I'm John, a product designer, experience strategist and builder. This is my little fragment of the internet where I write about my experiences, learnings, failures, misgivings, and observations relating to building digital products and experiences.

An observation: AI tools expose deep organizational problems

With the spread of AI tools across organizations building software, I wanted to compile and share some of my observations so far. First of all, I personally don't believe that AI is the root cause. It truly is an accelerant. But there is a need to uncover the

A practical guide to using AI (the often-overlooked fundamentals)

Right now, many companies are racing to incorporate AI into their products and services. It’s common to see announcements highlighting “AI-powered” features, even when the underlying functionality may simply be an enhancement to existing tools. Amid all the excitement, however, some of the most practical and effective steps toward

Building Phosphorus to give enterprises full visibility into their xIoT environment

Role: Director, Product Design • Industry: Network / Cybersecurity

Installing Storybook for React (Part I: Designer Edition)

I'm currently exploring options for ways to maintain the Phosphorus design system, which I've been calling 'Mineral'. A team that I worked with a while back were looking at leveraging Storybook at the time but they never fully got around to implementing it. Getting

Design orgs and the centralized, consultancy model

Design leaders that structure and operate their teams as if they are a centralized, internal consultancy within an agile product organization will rarely make an impact. From my experience, this doesn't work for several reasons, one of them being that it makes it difficult to consistently build the

Simplifying the payroll data migration process with UltiPro Launch

Role: Lead product designer • Industry: HR / Payroll

Specializing Too Early In Your Design Career Can Limit You

Don't specialize early on in your design career. Start broad and learn as much as you can. Get comfortable working in every stage of the product dev lifecycle - research, strategy, interaction design, visual design, etc. Learn to understand what activities are really necessary for your project and

Let’s talk about designing for better security

As designer’s, we put heavy emphasis on designing for experiences that bring both value and delight to our end users. We talk about things like ethical decision-making in design, accessibility and inclusion…all very important topics that need to be discussed. That said, there’s very little discussion around

Project Discovery, Team Alignment, Co-Design & Free Lunch

It goes without saying, proper planning and early team alignment helps to decrease the chances of projects going off the rails. That said, it still amazes me how little time and investment product teams actually put into having proper project kickoffs. By “proper”, I don’t mean a big groupthink

A well-rounded book list for Designers, Design Leaders & Product Managers

Here’s a list of book recommendations for people who contribute to the creation of digital products and/or services. It spans topics from user research to design to psychology and business and innovation — covering a broad spectrum that I feel can make any design practitioner, design leader or product

Redesigning Mailchimp's visual editor to simplify and increase campaign creation rates

Role: Lead product designer • Industry: Marketing / Small Business

This thing called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

I hear it being thrown around quite a lot these days. Do they really mean “V1”? Here are a few things you should know regarding the concept of the“Minimum Viable Product”: The Lean Startup Eric Ries wrote this book called “The Lean Startup”. The term derived from the idea