A design journal

Notes and essays on product design

Design discovery process at Smile

This is a document that I created to help improve the discovery process at Smile. What? Dual-track agile - cross-functional teams (squads) performing “discovery work” that feeds directly into the backlog of “delivery work” A template for research and discovery that aims to tie all feature work to solving a business problem Why cross-functional…

An outline of my product design process

This is a guide to the process that I like to follow when designing new products or non-trivial features. Whether it’s best to follow all the steps or not will depend on the specific context. The opportunity assessment part is more formal and better suited to new products, whereas the rest is generally equally applicable to features as well as new…

Creating an environment where design thrives

These are some of the principles that I think foster a healthy environment where design can be both efficient and enjoyable. This is based on my experience as a product designer collaborating across departments, as someone leading small teams, and as someone who has had the good fortune to report to some great managers. Let them solve problems Most…

A simple guide to typography

Typography has an incredible impact on the effectiveness of your designs, some say it’s the most important part of any web design. It’s also a huge topic that some people dedicate their entire career to and so can be understandably daunting for experienced and beginner designers alike. This guide is an attempt to distill a lot of the best practice…

Adding classes to react components

This is specific to React and CSS Modules and not relevant if you are using CSS-in-JS. Lets say we have a ‘panel’ component that we want to create: The resultant HTML will look something like this depending on how you set things up with webpack: Adding multiple classes: Lets say we want to add another class to our , this is what it would look like…