Thinking, in public
Field notes on design, engineering and growth — written by the people who ship the work. No thought leadership, just lessons with receipts.
Bidding on your own name: when brand PPC pays
Should you bid on your own brand terms? The incrementality test that answers it, the economics of defensive spend, conquesting ethics, and a spreadsheet to decide.
Fine-tuning vs RAG vs prompt: a decision guide
Prompt, retrieve or fine-tune? The decision tree we run with clients — real cost curves, data needs, iteration speed and maintenance burden.
PDP design: the page that pays for everything
Product detail page anatomy for conversion: image sequence logic, buy-box hierarchy, review integration, delivery honesty, and mobile-thumb ergonomics that matter.
Auth for content and commerce: passkeys, magic links, and the recovery flow
Passkeys, magic links, or passwords with rules? How we choose auth for content and commerce sites — and the account-recovery flows everyone forgets to design.
Screen-reader testing: a 30-minute workflow for every release
Automated checks catch a third of accessibility problems. A repeatable 30-minute manual screen-reader script catches the rest — the workflow we run every release.
Express wallets: faster checkout, if you place them right
Apple Pay and Google Pay can be your best-converting payment method or an ignored button. Placement, address capture and measuring the real effect.
Migrating a site without burning its rankings
Domain changes, CMS switches and relaunches are risk decisions, not just checklists. How to forecast the dip, set expectations and know when to roll back.
The highest-traffic UI nobody designs: forms
Forms are the most-used, least-designed UI on the web. A practitioner's guide to labels, validation timing, error copy, autofill and mobile keyboards.
Third-party scripts: governance before they eat your site
The audit finds the mess; governance keeps it from coming back. A consent-aware loader, per-vendor budgets in CI, and the quarterly ritual that keeps tags honest.
Alternative-to pages that don't smear anyone
Building a comparison-page programme that ranks and keeps trust: intent research, fair-comparison editorial rules, freshness ops, and killing fake objectivity.
How to give design feedback that speeds the work up
A client's guide to design feedback: reaction versus direction, the 'what problem does this solve' script, and comments that speed the work up.
Exit interviews for products: learning from the people who left
Churn interviews and exit surveys done properly: a five-question exit flow, recruiting churned users honestly, and separating squeaky wheels from signal.