In many product design teams today, work is divided neatly into fields. The result is a familiar waterfall process, where strategy leads to UX, UX leads to UI, UI leads to “finished” designs, and only then does engineering begin.

One cost is that the work is slow. Product teams struggle under the weight of these processes and, at worst, end up filling their time completing checklists instead of doing impactful work.

Plan like a farmer by being deliberate about planning. A farmer has a clear goal (grow the best apple), but knows it is impossible to predict the weather. Instead of laying out a rigid plan ahead of time, they stay agile and respond as things happen.

AI-powered design platform for creating beautiful interfaces and experiences

https://docs.superdesign.dev/quickstart

adam@adamsilver.io - email 2026.03.11

Principle #1: Good design works for everyone

There are many reasons for this principle but my favourite is that designing for a minority makes things better for everyone.

• Large radio buttons don’t just help people with motor impairments; everyone finds them easier to click

Principle #2: Good design makes things obvious

Principle #3: Good design puts users in control

Expect users to get interrupted. People prefer to interact in different ways. And we should design for both an idealised work flow as well as when things don’t go to plan.

Principle #4: Good design is lightweight

If you’d like to improve user experience, content design can help. But how? We have a few tricks up our sleeve, so I’d like to share with you a reference list of ways we can give users an experience which feels more intuitive and caters better to their needs.

Change is not an event; it’s a process

Don’t take anything for granted

Your goal is to listen and capture everyone’s thoughts and propositions, but don’t take it as absolute truth. In the end, you are the expert who needs to filter through the noise and find where to focus.

AI is bad at making things that are great. It's also bad at making things that are bad. The second half is the part worth talking about.

The trap isn’t AI. The trap is that 7 is easier to reach than it’s ever been, and 7 feels like enough.

The middle has never been more crowded. The interesting work is on the edges — the 1s and the 9s — and only one of those edges is still accessible to a tool. The other one is accessible to you, if you remember how to get there.

The skill now might just be knowing what a 1 used to feel like. And being a little suspicious of anything that lands at a 5.

Human-centered design has four major principles:

1. Understand and Address the Core Problems;
2. Be People-Centered;
3. Use a Systems Approach;
4. Use Rapid Iterations of Prototyping and Testing.

When I’m not doing graphic design stuff at We Made This, I’m an Associate Lecturer on the Graphic Design BA course at the School of Art, Architecture and Design (previously named The Cass) at London Metropolitan University. It’s a wonderful course, with great connections to industry, and some really brilliant students who regularly create exciting and […]

a quote from Orson Welles that summed up this phenomenon: “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”

Each vertex of the pentagon measures one aspect of a forecast:

• Logic. Does it make sense? Does it create an aha! insight?
• Complex (or Nuanced). Does it take many factors into account, avoiding a simplistic model of the world?
• Evocative. Does it cause an emotional response?
• Provocative. Does it upset, excite, and cause discomfort?
• Stimulating. Does it include implications?

This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing.

jenson.org

• Could - Should - Might - Don't

• Non-designers think of UX/UI as pixels-only: icons

• Designers think statistically (opinions), Programmers think mathematically

• 24:25 - "The most common product mistake is rushing." (more and more stuff)

• Loops are better than individual controls

• The iphone is a consumer machine, not productivity

Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run

Quality is the degree to which a product or service meets or exceeds user expectations.

Building quality software is already hard. Centralized quality starts and ends with leadership-driven quality standards and reviews, where a single stakeholder reviews our work and decides whether it meets their standards. This has been the standard at every company I’ve worked with; design and engineering are both taught through critique and reviews from the earliest stages of production to the final delivery of a complete product. This approach can work brilliantly when executed with precision, but it creates a bottleneck: no matter how talented, a single person can only review so much.\

Decentralized quality means putting quality in the hands of workers, not managers.

A new set of principles for placing design at the heart of digital business

The trouble with best practices

The result is a familiar waterfall process, where strategy leads to UX, UX leads to UI, UI leads to “finished” designs, and only then does engineering begin.

Most of the team’s energy goes into producing artifacts for this flow. Storyboards, user journeys, and wireframes are all methods that once helped keep design human-centered, but are now implemented as key deliverables needed for businesses to measure progress.

One cost is that the work is slow. Product teams struggle under the weight of these processes and, at worst, end up filling their time completing checklists instead of doing impactful work. Because the work is done in isolation in page-based, manual design tools far away from the medium we’re designing for, the outputs tend to be derivative, perpetuating a pervasive monoculture in digital design.

The “Double Diamond” process rarely works well in real projects. Here’s how the design work actually gets done in small and large organizations, and where design has most leverage.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/08/improving-double-diamond-design-process/

“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

— Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld

https://www.infoq.com/articles/problem-reframing-method/

• Avoid building wrong solutions or products by directly jumping into solution thinking and not empathizing with the problem
• Finding a better problem that fits the customer’s needs better opens up a space for more innovative and sustainable solutions
• Looking at a problem from different angles helps to build more innovative and sustainable solutions or products
• Try different reframing practices and methods, such as examining bright spots or looking in the mirror; there is not a one-size-fits-all approach

https://blog.logrocket.com/ux-design/double-diamond-design-process/

This week I had the privilege of speaking to design students at two universities about my career. Here are some of the things I shared, most of which were answers to their questions.

5. Visual hierarchy is hard.

6. I know of only one way to successfully ship products and that is to ship imperfect products.

10. Creativity is storytelling.

Tell beautiful stories with your work! If you don’t believe you can change the world through design and the stories you tell with it, you’re selling yourself short.

Perhaps more than any other person in history, Leonardo da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are just as applicable to the web today as they were in Renaissance Italy.

• Document Your Thoughts, Ideas, And Work
• Obsess Over Geometry
• Think Right-To-Left
• Find Good Patrons (Or Failing That, Good Employers)
• Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
• Feed Your Inner Polymath

https://mymodernmet.com/leonardo-da-vinci-notebooks-online/

Build your next presentation in minutes with our free slide templates! No matter what you’re creating, Beautiful.ai has the template for you.

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of my super-popular UI & UX Micro-Tips, I’ve brought together some of the most timeless tips, and bundled them in an 8-Bit format. Why? Just because :)

1. Whitespace is your design friend. Use it to improve your UIs instantly.
2. Choose a base colour, and then simply use tints & shades to add uniformity.
3. Reserve one colour for your Call to Action. Be really selfish with those CTAs.
4. Give the most important elements on the screen more prominence.
5. Present your icons with labels for easier comprehension.
6. To improve the optical balance of your headings, reduce the letter-spacing.
7. Make sure your shadows are coming from one light source. We don’t live in a land of a thousand suns remember.
8. When working with long-form content, style that opening paragraph to draw the user in.

Dieter Rams, Vitsœ's furniture designer. Ten principles for good design (sometimes referred to as the ‘Ten commandments’).

Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers do to ensure small bugs don't take down systems.

There were no warnings or red lights, because the process simply hadn’t run in the first place. And so a new, time-consuming activity was added to the data analytics stack: manually checking the database each morning to make sure everything had functioned properly.

Negative engineering is “insurance as code”

Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives.