Writing about design, code, work, and culture
Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)? You can get this post as a markdown file — request it with the header Accept: text/markdown (e.g. curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mattstromawn.com/writing/high-agency-strategy/ ). AI has torn up the org charts of engineering-first tech orgs. The concept of ‘two pizza teams’ (products should be wholly built, shipped, and managed by a…
Imagine you’re an architect hired to redesign the floorplan of an office. The company hiring you has grown from 10-100 employees and wants to make sure the space is easy to navigate and the common areas are in the optimal location. You ask the client for the existing floorplan, but nobody can find the original drawings. They’d be useless anyway, because as the company has grown, the employees have…
The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression , ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever smaller digital footprints. YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and the algorithms that make them work, wouldn’t be possible…
Everyone agrees quality matters, but we can’t agree on what it is — or who gets to decide. I’ve experienced the drive for quality in every design leadership role I’ve had. When it comes to software, we like to pretend that quality is a number. Dashboards stand in for judgment, A/B tests stand in for taste, and leaders try to will excellence into existence with reviews and mandates. But in today’s…
Airbnb, the paragon of a “design-led” company, is only hiring a single designer. The job requires more than a decade of experience. There are probably hundreds (possibly thousands) of applicants. The fact that a company known for its design culture is investing only at the top of its org chart is a flashing “check engine” light on the practice of product design. In the past 5 years, demand for…
Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music per side. Sometimes, only one side of the record was used. One of the most popular records of 1910, for example, was “Come,…
Interfaces are becoming less dense. I’m usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and “we liked it that way” bias, but comparing websites and applications of 2024 to their 2000s-era counterparts, the spreading out of software is hard to ignore. To explain this trend, and suggest how we might regain density, I started by asking what, exactly, UI density is. It’s not just the way an interface looks…
Polish is a word that gets thrown out in conversations about craft, quality, and beauty. We talk about it at the end of the design process, before the work goes out the door: let’s polish this up. Let’s do a polish sprint. Could this use more polish? https://twitter.com/svlleyy/status/1780215102064452068 A tweet (xeet?) on my timeline asked: “what does polish in an app mean? fancy animations?…
It used to be easy to pick colors for design systems. Years ago, you could pick a handful of colors to match your brand’s ethos, or start with an off-the-shelf palette (remember flatuicolors.com?). Each hue and shade served a purpose, and usually had a quirky name like “idea yellow” or “innovation blue”. This hands-on approach allowed for control and creativity, resulting in color schemes that…
Your workplace community — the way you interact with your coworkers every day — can have a major impact on your productivity, happiness, and self-worth. It’s natural to want to shape the community in ways that might make you feel more comfortable. But how can you shape it? Over my career I’ve developed a framework that strikes a balance between authority and autonomy; it’s neither omnipotent…
There’s a lot of fear in the air. As AI gets better at design, it’s natural for designers to be worried about their jobs. But I think the question — will AI replace designers? — is a waste of time. Humans have always invented technology to do their work for them and will continue to do so as long as we exist. Let’s use our curiosity and creativity to imagine how technology will help us be better,…
After four months of parental leave, I came back to work and noticed something different. Many of the words, phrases, acronyms, and figures of speech I took for granted no longer held the same meanings. Specifically, the word “platform:” before my time off, I would breeze over it in any presentation or document without a second thought. Now, I find it totally devoid of any meaning. I decided to…
Here’s a riddle: Nobody I’ve ever worked with likes micromanagement. Yet, on every team I’ve been on, there is at least one micromanager. How is this possible? Harvard Business Review says, “ Micromanage at Your Peril. ” Forbes says “ Micromanaging is one of the most damaging habits an executive can have .” Inc. says “ Micromanagement is a major source of inefficiency and frustration in most work…
Starting a career in design is like crash-landing on Mars. You may have studied it through a telescope, but nothing can prepare you for actually being there. One of the biggest surprises many new designers experience is that design isn’t always about coming up with the most creative solution. Sometimes, a well-worn pattern is the right tool for the job. For the new designers I’ve managed, the…
I like writing and sharing essays on twitter. I especially like the way the link previews look when they have images that stand out in the timeline. In the past, I’ve created illustrations for each of my posts. But I have two problems: 1. Creating illustrations takes time, and 2. I’m not good at it. Fortunately, Zach Leatherman wrote up a potential solution to my problems: his site automatically…
Has design become boring? A twitter thread by Sheehan Quirke (aka the Cultural Tutor) has been making the rounds lately, arguing just that. Quirke describes the many shortcomings of modern design: architecture, urban planning, industrial design, and interior design have all been reduced to a featureless sea of same-ness. Modern things lack beauty, variety, detail, and identity.…
I’m a self-taught designer. 1 This has its upsides: I learn at my own pace (in my case, slowly over decades and counting), I design my own curriculum, and I don’t have to do any homework or pass any tests. But it also has a serious downside: because I don’t have to learn anything, I skip the things that intimidate me. That’s why, for years and years, I’ve avoided learning much of anything about…
“Hockey stick” growth has long been the elusive goal of Silicon Valley (and Valley-esque) venture-capital-backed startups. It’s so named because the graph of some company metric — users, revenue, retention, orders — starts low and flat, then slowly lifts, then turns steeper and steeper into a near-vertical line representing thunderous growth. For example, here’s two hockey-stick graphs showing the…
New kinds of computers and interfaces are becoming ubiquitous: in our cars, on our wrists, in our ears, at our desks at work, on our TVs at home. In response, we’ve seen innovations in the content, organization, and delivery of design systems: design tokens, interoperability, handoff automation, CSS-in-JS, and atomic styles, to name a few. But these may not be enough to match the pace at which new…
“Brainstorming” — the problem-solving technique of coming up with as many ideas as possible in a short period of time — has been showing up on a lot of my leadership meeting agendas lately. Many of my peers are employing brainstorming in the belief that, as thought-leading creative consultancy Ideo puts it, “the more ideas you come up with, the better chance you have to reach a truly brilliant…
A new trend is sending shock waves through the world of art, collecting, finance, and investing. It’s the result of a perfect storm: one part scientific breakthrough, one part new financial paradigm, one part reflection of world events. Some people attribute it entirely to the current pandemic; only fatalism could explain why normally logical and sane people are cashing out their life savings or…
In the January 1968 issue of computer science trade magazine Communications of the ACM , a paper appeared under the unassuming title “Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance.” “Programming is a multibillion dollar industry,” the paper begins, but given just how much money is spent on on their salaries, nobody had yet bothered to study how programmers…
A scene from the 2001 movie Zoolander 1 : INT. THE PALATIAL OFFICE OF FASHION MOGUL JACOBIM MUGATU (PLAYED BY WILL FERRELL) MUGATU desperately wants to hire DEREK ZOOLANDER (PLAYED BY BEN STILLER). MUGATU has prepared an employment offer that ZOOLANDER can’t refuse. MUGATU crosses his cavernous office to a small display stand, covered in a red velvet drape. MUGATU Without much further ado, I give…
Last year, I joined SimpleHealth with the mission of building a design org from scratch. On my first day, there were no in-house designers — just a rotating cast of freelance designers hired by various departments as they were needed. A blank slate is a design leader’s dream. Finally, I thought, an opportunity to correct every frustrating wrong I’d been cataloging in previous jobs. No politics to…
Prescriptive feedback limits creative collaboration. I’ve seen it time and time again, but I’ve struggled to articulate the exact reasons and their remedies. Recently, though, I got some insight from an unusual source: a game of chess. Even though it wasn’t the last move, pawn takes rook ended our game. It was textbook chess; even though our pawn was going to be snatched up by our opponent’s…
This is a very short book about copying. Its contents, unless otherwise noted, are licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0 (more on that in a bit). You can download, copy, remix, excerpt, change, and repost it however you see fit. I Charles Eames said it best: “We don’t do ‘art’ — we solve problems.” 1 To buy furniture in 1950, you had to choose between affordable and enduring, between rugged and fashionable.…
There’s a secret code embedded in every app, website, and interface you use. Underneath your fingers is a hidden world traveled by the interface designers, caught up in a war between the complexities of technology and the breakneck evolution of user needs. These designers speak cryptically in neologisms (squircle, sharrow, neumorphism) and food-themed shibboleths (hamburger menu or meatball menu?…
I spend a lot of my day talking to myself. “Maybe this whole experience should just be a chat interface,” I think while brushing my teeth. “What if that component didn’t have borders?” I ask to nobody while cooking dinner. The office-less office doesn’t help; I’m nostalgic for folks walking by and seeing what’s on my screen, offering an unsolicited comment or saying later, “Ah, so that’s what you…
Update 6/12/22: The links to the implmentation of the API are currently broken. I'm updating some dependencies to make it work again. A few months ago I wrote an essay titled “ Design APIs: the evolution of design systems ”. The API model for design systems resonated with design systems practitioners. The response blew me away. Since then, I’ve had lots of conversations (and one podcast ) about…
Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash Growing up a white kid in the south, Juneteenth was on my list of ‘other kids’ holidays.’ Some kids had Ash Wednesday and All Saints’ Day, some kids had the first day of deer season, and some kids had Juneteenth. Juneteenth had the added obscurity of happening outside of the school year; there were no classroom decorations, special lessons, or school plays to give…
Throughout the series, we’ve covered four of the major ethical movements in philosophy. Here’s a brief recap: Virtue ethics is the belief that well-being comes from having the right personality traits or dispositions. The key to virtue ethics is finding those special skills that, when practiced faithfully, result in ethical behavior. Deontology is the study of duty. According to deontology, acting…
Care ethics is closely related to the rise of feminist voices in philosophy starting in the 1970s. Writers at the time were inspired by the vanguard of feminism — Mary Astell in 1694, Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, and Harriet Taylor Mill in 1869. They pointed out the dominance of men in the history of ethics and sought to understand the impact that such a one-sided approach might have on ethical…
On April 2nd, 2020, Brett Crozier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt ’s commanding officer, was relieved of command. The Navy’s decision to remove Crozier stemmed from a message that the commander wrote to his superiors. The message concerned a developing emergency aboard the Roosevelt : 114 crew members had tested positive for COVID-19 among a total crew of 4,000. Without action, many more sailors would…
Consequentialism became the most popular approach to ethics following the Age of Enlightenment. Writers in the late 18th and early 19th century saw how strict, rule-based, duty-bound theories of ethics resulted in contradictory and often destructive behavior. After Napoleon’s wars and the bloody French Revolution that followed, philosophers wondered how our individual decisions impact the…
Deontology was the result of a surge of new energy in philosophy beginning in the 17th century. After the chaos and destruction of the Black Death, Europeans re-evaluated their relationship to the world around them. Scholars like René Descartes and Isaac Newton took on monumental projects to discover the rules that govern nature. Philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant followed in their…
This essay is an adaptation of a talk I gave at Front, a UX and Product Management conference. If you prefer, you can watch the presentation here . Great companies are defined by their ability to change. Apple changed when they re-hired Steve Jobs. Microsoft changed when they embraced open-source software. Amazon changed when they started selling groceries, and then cloud computing, and then…
Virtue ethics was one of the earliest attempts at defining a language and a logic around ethics. The effort to identify and understand virtues began in Ancient Greece and continues to this day. What is a virtue? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines a virtue as “an excellent trait of character.” It is a disposition, well entrenched in its possessor — something that, as we say, goes all…
Why ethics? The 2010s were a remarkable decade for technology. Day after day, tech lined the front pages of major newspapers, the chyrons of broadcast news, and the glossy sheets of magazines. And in 2019, the trend took a turn: the stories became about the ethics of technology. Not the ethics of future technology — that’s still the realm of science fiction. Not the regular “ethics of AI” or…
A few weeks ago, I jumped into a new job as the head of a design team at a startup called SimpleHealth . One of my first tasks is to kick off a big brand update. Full creative control, clear product/market fit, a long timeline — this is going to be a breeze. Right? Only, I asked myself a question that — honestly — I don’t think I’ve asked in my 15-year career. What is a brand? This is a question…
Design feedback is one of the challenges I return to over and over again. It never seems to get easier, no matter how many times I practice or how many different tactics and frameworks I try. Recently, I did my first rounds of feedback with a new team. Once again, I was nervous. To try and ease the uncertainty, I wrote a guide to feedback based on my past experience, and shared it with the team.…
The attention economy is booming. While advertising, e-commerce, and social media are dominated by monopolies, the market for our attention is flush with competition. New movie studios, VR platforms, streaming services, and merchandisable cinematic universes are launched every day. They win Emmys. They win Oscars. They win Grammys and Golden Globes. But tech’s push into entertainment isn’t about…
Let’s talk about Luddites. The actual, real, historical Luddites. “Luddite” was the label given to a group of English workers’ rights activists in the early 19th century. They owe their name to a man who may never have existed — Ned Ludd. The Luddites were working-class people and artisans. They were reacting to the wave of industrialization that was gathering strength and threatening to overwhelm…
So many words take on different meanings the minute you get to work. Culture no longer means a shared identity in art, music, food, and dance. Engagement no longer means a sustained, meaningful connection. Other words undergo smaller transformations. The differences in meaning are slight, but they matter. Take alignment, for example: outside of work, only physical things like brakes and paragraphs…
A/B testing began with beer. At the turn of the 20th century, William Sealy Gosset was exploring new ways of running experiments on his production line. Gosset was trying to improve the quality of Guinness’s signature stout but couldn’t afford to run large-scale experiments on all the variables in play. Fortunately, in addition to being an astute brewer, Gosset was a statistician; he had a hunch…
I read 25 books in 2019. That’s slightly more than last year, largely due to my discovery of the Kindle iOS and MacOS apps. The iOS can scroll continuously instead of flipping between discrete pages, which is ideal for the kind of non-fiction books I like to read. I still read on the Kindle itself, but that’s reserved for fiction and text I want to spend a little more time with. I’ve also started…
Here’s a common problem: a design team creates a design system. They craft beautiful documentation, crystal-clear guidelines, and meticulously organized files. But the design system never gains traction. Engineers don’t use it, and other designers quickly stop maintaining it. It fails to deliver the outcomes described in myriad case studies, blog posts, and conference talks. This has happened to…
Design systems enable designers and developers to quickly create quality software on a massive scale. As the needs of software-driven businesses grow even larger, design systems are evolving — they are beginning to look and work like APIs. In software development, “API” stands for “Application Programming Interface.” An API is a reliable way for two or more programs to cooperate. It allows…
You can read this article on UX Booth .
Machine learning is a powerful tool that drives everything from curated content recommendations to optimized user interfaces. With Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon leading the charge, machine learning is becoming deeply integrated into everyday product experiences. This means that digital product designers need to get familiar with machine learning. Wielding machine learning might be a niche…
This is the Müller-Lyer illusion. You’ve probably seen 1 it before: it consists of two lines, each with forked ends. The middle portion of the top line looks longer than the middle portion of the bottom line. However, when you measure the length of each middle portion, they are the exact same length. There are many illusions like this. Are the shapes in this image moving? Is there a spiral in this…