Let me tell you about one of the best feelings. You have a problem. You bang your head on it for a while. Through the banging, you formulate a string of keywords describing the problem. You put those words into a search engine. You land on a forum or a blog post and read someone else’s words containing those keywords and more. Their words resonate with you deeply. They’re saying the exact same things you were saying to yourself in your head. You immediately know, “This person gets it!” You know they have an answer to your problem. They’ve seen what you’re seeing. And on top of it all, they provide a solution which fixes your problem! A sense of connection is now formed. You feel validated, understood, seen. They’ve been through what you’re going through, and they wrote about it to reach out to you — across time and space. I fell in love with the web for this reason, this feeling of connection. You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through. Contrast that with today. Today you have a problem. You bang your head on it. You ask a question in a prompt. And you get back something. But there’s no human behind it. Just a machine which takes human voices and de-personalizes them until the individual point of view is annihilated. And so too with it the sense of connection — the feeling of being validated, understood, seen. Every prompt a connection that could have been. A world of missed connections. Email :: Mastodon :: Bluesky

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

Amouage, the Omani House of High Perfumery, expands its global presence with its first Asian flagship in Zhang Yuan, Shanghai’s...

Meaningful design decisions flow from clear intent, not from data. “We don’t know what people want. We don’t even know what they do.” This confession — which so many clients never truly say but should — drives an almost compulsive need for testing and validation. Heat maps, A/B tests, user surveys — we’ve built an entire industry around the promise that enough data can bridge the gap between uncertainty and understanding. But here’s what testing actually tells us: what users do in artificial scenarios. It doesn’t tell us what they want, and it certainly doesn’t tell us what we should want them to do. We’ve confused observation with insight. A heat map might show where users click, but it won’t reveal why they click there or whether those clicks align with your business objectives. User testing might reveal pain points in your interface, but it won’t tell you if solving those pain points serves your strategic goals. The uncomfortable truth is that meaningful design decisions flow from clear intent, not from data. If you know exactly what outcome you want to achieve, you can design toward that outcome without needing to validate every decision with testing. This isn’t an argument against testing entirely. It’s an argument for testing with purpose. Before running any test, ask yourself: Do you have the intent to act on what you find? Do you have the means to act on what you find? If the answer to either question is no, you’re not testing for insight — you’re testing for comfort. You’re seeking permission to make decisions you should be making based on clear strategic intent. The most successful digital products weren’t built by following heat maps. They were built by teams with crystal-clear visions of what they wanted users to achieve. Testing can refine the path to that vision, but it can’t replace the vision itself.

After designing a few gadget-related projects, I decided to take on a new challenge: designing a lightning from scratch. Lightning is an area of fascination for me. I have an ongoing draft post about the various designer lamps in my home that I plan to publish soon. In the meantime,