User interface design

Article — 27 September 2026 — 1,503 words

The LLM in the room — Going beyond using AI to do someone else’s job badly

Economics — Human-centred approaches — Society — Technology

People mostly use artificial intelligence to do the jobs they didn’t value anyway. But this amounts to cutting our colleagues out. Value must be created through human-to-human exchanges. So we should rapidly focus on uses of AI that go beyond trying to do someone else’s job badly.

Article — 3 July 2026 — 1,193 words

Restoring the elements of user experience

Business — Human-centred approaches — User experience

Some human-centred practitioners have been consigned to increasingly superficial considerations. Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for us to bring the focus back to the fundamentals that make our work important and successful.

Article — 22 June 2026 — 1,837 words

Don’t make me thick

Information architecture — Society — User experience

We say “don’t make me think”, and “less is more”. But a naive application of these principles risks limiting our users when we should be helping them grow.

Article — 11 August 2025 — 1,745 words

Life beyond the folder system

Digital — Information architecture — Technology — Web

The folder metaphor is so intuitive to generations of computer users that they can struggle to think of any other way of using a computer. Yet for younger generations, the idea is completely alien.

Article — 10 February 2025 — 801 words

The object of information architecture

Information architecture — Social science — User experience

Work: Scottish Government

In my job at the Scottish Government, we are understanding the opportunities that can be provided by following an object-oriented approach to structuring our information.

Article — 10 August 2022 — 1,525 words

Nudge in human-centred approaches

Economics — Service design — User experience

Work: The University of Edinburgh

There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches.

Article — 18 June 2021 — 1,429 words

Why I talk about human-centred approaches

Human-centred approaches — Service design — User experience

It is difficult to find a phrase that exactly describes my work and the way I approach it. I’ve started to talk about human-centred approaches. This post explains what I mean by that.

Article — 13 October 2020 — 1,283 words

UX design’s UX design problem

Service design — User experience

How a chat at a conference underlined that user experience itself has a user experience problem — and what we can do about it.

Article — 14 June 2020 — 3,435 words

Service design and the Mario complex

Service design — User experience — User research

At Service Design in Government, I discovered that service designers see themselves as Mario. But that is an unrealistic model for what service design should be.

Linknote — 3 May 2019 — 35 words

User experience — Web

UI vs UX — Xkcd

Xkcd’s take on this perennial debate. I guess it had to happen sometime. 🙈

Nine years ago, soon after I started working on a university website, Xkcd published the classic comic called University Website.

Article — 23 October 2018 — 447 words

URLs aren’t good enough

Technology — User experience — Web

I am a web enthusiast, but I think we need to find a better way to navigate the web than URLs.

Linknote — 30 July 2018 — 53 words

Digital — Human-centred approaches

Designing the UI of Google Translate

I’m not too keen on user interface design showcases, because they usually boil down to: “look me make shiny thing”. But I really enjoyed this case study of how Google Translate redesigned their interface to make people more aware of some of the app’s most useful features.