the cluttered contradictory emotional territory that sits just outside the browser window: What does she already have? What does she love? What has she told me about? What will she pretend to love? What feels thoughtless? What feels too much? What feels like you didn’t think at all (Hint: anything at Boots that comes in a gift box)? Retail ignores all of this and forces you straight into the grid (what we call the Product Listings Page (PLP) ), as if the process were orderly. Spoiler alert, it never is.

This is why Christmas shopping feels hostile. It’s not that the options are universal bad, just that the interface tries to convince you it understands and reflects your mental model when it plainly does not. Handing you a hundred variants of the same filler and expecting conversion gratitude. Somewhere between the filters, the categories and the bath sets you sense the truth: this isn’t built for you. It’s built to organise the warehouse.

Don’t worry though, there’s a better story coming, and the technology to enable it is finally here. But this isn’t the piece for solutions, it’s about naming the problem plainly as it is and without the retail gloss.

Next time I’ll get on to the other half of the picture: the system-level shift that’s going to quietly rewrite the entire experience from how we search to where the journey really begins.

For now its enough to acknowledge the obvious: Christmas shopping isn’t about solving and indecisiveness problem for dumb consumers. It’s a broken model designed around systems that are not built to reflect how people think, feel or choose, especially in December.

Part Two: How agentic solves this, and more.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and some very light sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

  1. Plot twist. I ended up with the Shackleton Ronne. I browsed online for weeks. I did huge amounts of research and comparison and then I went to the wonderful store on Piccadilly and spoke to a great sales assistant there who worked with me to ensure it was absolutely the right fit and will see me out for prob 5-10 years of use. ↩︎

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nov 02 2025
work

Time Returned, Time Resold

Rain-blurred motorway at dusk viewed through a windscreen; dashboard lights glow amber in an empty driver’s seat — a quiet image of autonomy and time unclaimed.
Autonomy promised freedom. Instead, it gave us metrics.

Every few years a new invention turns up promising to give us time back. The dishwasher did it, then the calendar app, now the self-driving car. Efficiency, they say, is liberation. But the minutes never come home. They’re quietly re-employed: answering messages that weren’t urgent until we saw them, scrolling through news we already half-read. We don’t get more time. It just comes back wearing a different outfit.

Design now speaks the intoxicating language of generosity. We’ll save you clicks. We’ll make it seamless. Lovely words, but they come with a tempo you didn’t choose. The system nudges, reminds, congratulates you on your streak. Even the oven chirps when it’s done pre-heating. Helpful, yes – in the way a personal trainer is helpful when all you wanted was a walk.

Efficiency was meant to hush the world, not make it chatter. Parcels update you mid-journey, cars suggest faster routes, TV apps interrupt the credits to make sure you don’t go off to bed just yet. You start to feel managed by your own apps and appliances. Is it me, or do they all sound slightly pleased with themselves?

Still, there is a deeper promise in all this autonomy. Because the best thing about a self-driving car isn’t speed, it’s permission. The choice to drive when you want to: for rhythm, for presence, for drivers like me who relish the satisfaction of line and camber, and to switch off when you don’t. The long crawl north to the Lakes. The dawn blast to the airport. The late-night, rain-spray-soaked slog home when you’d gladly hand over the wheel and let the motorway unspool while you exhale, watch the window-light flicker, maybe half-doze through an episode of something forgettable. Control should be optional, not constant.

That’s what the technology could be about: selective surrender or a quieter freedom. But for some unfathomable reason, the marketing and product design departments have decided autonomy is best packaged as constant optimisation. That means another dashboard app full of metrics and prompts and juanty reminders. We built cars clever enough to drive themselves, then gave them personalities that never stop talking.

Real luxury now isn’t speed but discretion: the right to decide how long something should take. To drive when you feel like driving. To look out of the window when you don’t. Technology can make both possible.

Convenience promised to return our hours, but mostly it’s taught us to account for them. Every minute feels spoken for. Perhaps the odd thing is how willingly we’ve agreed to it and the peculiar pleasure we take in shaving seconds off tasks we didn’t enjoy anyway.

Maybe the best thing a self-driving car could do is forget the ETA and let us forget, too.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Sep 25 2025
work

Luxury UX beyond veneer: structure as brand equity

Split illustration in muted tones: on the left, a sleek SUV fades into static on a computer configurator screen; on the right, a calm hotel lobby with warm wood panelling, guests moving easily, and luggage arriving without fuss. The contrast shows polish versus structure, with luxury defined by order and rhythm rather than surface gloss.
Luxury isn’t in the chrome or the marble, it’s in whether the flow holds together without a fuss.

Luxury brands spend fortunes on surface. The right serif typeface. The right depth of cream on a website background. The right stock gsm on the brochure. Product renders with depth of field and lighting artefacts. But luxury UX cannot stop at veneer. If the underlying structure is clumsy, if journeys collapse into confusion or friction, then no amount of polish will hold that illusion.

The truth is that structure itself carries brand equity. The way a digital product is architected, how steps are ordered, how rules are introduced, how decisions are simplified, does more to signal competence and care than a thousand pixels of perfected pack shots. At Jaguar Land Rover we learned that millions of pounds of glossy configurator rendering and photoshoots is wasted if the journey collapses under its own contradictions.

When veneer is not enough

Consider that car configurator (I know I’ve been there before). The surface details may be flawless: chrome toggles, cinematic photography and transitions, elegant typography. Yet if the underlying structure forces a prospective customer through contradictory options, backtracking, or endless reloads, the brand is weakened. The luxury dissolves. Instead of modernity, the prospect experiences muddle. Instead of trust, they feel doubt.

Luxury is clarity disguised as ease. It is the sense that someone has already edited the path, made the trade-offs, and left you with decisions that feel not just coherent but inevitable. That coherence is structural. It is information architecture, not simple brand varnish.

Structure as invisible luxury

In regulated sectors, be it finance, healthcare, mobility, the stakes are higher still. Here, the user must feel that the product knows where it is going. A well-structured flow reassures not only through compliance but through a designed rhythm: disclosure followed by choice, choice followed by confirmation. In finance, disclosure sequencing is as much brand equity as trust marks in the footer. At Aviva, I saw how form ordering and timing mattered more than any banner, ad or brand flourish: get it wrong and trust collapses, get it right and the entire flow feels humane.

    This isn’t just true for luxury. At parkrun, where we were engaged to think about participant and volunteer profiles, the brand moment wasn’t surface polish but whether participants could find a barcode or book a roster slot without friction. There are quieter sectors away from money and luxe, but the principle holds: structure carries the brand.

    Hospitality and the British lens

    Top-end hospitality has always understood that structure outlasts surface. A hotel lobby isn’t luxury because of materials and furnishings alone; it’s luxury because check-in is peaceful, calming, effortless, because luggage appears without fuss, because the guest never feels unwillingly abandoned. The choreography, the sequencing of service, is the brand. Digital is no different. Done well, it is hospitality by other means.

    And here, for me, Britishness adds something. Where continental, EMEA or American luxury can lean toward performance, grand gestures, overt pampering, British luxury often communicates through understatement. Polished restraint. A dry nod over a champagne cascade and a platter of Dubai chocolate. That sensibility, translated into UX, means editing with discipline: fewer options, quieter confirmations, a flow that carries the user forward without ever drawing attention to itself. Not austere, not joyless. Just less show, more order.

    Brand equity in restraint

    A luxury brand earns equity not just through what it offers, but through what it withholds. The best experiences show judgement in what not to display, what not to demand, where to pause. Luxury isn’t ensured by the liberal application of gloss. Sheen can be appropriated, copied, imitated overnight. What endures is structure: the edits, the sequencing, the courage to strip things back until only what matters remains.

    When the experience lands with this quiet integrity, the user may never notice the scaffolding beneath. But they will feel the brand in the unbroken rhythm of moving forward without friction. That is luxury UX beyond veneer, luxury as restraint, stewardship, clarity. A quiet moral order and the calm assurance that polish and structure belong together if the experience is to endure.

    AI: This piece was written by me. I used ChatGPT as a sub-editor to keep tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpt and image that accompanies it.

    Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Aug 19 2025
    socio-cultural, work

    Why UK Kids Can’t Have Bank Accounts Before Six – And Why That’s Silly

    A close-up, hyper-realistic photo shows a wooden piggy bank with a coin slot on its back and a coin partially inserted. The piggy bank is positioned next to a smartphone displaying a children's banking app with icons for savings goals and coin graphics. To the right of the phone is a neatly folded stack of pastel-colored baby clothes, including a small pair of knitted booties, with a Vinted parcel label and barcode clearly visible. The scene is illuminated by soft, natural light, creating a muted, editorial feel.

    Here’s a sentence that shouldn’t exist: our two-year-old has a savings pot inside her eleven-year-old brother’s bank account.

    Not because we’re trying to confuse HMRC or because we’ve discovered some fintech hack that’s too good to share. Simply because no UK bank will give her an account until she turns six, and when she does, it will still be hamstrung by limits that assume every child’s money arrives in neat, predictable chunks from a parent’s allowance.

    The set-up is simple. We sell her old clothes and toys on Vinted. It’s honest, traceable money, every transaction recorded by a platform that has its own anti–money laundering checks baked in. The items avoid landfill. The proceeds go to her future self. It’s the kind of wholesome circular economy PR departments love to posture about. And yet the only way to park that money somewhere with her name on it (sort of) is to create a ‘pot’ inside her brother’s Rooster account.

    This is not a problem the Financial Conduct Authority asked the banks to solve. There is no specific regulation that says under-sixes cannot have a bank account. This is a product design decision, dressed up in safeguarding logic. NatWest’s own Rooster service told me:

    “We’ve had to introduce limits, with these limits created and set at what we believe is a generous amount for a child’s pocket money app… We recommend that you make fewer larger top-ups in the month, and then boost the money over as often as you like.” Katie, 15.AUG.25

    The logic, if you squint, is that transaction caps stop laundering. But laundering what, exactly? In our case: a baby’s outgrown sleepsuits. The “10 loads a month” cap on Rooster is not cumulative-value–driven (the actual pound-limit is much higher). It’s a blunt instrument, applied as though fewer transactions automatically means less risk.

    In reality, this isn’t about AML at all. It’s about the convenience of enforcing one simple rule across the board rather than designing for the messy reality of modern family finances:

    • Parents with irregular incomes.
    • Blended households with multiple contributors.
    • Ad-hoc earnings from resale platforms.
    • Grandparents who send £5 here and there for birthdays or because they saw a cute jumper in M&S.

    Under the current design, the system doesn’t distinguish between proceeds from a second-hand pushchair and proceeds from illicit activity. The compliance blanket is thrown equally over both.

    The result: we’ve built a workaround. Her ‘earnings’ from Vinted go into his account, into her pot, under our management. One day, in about four years, we’ll withdraw the lot and hand it to her. Which is absurd, not least because we’ll have to move it in fewer than ten transactions to avoid tripping the same rules all over again.

    If we were serious about aligning banking with real life, we’d have:

    1. A from-birth, save-only account – visible in the parent’s banking app, locked against spending, able to receive small, traceable contributions from approved sources.
    2. Transaction rules shaped by value and source, not arbitrary counts.
    3. A seamless graduation path at age six to a junior current account with a card and spending controls.

    The point is not to hand toddlers contactless cards. It’s to start building the habits, and the visibility, early. Money in, money saved, money safe. The actual ‘banking’ part should be the least absurd bit of that equation.

    This piece was written and fact checked by me and then sub-edited with the assistance of AI. The image was rendered by Gemini and excerpt, ALT tag were AI generated.

    Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Aug 13 2025
    work

    You’ve Booked the Flight. Now Feed the Cat.

    Or, What a Ryanair journey map taught me about real UX.

    There’s a type of interface that shows up on Dribbble every few months: flight check-ins, boarding passes, baggage-tracking dashboards. Always slick. Always serene. The UI equivalent of cucumber water.

    Most of them start at Choose your seat and end at Enjoy your flight. Which is tidy. But also nonsense.

    A few years ago, I worked on a project for Ryanair. I drew out a journey map (with pens, natch), not the polished, stakeholder-pleasing kind, but something closer to the real emotional terrain of travel. One that began well before the confirmation screen. One that started, in fact, with the cat.

    Because booking a flight isn’t a clean beginning. By the time anyone taps “Book now,” they’ve already trawled five sites, tried to align half-term dates with the one cousin who replies to group chats, checked weather reports, and googled “Do I need a visa for Croatia?” even though they’re flying to Naples.

    Life admin, not travel ambition, is what usually kicks things off. That’s where the journey begins.

    The diagram traced everything from that fraught pre-booking stretch through to the post-trip hangover, highlighting the emotional and logistical clutter that most airline UX avoids. Not because it isn’t there, but because it’s messy. And mess doesn’t fit neatly into a product roadmap.

    There’s the bit after you book, when nothing much happens, except everything might. The vague unease when no one’s confirmed your seats. The passive-aggressive alert that “something has changed” in your itinerary, but you’re left to figure out what. The nervous rechecking of emails. The slow panic over cabin bag dimensions.

    Then comes the day itself. A spike in interaction. The printer runs out of ink. You’re stood at Departures at 6:30am trying to download Peppa Pig episodes with 4% battery and no signal. Your toddler’s hungry. Your partner’s tense. And you’re still wondering if you packed the Calpol.

    And yet… this is the brand moment. Not the glossy UI, not the neat API integration. Just this: the knot in your stomach, the uncharged phone, the boarding pass you can’t pull up without a connection.

    The map tried to capture that. Not to romanticise it, but to acknowledge it.

    Even on the return leg, the friction isn’t over. Passport queues. Lost luggage. The existential despair of a train replacement service. You get home, open a week’s worth of mail, find a parking fine, trip over a stray shoe from the hasty departure packing, and realise you didn’t leave anything for the cat-sitter.

    Most journey maps stop at wheels-up. Ours didn’t. Because experience doesn’t follow a clean arc. It loops, it stutters, it sags in the middle. Thoughtful UX understands that.

    A tired parent, dressed in a dark winter coat with a fur-lined hood, stands in a dimly lit Swedish airport baggage claim area late at night. They are looking down at their phone, which shows a 4% battery icon. To their left, a child sleeps soundly in a dark grey stroller. A large, dark suitcase tilts precariously next to the parent, appearing as though it might fall. In the background, an empty luggage carousel stretches out, with a few other suitcases scattered on it. Further back, blurred figures of other travelers are visible, and the warm glow of a vending machine can be seen on the far left. The overall atmosphere is one of exhaustion and quiet resignation.

    Of course, Ryanair won’t build an app that books your pet-sitter or packs plug adapters. But this kind of messy map reveals where the brand can quietly show up—not with a feature, but with timing, tone, and the rare dignity of being understood.

    Maybe that’s a 6-sheet in the departure lounge that says “Still cheaper than therapy.” Maybe it’s an email that clears, not clouds. Maybe it’s an in-seat comm that drops the marketing voice for once and just says: “Made it. Welcome back.”

    Even for Ryanair, in fact especially for Ryanair, those moments can build memory, trust, and repeat business. Because no one remembers the boarding pass. They remember how they felt when the wheels touched down, the keys were missing, and the cat looked at them with contempt.

    You’re not designing for delight. You’re designing for 4% battery, no signal, and a queue that won’t move. That’s where memory lives. And maybe loyalty too.

    AI disclosure: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, used strictly as an editorial and thinking partner. All ideas, edits, and final phrasing are mine. ALT text and tagging were also generated with AI support.

    Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Aug 10 2025
    socio-cultural, work

    The quiet panic of parenting in a digital world

    A moody, hyperrealistic photograph shows a teenage boy and an older man, presumably his father, sitting across from each other at a wooden kitchen table in muted, late afternoon light. Both are absorbed in their smartphones, their heads bowed. A single slice of toast on a white plate sits in front of the father, while two closed books are stacked near the boy. The light filters softly through sheer curtains behind them, illuminating a quiet, timeless kitchen. The scene evokes a sense of mutual disconnection and the quiet ache of modern life.

    When I was around 15, I’d get into trouble for calling a girl I was ‘seeing’ after 9pm on the house phone. I remember the jeopardy when her dad answered. It wasn’t just awkward, it felt catastrophic in that very teenage sense. There was no texting, no soft-launching your feelings via Reels. If you wanted to reach someone, you reached their entire household. Privacy was negotiated in real time, and a cordless phone allowing you to slink off to a private corner was borderline futuristic.

    I mention this not to romanticise a pre-digital age but to mark a boundary: I don’t truly understand what it’s like to grow up now. Not really.

    We’ve been told, often with good reason, that today’s teenagers are in trouble. Jonathan Haidt calls them the “anxious generation”, a cohort rewired by phones and social media. Since around 2012, adolescent mental health (especially among girls) has deteriorated alarmingly. Haidt blames the smartphone: a device that didn’t just enter childhood but, frankly, annexed it. The evidence is worrying, declines in sleep, attention, face-to-face connection. An uptick in self-harm, anxiety, emotional exhaustion. The argument isn’t hysterical. It lands.

    But Dean Burnett suggests we’ve misdiagnosed the patient. The panic, he argues, isn’t just in the teens, it’s in us. The parents, the teachers, the adults nervously refreshing headlines while peeking at their own screen time stats. According to Burnett, much of this alarm stems from a mix of generational disorientation (a kind of collective unease that what we grew up with is no longer relevant), recurring moral panic, and good old-fashioned ignorance. We didn’t grow up with these tools, so we assume they’re harmful. We project. We catastrophise. We fear what we don’t fluently use.

    The result is a pervasive sense of being at a loss. Some parents clamp down, banning apps, enforcing rigid rules on screen-time that feel increasingly arbitrary. Others detach, paralysed by the sheer bloody complexity of it all. But the most common response that I pick up from parents around me is probably the most human: low-level dread wrapped in middle-class guilt. We don’t really understand what our kids are doing, but we feel complicit anyway.

    And then, just as we start to piece together a measured response, “Right! phone-free supper time!”, delayed access, schools running digital literacy workshops, the next threat pops up. Welcome to Whack-a-Mole Parenting. Just as the cultural tide begins to turn on one device, another rises, this time more subtle, more embedded, more seductive.

    A recent Substack essay by Cal Newport took this from another angle. Reflecting on Ezra Klein’s critique of The Anxious Generation debate, he argued that we’ve become so beholden to statistical validation that we’ve lost touch with our own moral instinct. That rings uncomfortably true. We don’t just hesitate to act, we hesitate to know. When it comes to phones and parenting, our sense of what’s right is so often deferred, diluted, or apologised for.

    Take me, for example. I ask ChatGPT more (personal) questions, now than I ever asked Google. Some are practical: how to structure an email, what to cook with these leftovers, when should I plant out these seeds. But others are… not. I’ve caught myself consulting it about health worries, internal dilemmas, parenting doubts, things I wouldn’t bring up at dinner, or even necessarily with my family, my friends. Because it remembers. Because it adapts. Because it flatters you by bending to your will.

    And this is me: a reasonably grounded adult with (I hope) a steady compass and a mild allergy to digital hysteria. Yet even I find it maddeningly addictive. Not the technology itself, but the relation. The illusion of being known, helped, mirrored. I can only imagine how powerful this is for a 14-year-old who isn’t just seeking answers but identity.

    So the question isn’t whether smartphones are making kids anxious. They are, in some ways. But the deeper story is that we’re all overwhelmed by the sheer pace of paradigm shifts. We can’t metabolise one tech wave before the next hits us in the face.

    What Would Good Design Do?

    This is where design comes in. Not as damage limitation, but hopefully as orientation. The best design doesn’t just solve problems. It asks better questions. Like: what rhythms support attention? What thresholds help people feel held, not hijacked? How can digital relationships exist without replacing the real ones?

    The design problem is not abstract. It’s visible everywhere. Think of Snapstreaks – a design mechanism that rewards compulsive interaction with digital trophies. Or TikTok’s For You page – a personalised feed of videos that TikTok’s algorithm thinks you’ll be interested in, which notoriously appears to learn vulnerability faster than it learns taste. These aren’t neutral tools. They’re attention economies wired for compulsion, not care. If you’re a parent watching this unfold, it’s not just confusing, it’s existential.

    Anna Dahlström, a UX designer and storyteller I trust deeply, put it like this: “We need to design this—not as a roadmap, but as the future we want our kids and their kids to live in.”

    A brief aside here: Earlier this year, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LoveFrom’s Jony Ive announced a collaboration to create a physical device for the “AI age.” They talked about daily rhythms, calm interfaces, emotional connection. And while their vision sounds noble, it also confirms the underlying anxiety: that our tools are no longer just functional, they’re emotional infrastructure. If anything, their announcement makes this conversation more urgent. Because the question isn’t whether the tech will be beautifully built. It’s whether it will reflect what matters.

    That means not just critiquing the addictiveness of AI companions, but imagining something better. Less extractive. More human. Here’s what that might look like (after an hour of making notes this morning):

    • Design for pause, not push. Platforms should default to stillness, not stimulation. Kill the endless scroll. e.g. “You’ve seen it all, for now” or opening to a prompt rather than a firehose of dopamine content, or making ‘like’ less of a tap and more of a hold, restricted to just a few per day. Default to a quiet mode after 20 mins. Ask a user “why are you sharing this?”
    • Design for self-awareness. Don’t just track engagement. Track how users feel when they leave. Make reflection part of the loop. e.g. “How did that make you feel?”, reporting this along with screen time weekly reports. An in-app emotion metric that algorithmically analyses your interaction cadence, scroll patterns, message tone.
    • Design for companionship, not substitution. If AI is going to listen, let it redirect. Let it nudge us toward real conversations, not just simulated ones. e.g. “This sounds important. Have you considered talk to [name]?” or helping the user plan social activities, remember dates or conversation starters.

    The tools aren’t going away. But the way we design them can still reflect care, pace, and conscience. That’s not a nostalgic idea, it’s a classic UX problem and one worth solving.

    Coda

    When I was a teenager, the phone was something you had to ask permission to use. Now, it’s something we all struggle to put down. Maybe the answer isn’t more rules or fewer apps. Maybe it’s knowing what to do with ourselves in the quiet space that’s left when the screen goes dark.

    That’s where design still has a role to play, instead of locking us out, it guides us home.

    AI disclaimer: This piece was written by me, but I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, surface research, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.

    Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    ← Older posts