A design engineer based in Montreal, Canada. Currently helping users build their worlds and write their stories at . I love to shape how software works and feels.
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Vale
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See allVelocity and craft
The tools are fast. Anyone who has used them for a week knows it. A user flow gets designed in a day. A component library gets built in a week.
All of that is true, and it is the least interesting part. The tools accelerate production and nothing else. The person looking at your work still perceives it at the same speed they always have. Everything that separates one body of work from another lives in that gap, and the question worth answering is how to take the speed without losing the judgment.
Production used to be a real skill. It stayed scarce for exactly as long as it stayed hard, and it stopped being hard for everyone at the same time.
A skill everyone has stops telling anyone apart. Distinction moves to whatever is still scarce.
Design engineering a collaborate popover
I've designed and built many UIs over the years, so intuition plays a big role in recognizing when an interface can be improved. When something feels off about an interaction, that feeling is experience compressed into a signal. The noticing comes first. Theory and vocabulary come after, to validate and communicate what you noticed.
Still, validated intuition makes for stronger design decisions, and validation doesn't require a formal study. Lightweight methods like heuristic evaluation and discount usability testing[^1] surface most issues.
Take the example above, a share and collaborate popover. My intuition says it makes users work harder than they need to. Let's break it down.
The "Add people" input looks like you should be able to click it, type, and search for users to add. Instead, clicking it navigates to a second screen. It resembles the standard input field found everywhere on the web, so it should behave like one. The false affordance goes against Jakob's Law[^2][^3] and makes users stop and think about something that should be automatic.