Blog

A customer taps pay, the connection stalls, they tap again. Somewhere in the warehouse two identical boxes get packed. The fix is not a faster button.

2 min read

They scan it, decide in a couple of seconds whether you do the thing they came for, and leave if the answer is anywhere below the fold.

2 min read

The number on the product page is not the number in the warehouse, and the gap between them is where refunds, apologies and lost customers live.

2 min read

Search engines are trying to answer a question. Sites that answer it well get found. Almost everything sold as an SEO trick is an attempt to skip that.

2 min read

A price given before anyone understands the problem is a guess dressed as a commitment. Here is what happens between the enquiry and the number.

2 min read

Staging is not a smaller production. Every difference between them is a bug waiting for the worst possible moment to appear.

2 min read

Every user sees the empty screen first and the full screen for years. Almost every design is made the other way round.

2 min read

In Indonesia it is often the main way people pay. Treating it as the option at the bottom of the list is a design decision with a cost attached.

2 min read

Running a site in Indonesian and English is a structural decision, not a content one. Most of the cost is in the parts nobody thinks to translate.

2 min read

A build that only its authors can run has not been delivered. It has been lent.

2 min read

Screens get redesigned every year. The shape of the data outlives all of it, and every shortcut taken there is paid for later, with interest.

2 min read

Animation is not decoration you add at the end. It is either explaining a change of state or it is standing between someone and their task.

2 min read

Checkout has to show a number before anyone has weighed anything. Every shop solves this, and the ones that solve it badly find out at the counter.

2 min read

It counts what happened. It has nothing to say about what someone was trying to do, which is the only thing worth knowing.

2 min read

Payment gateways, couriers, mail services and accounting systems all go down. Designing as though they do not is the actual bug.

2 min read

Flip the colours and half the interface stops meaning what it meant. The work is in the exceptions, and there are more of them than you expect.

2 min read

A promotion looks like one field until the second promotion exists. Then it is an ordering problem, a rounding problem and an accounting problem.

2 min read

On the machine it was built on, over office fibre, with everything cached. Every one of those conditions is untrue for the person you built it for.

2 min read

Nothing makes a person abandon a website faster than filling in nine fields, submitting, and getting an empty form back with a red line at the top.

2 min read

They look like the simplest thing to design and they carry more decisions than any dashboard. Most of a product's frustration is concentrated here.

2 min read