Career UX/UI
Career advice for product and UX/UI designers, from interview questions and portfolio tips to advancing early in the industry, written from almost 20 real years working as a genuine UX Designer here in Wellington, New Zealand.
Claude Assist: Flip the narrative with reverse prompting
How reverse prompting, Claude asking the questions instead of me writing the brief, finally got my ideas out of my head and onto the screen without losing my own voice somewhere along the way. A method I'll genuinely keep using going.
How to advance early on in your UX/UI design career
Relax, this isn't a "buy my course" article, I promise you. No funnel, no upsell waiting at the end, just what's genuinely worked for me across almost 20 years of working as a UX/UI designer. Just what I wish someone had told me earlier on.
10-step UX/UI design process to deliver products people love
"What's your design process?" I get asked this constantly, and for years I genuinely didn't have a real answer. This is the exact 10-step process I finally wrote down, from initial brief through to final delivery to a client.
Claude Assist: Product design UX/UI portfolio rebuild
Six weeks of nights and weekends, hundreds of AI prompts, and one very old, PHP-patched website. Here's everything I learned rebuilding my UX/UI portfolio from the ground up, low-code, on WordPress. Every mistake included, nothing glossed.
Designers “should”… choose their own adventure
A pushback on the "designers should" genre of advice, this one included. Whether it's coding, degrees or portfolios, here are some honest alternatives to help you make up your own mind instead of following someone else's rulebook.
32 UX certifications: Interaction Design Foundation courses
After almost 20 years in UX/UI, I wanted some formal qualifications behind me. 32 courses in with the Interaction Design Foundation, covering everything from design thinking and research through to AI, accessibility and mobile UX.
Essentials for home to enhance your work-life balance
Work-life balance sounds like something you fix with one big decision. Mine came together from a stack of much smaller ones, starting with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones I bought almost by accident a few years back.
Questions I ask when interviewing & applying for UX roles
The questions I actually ask when interviewing for a UX/UI design role, plus the frameworks, from the three lenses of innovation through to the double diamond, that shape how I work once hired. Questions that reveal more than a resume ever.
Victoria University: Designing a police dispatch dashboard
Whenever I meet people about new roles, they ask me to explain my process. This university paper is where I first properly wrote it down, a week-by-week UX breakdown designing a police dispatch dashboard from brief to prototype.
Looking for the ideal Wellington Product Design UX/UI role
"What's the problem you're trying to solve?" That's usually my first question when exploring a new opportunity, and honestly, the answer carries a lot of weight. Here's what my ideal Product Design UX/UI role would actually look like.