Why it's designed that way.
The forms, flows, and rebrands everyone's already frustrated by, and the design reasoning nobody explains, not taste, but constraint.
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4 design decisions worth a second look.
- Why an AI can deny your loan but legally can't tell you the real reason
- The AI accessibility fix that got its own seller fined by the FTC
- Why the same website looks different depending on where you're standing
- Why your airplane seatbelt opens the opposite way from your car's
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About Jon
I've spent most of my career sitting in rooms where someone points at a screen and asks why it looks so bad. Sometimes it actually is bad. But a lot of the time it's a form legal rewrote three times. It's a button that can't be that color because of a licensing deal. It's a flow that asks the same question twice because two departments each need their own answer. Design lives inside those constraints, and stacked up over enough years, they're what actually turns a decent product into a mess. Nobody in the room ever says that part out loud. The screen just gets blamed instead.
That's basically the whole newsletter. Every issue, I pick something everyone's already annoyed by and trace it back to the actual rule that made a designer choose that.
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