A design engineer based in Montreal, Canada. Currently helping users build their worlds and write their stories at . I love to shape how software works and feels.
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Vale
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See allVelocity and craft
The tools are fast. Anyone who has used them for a week knows it. A user flow gets designed in a day. A component library gets built in a week.
All of that is true, and it is the least interesting part. The tools accelerate production and nothing else. The person looking at your work still perceives it at the same speed they always have. Everything that separates one body of work from another lives in that gap, and the question worth answering is how to take the speed without losing the judgment.
Production used to be a real skill. It stayed scarce for exactly as long as it stayed hard, and it stopped being hard for everyone at the same time.
A skill everyone has stops telling anyone apart. Distinction moves to whatever is still scarce.
Design engineering a collaborate popover
I’ve designed and built many UIs over the years, so intuition plays a big role in recognizing when an interface can be improved. When something feels off about an interaction, that feeling is compressing experience into a signal before you can put theory behind it. The design vocabulary helps you validate and communicate it, but the noticing comes first.
Still, validated intuition makes for stronger design decisions, and validation doesn’t require a formal study. Lightweight methods like heuristic evaluation and discount usability testing[^1] surface most issues.
Let’s look at the example above, a share and collaborate popover. My intuition says the interaction is overly complex and could be simplified. Let’s break it down.
The “Add people” input suggests that clicking on it should let us type and search for users to add. Instead, it navigates to a second screen. This closely resembles a standard input field prevalent across the web, so it should behave like one. This false affordance goes against Jakob’s Law[^2][^3] and introduces unnecessary cognitive load.