A blog by Jesse Gardner
Like everyone, I’ve been thinking a lot about how and where AI fits into my common workflows. I came across something this morning that made me pause and reflect. It’s a thread about how the Pentagon is using an AI-powered targeting system for military strikes. Technically, they have a “human in the loop” requirement, but the reality is: “When the system produces 1,000 targets in 24 hours, ‘human…
The more I do this work, the more firmly I believe that a well-built design system is critical infrastructure for AI. I’m presenting a talk at Into Design Systems next week about that topic, and it’s chock-full of insights from over 8 months of building out a design system and making it understandable for LLMs. Here’s just a few things I’ll be covering: Reducing randomness, making AI output more…
I gave Claude Code a 5-page PDF form, and in just over an hour, it had turned it into an 8-step web application using components, tokens, and utility classes from the NYS Design System by talking to our new design system MCP server . This is only a test and still needs refinement. Some PDF fields, like a blank text input for work schedule, might not make as much sense in a web application. Some…
One of my goals for 2026 is to write more publicly. Here’s my long-running list of posts I want to write: Context > Probability: Design system as AI infrastructure - Presented at Into Design Systems The psychological complexity of mobile UI: animation, metaphor, and gestures Priming and initial UI decisions Skeuomorphism and laugh tracks How I organize my files (related: how I organize my notes)…
The NYS Design System has been nominated as a finalist in the 2025 Zeroheight Design System Awards ! You’ll find us in the Award for Innovation category. A huge shoutout to Leo Vogel for pioneering Fidelity Modes, the feature selected for the Innovation Award category. Voting only takes a minute and would mean the world for our new team — but don’t wait. Voting closes in a few hours, noon ET on…
I ran a brief accessibility review of the new America by Design website: There’s no skip to content link and no basic landmarks (elements with roles like header , nav , main , footer , etc.) Landmarks like this are standard for keyboard and assistive technology navigation, making navigating the site frustrating at best. Since you can’t “skip to content,” the giant “America by Design” logo at the…
I’m speaking on an accessibility panel at the upcoming New York Digital Government Summit (Thu 9/18)! The audience will be IT directors, CIOs, and other civic tech leaders from across NY State and local government. We’re planning to dig into: Compliance vs user experience Automated vs manual testing The role of automation in accessibility (and its limits) PDF accessibility VPATs/ACRs in…
Big day for New York State’s Human-Centered Design team… our NYC-based crew came together in the new NYC office for the first time! Lucky to be a part of this talented and hard-working group of civil servants. 🗽
“My Friend! you and I have passed our Lives, in Serious Times. I know not whether We have ever Seen any moments more Serious than the present.” John Adams wrote these words over 200 years ago to his once rival Thomas Jefferson, with some sad disillusionment about the increase in political polarization, the tiresome politicking that led Washington to retire, and the way that the story of the…
It’s been a minute since I’ve talked publicly about the design system work we’ve been doing at New York State… Over the last few months, our small (but mighty!) team has been building a connected system of tools and resources to help people that build New York State government applications and sites do it in a way that is consistent, mobile-friendly, and accessible for everyone. I couldn’t be…
18F was just eliminated. You may not have heard of them, but if you live in the United States, you’ve certainly benefitted from their work. They were a part of the General Services Administration and partnered with different government organizations to help with technology modernization efforts. They focused on user-centered design, agile development, and sharing via open source so other…
Recently visited New York City for an accessibility meetup about older adults and digital inclusion. I am privileged to work on a team and with a state that prioritizes and funds making digital government services work for all people. Can’t wait to talk about some of the big things we’ve been working on the last few months.
The scenery ain’t half bad either.
For those of you that don’t know, I work for the state of New York on a human-centered design team. In plain terms, we try do our best to represent the voice of the resident in the midst of technical, policy, and legal complexity. I’m leading user research, and building out several teams that will help the state build digital interfaces consistently and in a way that’s accessible to people with…
In government tech, hiring vendors is often seen as a way of deflecting risk. The thinking goes like this: “If the vendor fails, we can fire them or pass off the blame for poor delivery or missed deadlines.” But if a vendor fails, it’s the resident who suffers. If they can’t access critical government services, they’re not going to blame Deloitte or Accenture. Their government failed them. This is…
New York’s 2024 State of the State priorities got released today, and one of the key CX priorities is building a statewide design system. A design system is critical front-end infrastructure that contributes to a better digital experience for NYS residents in many ways: Consistent front-end UI patterns means a more cohesive and trusted experience across applications and services, which means less…
“How many platforms does your design system support? Which platforms do you support and how are you overcoming the challenges of doing so?” That was the question we discussed in last week’s episode of The Question that I co-hosted with Ben Callahan. It was a fascinating discussion, with lots of great feedback from other practitioners. Ben will probably provide a deep dive soon, but here are some…
On January 23, 2008, I received word that an old friend from college, Sarah (Roegner) O’Dell, had passed away. Two years earlier, her husband, Aaron, had invited me out to a birthday celebration for her. I couldn’t go because I was heading up our New Year’s Eve service at church. I promised to call and promptly forgot. I kept meaning to call, but never did. Then I found out that she was diagnosed…
December 9, 2009 at An Event Apart in San Francisco, Dave Shea stood on stage and declared himself a generalist. His words resonated with me. So much so that I sketched “Dave Shea is a generalist” in my journal and promised myself that if a design hero of mine could do it and find some success, I could make it work too. I’ve always dreamed of a cross-discipline career. When I was a kid, I wanted…
Yesterday, I shared my story about going 10 months without a paycheck. It clearly resonated: in just 1 day, the post got hundreds of comments, 5,000+ reactions, and almost half a million views. But what you don’t see are the dozens of people who messaged me about their own struggles: “I’m scared, I’m nervous… I’m trying to keep a courageous front for my family” “I am definitely putting on a facade…
I haven’t really talked about this publicly, but after I left my last job, things got really tight before I got a new one. I went 10 months without a paycheck and with very little contracting work. I have a family of 6, and we depleted all our non-retirement savings and used credit cards for bills. Things are okay now. We’re living frugally, paying off debt, eating at home, saving up, and letting…
Starting this week, I’ll be joining New York State’s Office of Information Technology Services, tasked with building out a user research team. The team will be focused on improving the usability and accessibility of NYS’s digital services and applications. The governor mentioned this new initiative in this year’s State of the State: "The State employs only a small number of designers who…
After leaving Fox , I spent a couple of months figuring out what was next. The job had required an intense focus on engineering, which stretched me and dramatically increased my expertise in the area. I felt drained, though. I’ve still always had a passion for human-centered design, but the realities of the job didn’t really allow for much of that. While I pondered, I started noticing folks in the…
The federal government just released a modeling project that focuses on life-scenarios instead of personas or archetypes. Since the government practically serves everyone and people engage with those services at specific moments in their life (approaching retirement, recovering from disaster, etc), this approach to evaluating and improving the customer experience seems to make more sense than…
Every year, our family writes down goals for the next year and stashes them into a time capsule (aka a cardboard tube) to be opened the end of the next year. These were my 2022 goals (and new 2023 goals at the end): Visit the Rockies together. In 2013, I visited the Rockies for the first time and fell immediately in love. I attended a CSS conference at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. I can’t…
Two big themes for our 2022 travels: local exploration and work travel. In January, we braved the cold and traveled upstate, visiting the colorful ice castle in Lake George. A recurring theme here in Upstate NY is cold winters (foreshadowing). There were many tears the night we visited the castle, but they quickly froze and the beautiful pictures and hot cocoa afterwards helped us forget all that.…
I’ve got so many updates from 2022 that a single post wouldn’t cut it. That’s not true. I could put it into a single post, but it would be far too long for the modern individual’s dwindling attention span. How will my written words hope to compete with TikTok’s 3.33s average watch time? Not to worry — I’ve cut this into smaller, digestible chunks! 2000 words is hardly digestible, you say?! I’ve…
Confession time: I wrote up a year-end review for our family and realized while writing it that this was a weird year for my family — and it’s largely because of me. Maybe this resonates with you: when I was working my corporate job in the first half of the year, I had money but very little time. Now that I’ve started my own consulting business, I have time but not that much money. I keeping…
A friend considering the solopreneur route recently asked me: “Are there any things that you wish you had done sooner or worried less about? And is there one important foundational reflection, action, or experiment that helped you in some meaningful way?” I’ve been doing this now for a long time, so I thought I’d share my reply here in case others find it helpful: I wish I had been more consistent…
I’m working hard to build a new business, but several folks in the space are miles ahead of me and crushing it. At first, that got me feeling discouraged, but I reminded myself (saying it out loud in case anyone else needs to hear it): You have valuable skills and experience. Stop comparing. Focus on your strengths and get moving!
Friday was my last day at Fox Corporation. I joined Fox last year on their custom platform team, a shared service team providing infrastructure and support for most business units across the organization. While on that team, I helped launch Fox Weather and created comprehensive documentation for folks onboarding to the platform. I went on to manage several client-facing teams. Truly, my favorite…
Roughly translated, that long-winded title means that I’m going to be a liaison between the product and engineering teams that build out the online platform powering nearly all of Fox Corporation’s properties. When I was approached about the job a few weeks back, I felt a bit conflicted. I’ve been publicly vocal about some of my disagreements with Fox News and their editorial choices, so I…
It’s March 11, 2020 — a Wednesday. The world hasn’t completely shut down yet — that will happen Friday the 13th — but things are definitely getting weird. I didn’t have any grand plan around building a community. I’d just been working from home for the last 10 years and knew how challenging and lonely it can be to sit in front of your computer all day not interacting with anybody in any meaningful…
I've been doing some research into randomness lately, and I came across the following excerpts in my reading, which praise the merits of introducing some randomness into our life and our work: In a design process, designers and design researchers often find something that they were not looking for initially. For serendipity to occur, the ideal condition seems to be an open and questioning attitude…
I just wrapped my first live event on Clubhouse : a discussion around Using Content To Grow Our Businesses with Steve Portigal , Martina Hodges-Schell , Becky Buck , Thomas Richardson , and David Holl . If you're not familiar with the Clubhouse app, it's like Snapchat for podcasts. People on the platform can spin up no-video, audio-only rooms and invite people in to chat. This allows for the…
With everyone working from home lately, I thought it might be helpful if I shared a bit about my audio/video setup. Video Before I dive into how I got everything working together, here’s a bullet list of my video setup today: Sony A6000 Dummy battery Elgato Cam Link Amazon Basics tripod Micro-HDMI to HDMI cable This setup is about $750 if you buy everything new. Setting It Up After Dan Mall turned…
When Greg Storey asked me to help migrate Airbag Industries off Movable Type to a modern publishing setup, I was over the moon — for a few reasons. For starters, I’ve been an Airbag fan for a long time. I met Greg almost ten years ago while hanging with Dave Shea in Austin for a SXSW, and I’ve enjoyed his wit and insight over the years. Secondly, Greg told me up front that he wanted to go the…
This is part two of my year in review series. You can start with my 2019 in Review, Part 1 if you’d like. In 2017, I turned 40. Instead of buying a sports car I couldn’t afford, I told my wife I wanted to travel more. But 2017 was also the first year I’d gone back to full-time consulting after 7 years of full-time employment (more on that in a later post), so we didn’t really have the means for…
It’s been a long time since I wrote a year-end review. So long, in fact, that I’ve attempted to capture highlights from multiple years and ended up turning it into a novel. Seems like the longer you go without documenting the big events from a given year, the more you feel like you need to include it in the next year’s review. At some point, all the years begin to blur together, and you end up…
Yesterday, I shared the progress we made on tearing out our old flooring. Today, we start laying the new flooring! I’ll keep things short since it’s been a lot of work and we’re still only halfway finished. We started by laying out the planks we wanted to use. This approach let us easily design the pattern we wanted to use and adjust it before actually locking anything into place. The planks we…
Since we bought our house in 2015, we’ve wanted to replace the flooring on the first floor. The bones of the house were good, but some of the interior cosmetic choices were… well, they just didn’t really match our style. Royal blue carpet with teal walls in the living room? Teal carpet in a dining room? Eggplant, taupe, and orange wood in the kitchen? A few years ago, we painted the walls and the…
In the continuing saga of my renovation plans for the foyer of our house, you know that I’ve torn down the wall closing in our entryway and framed in a new pantry and coat closet in that space. For day 17, I finished the major work by sheetrocking the closet and shiplapping the rear wall. This front wall took a while to frame in because I had to do a lot of math trying to account for jambs and the…
My 6-year-old got a lot of LEGOs for Christmas. I’m not exaggerating… a set of 2000 miscellaneous blocks, several kits, and an army of various characters. And that’s not even counting the LEGO sets my other kids got. A few weeks ago at a friend’s house, he saw a shelf for showcasing LEGO characters, and he asked me if I could help him build a similar shelf. Sounds like a December making project to…
Now that Christmas is finally over, I can share something that Jessica and I made for some of our family members as a Christmas gift. We cut 12" rough cut pine planks about 60" long and stained them with Minwax’s Classic Gray. Then we printed out some large, 6" wide letters (Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended) to use as lettering guides for painting their last names on the sign. Creating crisp lines…
You might have seen the news that over 200 evangelical leaders have signed a public letter condemning Christianity Today’s article that called for the impeachment of Trump. https://twitter.com/ChristianPost/status/1208835392658706435 Are you surprised? I’m not. It’s not enough to praise Trump for the “good” he does for you; you have to keep your mouth shut about his failings or else you’re…
Look, I get it. It wouldn’t be the first time someone thought I should (or even told me to) pipe down about politics. But for those of you who have managed to make it this far, here are a few reasons why I feel compelled to speak up: The current President claims to be a conservative Republican, which I also claim to be. Yet his view of the world and his actions endlessly reveal that he is neither…
When I was a child, my father sat down at the piano and told to play what I felt. If I played a wrong note, he’d say, “There are no mistakes. Work it into the song.” I’d pour my heart out to the keys there in the darkness… truly, no one knows me like the piano . I’ve never been a great technical pianist, but there’s nothing more captivating or cathartic than sitting down at the keys and wandering…
If you’ve been following along with my renovation plans for the foyer of our house, you know that I’ve been doing a lot of “wall unmaking” lately. For day 11, I finally made something instead of just tearing stuff down. This is the wall separating the new closet and pantry. The board on the ground closest to the front door is where the front closet wall/doorway will stand. The front closet will…
A few days ago, I tore down a wall between the living room and the foyer as part of some renovation plans for the foyer of our house. Today, I continued with my “unmaking” making streak and tore down the hallway closet adjacent to the foyer in order to build a new closet facing the entry door and add a walk-in pantry on the backside of the hallway. I really enjoy the open space, even though it’ll…
This is day 9 of my 31 days of making . I’ve always struggled designing my own site, so I decided to treat myself like a client and walk through the full site redesign process… on camera. In this first video, I work through the goals of my site, review what’s working and what’s not on the existing site, and put together a rough project plan by breaking up the projected effort into logical chunks.…