Writing on product work that we keep coming back to, gathered from across the internet.
Every title opens the original on the publisher’s own site. We point at this writing and credit the people who wrote it. We do not host it.
Ten broad principles derived from analysing 249 usability problems, unchanged since 1994 and still the common vocabulary of interface critique. Vague feedback in a design review usually becomes specific the moment someone names which heuristic is being broken.
Defines the parts of a journey map, the actor, the scenario, the phases and the emotional line running underneath them. Read it before commissioning one, since a map assembled without research describes the room it was drawn in rather than the customer.
Sets out the difference between a style guide, a component library and a full design system, and what each one costs to keep alive once it exists. Useful when a team wants to start one and needs to understand the commitment first.
A structured reading path through interface copy, from microcopy and error messages through to voice, tone and localisation. Aimed at people who write the words inside a product without ever having been taught how.
A short run of sketches showing how the same problem looks to someone starting out and to someone who has done the work for a decade. Zhuo uses it to make a point about scope and judgement that carries well beyond design.
Meeting a technical standard and being genuinely usable by disabled people are different bars, and this piece is about the space between them. Worth reading if your team treats a passing audit as the end of the work.
Adams argues that design judged on how a screenshot looks drifts away from the problem the work was meant to solve. What he offers instead is a sequence, starting from the job and the outcome and reaching the pixels last.
The article that named responsive design and set out the fluid grid, flexible image and media query combination behind it. More than a decade on it remains the clearest statement of why a layout should adapt rather than fork.