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UX Design Learning Articles

UX design learning lessons and essays on the craft: typography, colour, patterns, usability, working with clients and clear language. Each one is a piece of the learning path, and many come straight from the free DesignPath courses.

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Client & Stakeholder Management3 min readMembers

Briefs

A client sends four paragraphs and a link to a competitor. Nobody writes anything down, and two weeks later you each remember a different agreement.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Input Types & Pickers

A text box and a dropdown are the two defaults, and both are wrong more often than they are right. The control decides how many taps the answer costs, which keyboard opens on a phone, and whether the format can be wrong at all.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Multi-Step Forms & Wizards

A team splits its thirty-field application into five steps and the completion rate goes down. Nothing was removed, and the form now announces that the work is five screens long. Splitting a form is a real fix for a real problem, and it only works when the cuts and everything between the screens are designed.

Four bars of decreasing width and weight, the longest one marked with a pink dot

Craft5 min read

What Actually Makes a Design Good

You can learn the tools in a month. Knowing whether the result is any good takes longer, and nobody really teaches it.

A pink card cut into the shape of a speech bubble, lying on a white surface

Client & Stakeholder Management5 min read

Foundations of Clear Communication

Designers want the work to speak for itself. It rarely does. A good idea argued badly usually loses to a weaker idea argued well, so communication is what decides whether your design survives the room.

A single sharpened pencil tip on a plain gray background

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Writing Clearly

You became a designer to design, and most of your working day is writing: Slack messages, tickets, docs, feedback. Your work travels to other people as words long before it travels as screens.

A white megaphone hanging against a flat orange wall

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Argumenting Design Decisions

Being understood isn't the same as being agreed with. Clarity gets your idea across the table intact. Persuasion is what moves people who weigh your design in revenue, risk and roadmap space.

A laptop showing a grid of faces on a video call, beside a green mug

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Presentations & Demos

Presenting is two skills wearing one name: the thing you build, and the way you deliver it live. A great deck delivered at speed loses, and a confident delivery of a muddled deck confuses.

A small bronze Thinker figurine sitting against a white brick wall

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Communicating as an Introvert

Most communication advice assumes the extrovert ideal: speak up faster, network harder, think out loud. Jung named introversion in 1921 and it never meant shy, and the route to the same rooms runs through preparation.

A white chess king standing in the middle of a field of black pawns

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Negotiation & Difficult Conversations

The talks you dread - pushing back, delivering bad news, asking for more money - are the ones that shape your career most. This module makes them less scary by giving you a method instead of nerves.

The word TEAM spelled out in four patterned wooden letters

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Communicating Across Teams & Org Types

What works in a five-person startup will get you ignored at a 5,000-person enterprise, and vice versa. How you communicate has to flex to the size, stage, and shape of the place you're in. This module shows you how to read the room - at the scale of the whole company.

An open notebook, a phone and a cup of coffee laid out on a pale green desk

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Finding & Bidding for Work

Freelancing lives or dies on a steady flow of work, and the designers who struggle are usually strong at design and unpracticed at finding clients. The search has to run while you are busy.

A wooden abacus with rows of blue, yellow, green and red beads

Client & Stakeholder Management3 min read

Proposals, Pricing & Contracts

A client said yes to talking - now you have to turn that interest into a signed, well-scoped, fairly-priced deal. This module covers the paperwork that protects you: proposals, pricing, scope, and contracts.

Four feedback faces from unhappy to happy, with a hand ticking the happiest

Client & Stakeholder Management4 min read

Running the Client Relationship

Clients forget the pixels and remember the experience of working with you - whether you were reliable, clear, and easy to trust. This module is about the communication that runs through a live project and turns one client into a repeat one.

The same card twice, once on white and once on a near-black surface

Learning4 min read

Dark Mode Is Not Light Mode Flipped

Dark mode is not an inverted version of light mode. It's a parallel set of decisions about surface, contrast, and color behavior in low light.

A large serif Aa with its sidebearings and cap line drawn in

Learning4 min read

What Makes a Good Typeface

Most designers can tell when a typeface feels off. Fewer can say exactly why. Quality in type has specific, learnable tells.

Ten rounded tiles in two rows, the first three filled solid and the rest left open

Learning7 min read

Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics

Most interface problems aren't mysterious. Someone clicked the wrong button, didn't know the system was loading, or couldn't find their way back.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Using a Pattern Library

Every common interaction has been designed thousands of times, tested against millions of people, and settled into a shape that works. A pattern is that settled shape, and reaching for one is how you save the invention for where it counts.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Authentication UX

Strong authentication wants complexity. The person at the screen wants to get in. Push complexity too far and users route around you with reused passwords and sticky notes, which leaves you less secure than when you started.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Underlined Text

Taking the underline off a link looks like a small styling decision. It is a decision about who can find the link at all, and it is made most often by people who can see the color perfectly well.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

File Upload

Somebody waits three minutes for a file to arrive and gets one line saying the upload did not work. The rules that would have stopped it were on the page all along, underneath the button, in gray.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Live Validation

Flagging errors as people type ships as a default best practice and usually backfires. It interrupts unfinished work, misfires on real names and real phone numbers, and promises a green tick the server later refuses. Late validation wins almost every time.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Error Messages

Error messages get written last, read at the worst possible moment, and blamed first. The distance between a dead end and a recovery is almost entirely design: which kind of error it is, where the message sits, what it says, and whether anyone can perceive it.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Toggle Buttons

In one study of 27 toggle designs, the most common treatment in the wild, red for off and green for on, produced a 32.5% error rate. A control this small has one job, and half of getting it right is deciding whether it should be a switch at all.

UX Patterns4 min readMembers

Hidden vs Disabled

A greyed-out button is the reflex answer, and it is often the wrong one. Whether a control should be hidden, disabled, read-only or left alone comes down to one question, and the rest of this module is what to do once you have answered it.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Settings & Preferences

Jared Spool collected several hundred Word settings files and found fewer than 5% of people had changed any of the 150 settings. The defaults are the product, and the settings screen is where a team hides the decisions it could not make.

UX Patterns4 min readMembers

Loading & Skeletons

Every product waits on something, and the wait is designed whether anybody decided to or not. Two products with identical response times can feel a second apart, and the difference is entirely in what the screen does while nothing has arrived.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Empty States

The blank screen a new person meets before they have added anything is often their first real look at the product. It is also the one screen that only appears when the designer is not looking, so it ships saying No data.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Notifications & Toasts

Every event in a product produces the same small box in the corner, so people stop reading them, and the one that mattered goes past unread. Feedback is a ladder from barely there to stop everything, and most teams only use one rung.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Modals, Dialogs & Sheets

A modal stops everything and demands an answer, which makes it the most expensive component in any product. Four teams adding one each to the same screen is how a product ends up interrupting people on the way to what they came for.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Undo

Nielsen's third heuristic asks for a clearly marked emergency exit. Most products answer it with a confirmation dialog, which asks somebody to be certain in advance instead of letting them be wrong for ten seconds.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Tabs & Segmented Controls

Tabs promise that everything behind them is an alternative to everything else. Most of the trouble with the pattern comes from putting something behind a tab that was never an alternative at all.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Accordions & Disclosure

Collapsing content makes a page look shorter without making it smaller. Everything hidden is content somebody has to choose to reveal, and most of them will not.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Back Button

Back was 41% of all navigation actions in 1994 and 14.3% a decade later. The drop tracks the web becoming applications, where a press of back is an undo for whatever just happened rather than a request for the previous document.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Breadcrumbs

A trail makes three promises at once. Every ancestor is somewhere you can go, the separator says the left contains the right, and the last item says you are here. Every problem with the pattern is one of the three being broken.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Sticky Menus

Pinning a bar to the top of the screen is a default in most design systems. It costs the same pixels on every screen of every session, and the pixels are charged against the thing people came for.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Mega Dropdowns

A mega menu shows a whole level of the site at once, hanging off one word in a header. It works when the structure underneath it is good, and nothing about the panel can rescue a structure that is not.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Search UX

Somebody who searches has already told you exactly what they want, in their own words. Baymard's 2026 benchmark still finds 56% of sites with mediocre or worse search, which makes it the clearest signal most products throw away.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Infinite Scroll

A list that loads forever is smooth in a demo and expensive in production. It trades orientation and return for continuous browsing, which is the right trade for a feed and the wrong one for almost everything else.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Data Tables & Filtering

A table of ten thousand rows is useless as ten thousand rows. What makes it work is everything around the rows: what you cut, what you sort by, what you can act on, and what survives a phone.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Onboarding & Activation

Signups arrive in the numbers marketing promised and two thirds never come back. The gap sits between trying the product and understanding it well enough to return, which is where most products leak their growth.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Carousels

Erik Runyon measured a university home page carousel at barely 1% click-through, with 84% of those clicks landing on the first slide. Four teams had content in it and three of them were talking to nobody.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Pricing Pages

Nobody reads a pricing page. They compare it, in a sweep across rows with a periodic glance back at the headers, and the layout either supports that or gets abandoned.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Feature Comparison Tables

A comparison table exists for the purchase somebody agonizes over, where too many similar options and a real cost of choosing wrong produce a freeze. It only works if the data underneath it is complete.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Reviews & Testimonials

A shop has forty reviews and every one is five stars, because only happy customers were ever asked. Purchase likelihood peaks somewhere near 4.5 and falls as it approaches a perfect score.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Navigation Queries

Somebody arrives knowing exactly what they want to do and has to reverse-engineer an organization chart to find it. A navigation query asks for the intent instead, and routes from there.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Birthday Picker

Asking for a birthday looks like the easiest field on the form, so designers reach for a calendar or three dropdowns to prevent mistakes. Both create more friction than they prevent, and a field people struggle with returns worse data, not better.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Language Selector

A Dutch traveler opens the site from a hotel in Tokyo and lands in Japanese. Location was read as language, which is the assumption underneath almost every problem with this component.

UX Patterns3 min readMembers

Closed Captions & Subtitles

Ofcom found 7.5 million people in the UK using subtitles, 18% of the population, of whom only 1.5 million were deaf or hard of hearing. Four out of five caption users can hear the audio perfectly well.

Thinking4 min read

The Door That Taught Me About Design

The door you push when it clearly says pull, then glance around hoping nobody saw. There's a whole idea in that moment.