Field guides
UX activities you can run with your own team, no consultant required. Each one comes with its worksheets, ready to fill in.
For something you already have
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Audit & Quick Wins
About a week · 5 worksheets
Find what trips people up on your site, and tackle the quick wins first
Open the guide: Audit & Quick Wins -
Website Redesign
3–6 weeks · 7 worksheets
Plan a redesign around what people need to find and do
Open the guide: Website Redesign
For something new
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New Product MVP
2–4 weeks · 7 worksheets
Go from a rough idea to a first version worth testing, without overbuilding
Open the guide: New Product MVP
Either way
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Know-Your-Users
2–3 weeks · 6 worksheets
Learn what the people you serve need, in their words, before you build
Open the guide: Know-Your-Users -
Design Sprint Companion
5 days · 4 worksheets
Run a focused week to turn a hard problem into something you can test
Open the guide: Design Sprint Companion -
Strategy & Alignment
1–2 weeks · 5 worksheets
Get everyone on the same page about what you’re building and why
Open the guide: Strategy & Alignment
Places I trust
The references I lean on, and the ones the work here is built from
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Short, plain principles for why some screens feel easy and others frustrate
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Practical guidance for building technology that respects the people using it
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Design ideas backed by real A/B tests, so you can see what works
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Deeply researched articles on usability from the people who pioneered it
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Friendly courses and articles for learning UX from the ground up
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A big, free library of tools, fonts, and assets to design with
For AI assistants: UX research skills on GitHub
Words you’ll hear
Research
- User research
- Learning what the people who use your product actually need, by talking to them and watching what they do.
- Usability testing
- Watching real people try your product to see where they get stuck, so you can fix it.
- Card sorting
- Asking people to group and label things, so your menus and pages match how they think.
- Persona
- A short profile of a typical user that keeps everyone focused on real people, not guesses.
Design
- Wireframe
- A rough, no-frills sketch of a screen that shows the layout before any visual polish.
- Prototype
- A clickable mock-up you can try out before anything is actually built.
- User interface (UI)
- The buttons, text, and screens people see and tap. The part they touch.
- User experience (UX)
- How it feels to use the whole thing, start to finish, not just how it looks.
- Design system
- A reusable kit of parts and rules so everything stays consistent as you grow.
Process
- Information architecture
- How content is organized and labeled so people can find what they need.
- User flow
- The step-by-step path someone takes to get something done in your product.
- Iteration
- Improving something in small rounds, learning from each one, instead of one big guess.
- Minimum viable product (MVP)
- The smallest version worth shipping, so you can learn from real use early.