On Monday, Figma sent out an email reminding all customers that the price of a basic seat is going up again, to $16 a month. As a small business owner, I can’t avoid these recurring costs, and I’m currently doing OK, so I don’t open emails about money that I know will just stress me out. If I’m in money trouble, I’m confident that my finance person or my accountant will let me know. In fact, I…
Here are 12 things I’ve learned the easy way, working with really great cilents. I hope it will help folks who want to be better clients for their solo consultants and freelancers.
I wrote a newspaper column—for a physical paper!—for almost 4 years, beginning in 2013. There are maybe a dozen or so of those columns that are worth revisiting, now from what feels like a historical perspective. I’m going to republish them relatively unedited, except for a clunky sentence or two, since I often had to edit a lot for length. I’m preserving my old thinking, unedited, as cringe as it…
In the early 90s, Umberto Eco published a collection of essays called How to Travel with a Salmon, a compilation of some of his newspaper columns. It contains two of my favorite pieces by him, ever. One is called On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire at a Scale of 1:1. It spins out a speculative and ludicrous attempt to make a perfect map, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s extremely…
It’s no secret that AI hype is one of my rage triggers. But before you mash out an angry email demanding I acknowledge that the way you use it is an exception, I’m not talking about automation and machine learning generally, where there are very good and useful applications. Also, you don’t need my validation. I recently published the first version of my company’s AI policy , which is, more…
Why assuming the user doesn’t want to be there is a healthy starting point for good UX. And we don’t need to fix it because our job isn’t to help people use the software we build, it’s to help them stop using it.