Onboarding without a tour
A talk for product teams on checklists, empty states and the first useful minute.
Notes on practice
Essays on onboarding, settings, research and running a one-person studio. About one a month, never about tools.
All writing 18 essays
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Settings 9 min
Settings pages are where trust is won or lost
People open settings when something has gone wrong. What they find there decides whether they stay.
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Onboarding 7 min
A checklist beats a product tour
Tours explain the product. Checklists get people to the first useful minute.
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Writing 6 min
Write the error message first
If you can't explain what went wrong in one sentence, the screen isn't finished.
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Running a practice 11 min
How I price a project without counting hours
Fixed prices, one page, and the three questions I ask before I write a number down.
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Research 8 min
Four days on a farm taught me more than forty calls
What changed in the Plotwise app after I watched people use it with gloves on.
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Settings 7 min
Name the role, not the permission
Thirty-eight checkboxes became five roles with names a manager would use out loud.
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Onboarding 5 min
Empty states are onboarding too
The first screen most people see is an empty one. Treat it like the welcome it is.
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Running a practice 12 min
Ten years of working alone, in ten notes
What I would tell myself in 2015, mostly about saying no earlier and writing things down.
Talks and side projects
Things that didn't fit in an essay.
Label every setting as a promise
A one-page worksheet for rewriting settings labels as sentences.
Fieldwork research kit
A printable notebook for research visits, in its sixth edition. Free, updated every spring.
Free48 pages