I have deep experience in product and API design, and specialize in:
- Creative products, especially those that facilitate web design and development, either for professional web developers and designers, as well as products democratizing it and making it accessible to a wider audience.
- API Design, especially for the Web
With my unique combination of usability/product and deep software engineering expertise, I can help you design user interfaces and/or APIs that users love, while using my deep technical expertise to prioritize directions that maximize Impact/Effort.
My involvement can range from async design reviews / audits, to mentorship sessions with your team, and even hands-on research work.
Why me?
My software engineering expertise combined with my usability and product design background give me a unique ability to design solutions that balance user needs and implementation effort.
- I have launched dozens of software artifacts for developers, which often succeeded against competition mainly on the basis of superior UX/DX.
- I have designed numerous web platform features that have shipped in every browser and are used by millions of developers.
- I have performed or assisted in over 100 design reviews of new web platform features during my tenure as a W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) member. I was elected in the W3C TAG on the basis of my usability and API design expertise.
- I have worked as Product Lead at Font Awesome, the company behind the world’s most popular icon toolkit, used in one third of all websites in the world.
- I hold a PhD in Usability (Human-Computer Interaction) & Innovation from MIT
- I have taught usability to MIT students for years through a novel course I co-designed and co-taught with David Karger, combining my two passions: usability and web technologies.
- I have published peer-reviewed research in top-tier academic venues in the field of usability and API design.
You can read the following essays and case studies I have written to understand my philosophy around product design:
- In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam
- The Hovercar Framework for Deliberate Product Design
- Context Chips in Survey Design: “Okay, but how does it feel?”
- Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit
Design Reviews
Broadly speaking, a design review is a structured process where an expert evaluates a product or API against usability principles and best practices, identifying potential issues and areas for improvement. The deliverable is a report that outlines the findings, including specific usability issues, potential solutions, and recommendations for improvement.
A good design review can uncover several usability issues, saving your company hours of user testing and development time. It can also be completed much faster than user testing (typically 1-3 weeks), as it does not require recruiting participants, scheduling sessions, and analyzing results. It is not a substitute for user testing, but rather a way to make the most of it, by getting a good chunk of usability issues out of the way before that stage.
Design reviews can be conducted at all stages in the design cycle, provided that there is a prototype with sufficient detail. Since they are based on inspection, as opposed to actual use by a real user, they can be used to evaluate much more abstract or scoped down versions of a user interface that would be hard or impossible to test with participants, e.g. a set of specifications, an isolated segment of a design, such as a single dialog box, or a microinteraction.
You can read more about design reviews in this excellent overview by Nielsen Norman Group. While there are many UX firms that do design reviews (NNGroup above being an excellent example), when it comes to domain-specific products (such as design or development tools), for a good design review you need both deep usability expertise and the domain expertise to understand the product and its users. That’s where I come in.
API Design
API Design is UI Design, but doing user research of these types of UIs does require a very specific type of expertise. In addition to design reviews, interviews, or surveys, I am one of the few usability researchers that have run user studies where the UI being tested was purely textual (e.g. a programming language or API), and I can help you do the same.