Manny

"What is the ROI of UX?" is shaped like a question, but it is actually two hostile premises: 1) that UX is sufficiently marginal for its value to be openly questioned 2) that the asker has the authority to judge this question, and practitioners are merely consulted on it, as a matter of courtesy

you’re right! it feels mostly awful to Go Online™, these days. the internet in a sad state, for reason after reason after reason. but there is a way to fix it; to trade the voidful howling for a quiet & joyful song. here’s how to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

One of few newsletters I actually look forward too and read. A MUST have for anyone working in product and technology.

2025 can honestly choke. Good riddance 😬

Too young to worry, too old to give a shit ✌🏽

I have been back and forth over the span of 5 years about whether to publish this article. All opinions and experiences in this post are my own, or from people I personally know, backed up with recent reports and statistics.

Built a new PC for some games 🤓

A very timely read for tech workers right now. My favorite takeaway as it applies to cross-functional teams, especially for designers: "in order to master your own domain, the boundaries of your specialism will often blur with specialists in other domains."

Soon enough, people will be adding "Figma Suite" to their resumes.

Thoughts!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?

So much to unpack here, but I also love the mini lesson in survey design.

You don't necessarily need to say "image of" in your alt text for users to know it's an image. Screen readers will announce that it's an image. But it can help readers to specify if it's a hand-drawn image, Polaroid, infographic, screenshot, chart, map, diagram, or so on.

Sometimes I wonder who has the world record for the most Workday accounts? 🤔

sʇouʞs 📉

Context matters and not everything valuable is measurable. See "Why big data needs thick data" by Tricia Wang. A timeless classic imo medium.com/ethnography-...

So called 'gender critical' thought is unscientific, reductionist, and incompatible with the historical record. Human history is undeniably and richly populated by endless examples of multiple gender identities and roles, decoupled from biological sex, throughout time, across continents & islands

Something I realized about the convos around the Ghibli styled images generated by Open AI, is that a lot of people rely on legalities. They have no sense of internal ethics. We have to fight to make sure the law is on the side of ethics. Slavery was legal but that doesn’t make it right.

See if color contrast meets accessibility standards right within the color picker

Why does it feel so much harder to design for yourself and not others?

UX design is in disarray. The idea of design-for-use has been replaced with design-for-sales, and its incentives (make more features so that you have more shit to sell) don't align with user-centered work. In this issue, I investigate the ground-level view of how this happened and how to stop it.

Something I've noticed is that when someone says, "can I ask a stupid question?" during a teaching session, this is almost always followed by the most interesting discussion of the session It's one of the things I look forward to most about teaching

Hollering at this episode 🤣 "At this point, I will even take, 'we will improve our NPS score'" @spavel.bsky.social 😱 www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7m-...

A T E 🔥

By excluding these “edge cases” it also further perpetuates the bias that “[insert marginalized group here] doesn’t use our app”. Strengthening and perpetuating the cycle through even more self-selection and exclusion, leading to more feature factory product teams.

Can we get an executive order to end daylight savings? Too soon?

I think it's important to remember, with everything extremely fucked up and dumb right now, that at the root of it, fuck fuck fucking fucking fuck.

+1 for this course! I use it as part of my interactive design course every semester with my students. Fantastic content, and approachable for everyone!

websites are so cool anyone can just make one about anything

All the cloud platforms use your data to train LLMs. Local-first tools are the way to fight back. Security, defense, finance, healthcare, government... the reason high-security orgs use Obsidian is for the privacy and ownership of their data. Now every team can be sovereign.

Knowledge is never knowing the answer. It’s knowing the territory.

And yet, when learning we’re more often rewarded for having the “answer”. AI just reinforces this behavior even if the answer is wrong or inaccurate. Sometimes there’s no answer, just tradeoffs. I wonder what would happen if LLM’s were trained to help us ask better questions 🤭

Ever notice how there's no fixing anything in "move fast and break things"

The real hierarchy of needs

“Soul not for sale, probably won’t make no money off this, oh well”

Yes and it’s the people you meet along the way. Genuinely connect and nurture those relationships. Be as authentic as you can. Opportunities often come when we least expect them!

Long live the web, long live the links!

If I won the lottery, I wouldn't tell anyone - but there would be signs the signs:

Amazing life hack: learn how to be genuinely happy for other people. Don't feel threatened by others' happiness. Don't go into comparison mode. Don't be a wet blanket. Don't avoid it. Embrace others' happiness. Bask in it. Let their smile become your smile. Let it infect you. Let it lift you up.

As designers, the tools we use can shape our focus and thinking, and bias us toward narrower outputs — especially when it comes to accessibility. So how could a design tool like @figma.com help us better? I have a few thoughts. www.jeleniauskas.com/writing/to-c...

As long as you're sincere in what you say, you haven't got to know what you're talking about. — James Baldwin

if you see something that's "buy one get one free" and you're a CSS developer you can instead say "that's a 2fr one deal" hahahahahahaha

To be a missionary and mercenary in the same job join a design consultancy, it’s quite the roller coaster 🤭