Product
Dashboards, onboarding, research rituals and the features we deleted. Notes from the product room.
CSV import and export: the UX of tabular handoffs
CSV imports that survive real spreadsheets (mapping, previews, error files people can fix) and exports people can trust — stable schemas, honest metadata.
Empty states are onboarding: designing the blank dashboard
The blank dashboard is the highest-leverage screen in a SaaS product: three empty-state archetypes, sample-data patterns that teach, and measuring the lift.
Jobs-to-be-done interviews that surface what users won't say
Beyond the JTBD script: interviewing for what customers can't or won't tell you, synthesising transcripts into forces, turning jobs into ranked bets.
Data tables for people who live in them
Ops and finance users live inside your tables all day. Density modes, sticky decisions, column management, honest exports and keyboard speed runs.
Timeouts, autosave and recovery: designing for interruption
Autosave contracts, session timeouts that warn without punishing, crash recovery and 'unsaved changes' guards that don't cry wolf: interruption-proof UX, end to end.
Sandboxes that convert: demo data done right
A sandbox full of believable data outsells a drip-feed of tooltips. How to design demo data, sandbox vs trial taxonomy, resets, and the swap-to-real moment.
Notifications designed like you're not the main character
Notification systems people don't mute: severity ladders, digest economics, channel choice and the anti-patterns that train users to ignore everything you send.
Settings: the screen your product is judged on at month three
Nobody evaluates settings during the trial; by month three they're how users judge you. Defaults as decisions, dangerous-action design, searchable settings.
WCAG AA for product teams: the parts everyone gets wrong
The WCAG AA criteria that fail most in real products — contrast, focus visible, target size, keyboard traps — and the review rituals that keep them green.
Error messages that de-escalate
An error message is a conversation at someone's worst moment with your product. The structure, tone rules and support hooks that make errors actually help.
Activation metrics that mean something
Most activation metrics are flattering fictions. Find the behaviour that predicts retention, measure time-to-value honestly, defend it in the boardroom.
Template galleries: the shortcut to the aha moment
Starter templates are onboarding's best shortcut — if they're categorised by job not industry, previewed live, pruned ruthlessly and measured to activation, not clicks.