I was sitting on the couch clearing out emails one night not too long ago with the news playing in the background when my ears perked up to a headline about Facebook. The headline was something to the effect of the Facebook board to decide on Donald Trump ban.

We all know how that turned out. But I remember becoming incredulous over this whole storyline as the days passed. In what world, I thought, could someone pull the kind of shit Donald Trump pulled and not be immediately banned from a platform?

I mean if this was Donnie Trump Jr…

Why would anyone want to be a designer? I‘ve wondered this more than once and even written entire articles around the topic.

From the outside looking in, I get it. What initially fuels our desire to become designers is often far different from what motivates us to remain designers. Many of those in the early stages of exploring design as a career option will undoubtedly be swept up in the flashy glitz we only see as outsiders looking in. But there’s a point early in any design career where the work begins. There is a point where reality sets in.

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I’m scared shitless of showing my designs. More than a decade as a designer has not cured me of this fear.

I fear the negative feedback I am sure will come. But I fear positive feedback even more. For I will quickly rationalize any positive feedback as superfluous flattery.

It’s a paradox where the negative feedback crushes me and the positive feedback is never enough to quell the appetite of my fragile ego. It isn’t easy to write about myself this way. But it is the truth.

This is still the one key aspect of UX design that can raise…

“What’s your superpower?”

I was seated across from the hiring manager in a swanky downtown Chicago office on Michigan Avenue. The interview had been going well until she asked what was arguably a cliched question — cliched even for ten years ago. She leveled her eyes and gave me a look as if this question were the sole deciding factor in her hiring decision.

What was my superpower?

If I could have shot flesh-melting lasers out of my eyes at that point, I might have.

I understood what the question was really asking for. It was a question designed to…

It’s one of those days where everything went right. The design problems that had been plaguing you for days or weeks suddenly fell away as you found the right solutions. Everything snapped into place like a hand-crafted jigsaw puzzle.

You got it. Now you just have to sell it.

This is where other problems, new problems, typically come to light. Somewhere in the middle of your design presentation, someone says those four words you are all too familiar with — we can’t do that. It might be a developer or someone on the business side or, even worse, a stakeholder.

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This is that time of year where the ritualistic end-of-year articles begin popping up — Looking Back at 2020 or 2020 in Retrospect. There always seem to be scores of articles predicting future design trends and the future of the user experience. That’s not what this is.

While I do harbor a certain fascination with our species’ ability to establish temporal landmarks and treat December 31st as distinct and different from January 1st, I don’t entertain any fantasies around the clean slate idea of closing out one year and beginning another. …

My first telemedicine project, by even the most generous assessment, was a disaster on multiple levels. It was supposed to be a simple project — an academic study in geriatrics funded by federal grant money. We were going remotely hold exercise classes for aged patients and measure their progress over a certain period of time. The grant proposal was far more detailed than that, I’m sure. But the gist of it was we were going to “Zoom” patients into multiple weekly exercise classes and see if their vital signs and health improved over the duration of the program.

Simple enough…except…

What if healthcare were more like the airline industry? I’m not talking about the bad seating and the stale pretzels, nor am I considering herding people into doctors’ offices like cattle or overcharging them for services. Our healthcare system already does that. No, I’m particularly interested in those loyalty programs. You know, the ones where you get a special status — like Gold Member or even the highly coveted Platinum Plus Member.

In this scenario, you could obtain VIP status in large healthcare networks or maybe even an entire national network. This would afford you head of the line privileges…