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.

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.

The coordination work that holds projects together disappears the moment it works. On the unfairness of recognition and finding leaders who see it anyway.

Projects just drift toward chaos unless a person is actively holding them together.

The problem is that recognition follows narrative. When a project succeeds, credit flows to the people whose contributions are easy to describe. The person who presented to the board. The person whose name is on the launch email. The person who shipped the final feature. These contributions are real, I’m not diminishing them. But they’re not more real than the work that made them possible. They’re just easier to point at. Easier to put in a slide. And I think that’s where the unfairness starts, slowly, without people really noticing.

The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.

Senior engineers look at the big, messy, abstract thing and start digging:

• They ask questions nobody else thought to ask.
• They separate what matters from noise.
• They identify what should be done now vs. what to punt.

Most software is bad. I neither know why, nor how to solve the problem. Instead, the best I have to offer is a technique to keep the badness away for a while: friction logs.Friction logs are what they sound: a detailed log of everything that caused friction when using a product. This post teaches you how to make one. I recommend you to make one if:

Build this handy mobile workbench that folds up to only 7 in. You only need two hours, some 2x4s, 3/4-in. plywood and 8’ of 1x4.