Notes & essays

Onboarding gets the workshops, the animations and the budget. The hundredth visit gets whatever was left. Yet that is the visit that decides whether someone keeps the app.

So I test the second visit first: open the product cold, with yesterday's data, and time how long it takes to do the one thing people came for. Everything in the way of that is a candidate for removal.

When a panel slides in from the right, it says "this came from over there". If it did not, the motion is lying, and people feel it even when they cannot name it.

My rule: animate only what moved, keep it under a third of a second, and always respect "reduce motion". The best animation is often the one you remove.

I sketch every key screen in Arabic and in a Latin language side by side. Icons with direction, number formats and line lengths all change, and it is far cheaper to find out on paper.

The test is simple: if a native reader cannot tell which version came first, the system works.

The people reading a CV have eight seconds and one question: can this person do the job we have? Everything on the page should answer it, in the order they will look.

That is why mine prints on one page, puts results before duties, and lists tools last.