dickover n. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

Similarly there are the dickbar

Level 1: What they say
Level 2: What they think & feel
Level 3: What they do
Level 4: Why they do it

There is for example different reasons for a cancellation: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7140680577552117760/

The wheel of emotions https://uca.edu/bewell/files/2020/11/Feelings-Wheel-Learn-How-to-Label-Your-Feelings.pdf

Observe instead of asking whereas possible: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/05/four-levels-customer-understanding/#observe-and-diagnose-don-t-validate

Practical ways to uncover user needs:

• Exposure hours, when every employee must be exposed to their customers for at least 2 hours every 6–12 weeks.
• Live UX testing, where we invite everyone in the company to join and observe.
• Co-design with users, where we show new features and ask users to rank them.
• Helpdesk insights, where we ask for frequent complaints and questions from the support every 3–6 months.
• Listening in, where we tune in on a customer service call, web chat, or eavesdrop where users hang out.

1. Fixing issues in the design phase is 100 times cheaper

2. Performance impacts user experience

3. Your site has 50 milliseconds to impress your customers

4. Hick’s Law: The cost of overwhelm

   Stakeholders often think “more options” equals “more value.” Psychology proves the opposite. Hick’s Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number of options available.

5. White space improves comprehension

6. The power of “fake” progress

7. Make your content readable: roper typography, specifically line spacing (leading) and paragraph width, can increase content comprehension and reading speed by up to 20%.

8. Your users only read 20% of your content

9. User testing with 5 people is the magic number

10. The financial ROI of 9 900%

1. Clarity is job #1
2. Interfaces exist to enable interaction
3. Conserve attention at all costs
4. Keep users in control
5. Direct manipulation is best
6. One primary action per screen
7. Keep secondary actions secondary
8. Provide a natural next step
9. Appearance follows behavior
10. Consistency matters
11. Strong visual hierarchies work best
12. Smart organization reduces cognitive load
13. Highlight, don't determine, with color
14. Progressive disclosure
15. Help people inline
16. A crucial moment: the zero state
17. Great design is invisible
18. Build on other design disciplines
19. Interfaces exist to be used

How to make them better. If the UX priority is the advertising or subscription, no doubt there is also clear quickwins.

Country -> Zip -> ...

Autocompletes the user input to avoid errors.

• Use inputmode="numeric" for a ZIP code
• work with autofill and its autocomplete attributes: postal-code, address-line1, country
• country first in case of international addresses

See the service for it: https://api.zippopotam.us/

I really enjoy the examples provided on the page.

Fitts's Law

The time required to move to a target is a function of the target's size and distance from the starting point.

The target such as buttons must be bigger.

HIck's law:

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

Miller's law:

The average person can hold about 7 (plus or minus 2) items in working memory at any given time

Format the informations correctly (Phone, Card, Social, Serial, Currency)

Doherty Threshold:

Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace that ensures neither has to wait on the other. The threshold is 400 milliseconds.

I would say "instant" is reach under 200ms

Postel's law:

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.6

The more formats you accept, the less friction people experience. Validate generously, format strictly.

That's awesome for dev and UX feedback. It w. It follows the trend that the tool only exports into a human readable format and that's more than enough.
The UI or the interpretation of the JSON can be built later on.

Uxnote is an annotation bar for mockups and websites. Drop a single script to get text highlights, element pins, numbered cards, color theming, a dimmed focus mode, import/export, and email handoff. No plugin and no backend required.

It's similar to https://loomflows.com/ but minimalistic and provide full-control over the data.

The goal was to show how you can use patterns from the GOV.UK Design System to design complex case working systems.

The prototype was complete user flows with URL changes. No validators, only examples of flows with the existing design system.

That’s 100x harder to do with Figma. The audience is focused on the Figma navigation instead of experiencing the design. It also hides problems: transitions, loading states, error states adn edge cases.

Done subtly and in moderation scroll fade can look fine†. Alas and to my dismay, subtlety is not a virtue of scroll fade proponents. Nor is timing. I’ve built too many websites that got almost to the finish line before I was hit with a generic scroll fade request. Fade what? Everything! Make everything fade into view! It’s too static, you know? Make it pop!

Winning arguments against: accessibility, impact on core web vitals

Friction exists to make us notice what we’re doing. [...] Bad friction is friction without purpose. It exists by accident, or through neglect. It asks more from the user without offering anything in return. [...] Good friction is different. It’s intentional. It’s added with a clear reason, and it earns its place in the experience — often through utility.

Good frictions:

• Holding ⌘Q to quit a browser session is a deliberate pause before closing everything
• A brief delay after sending an email, allowing you to undo before it’s final
• Intentional pagination instead of infinite scrolling is progress with awareness
• A warning when an email mentions an attachment but none is included is a small check before sending

The use of a lot of icons in menus is a bad pattern.
12px icons are also too small for details.

A contact page that avoid contact, exactly.

The problem was, they were thinking about their inspiration sites from an aesthetic point of view, not from a user experience perspective

I see this example so much! https://res.cloudinary.com/nicchan/image/upload/w_752,h_718,c_lfill,f_auto/v1765177043/contact

The discounting rates led the client to undervalue the team and treat them as executors rather than experts. They argue that clients (and sometimes designers) often dismiss early design phases like discovery, and wireframing as boring hurdles to reach visual branding, but it's so much important! The takeaway is that service providers should educate clients on why these foundational steps matter, because understanding the “why” and getting structure right is essential for good design—even if it’s less exciting than prototyping or visual identity.

#blogging

By blogging, I’m putting a body of work out there that communicates my values and ethos. While much of the details of my client work has to remain private, these posts can be public, and hopefully they can help me find people who resonate with what I have to offer. Or you know, just be bold enough to communicate ‘Fuck off’ to those who don’t!

Perfect in combination with the UX Devil method: find the worst pattern possible, and create the UI to avoid this UX Devil.

Numéro fictif utilisable en France:
01 99 00
02 61 91
03 53 01
04 65 71
05 36 49
06 39 98

Source: https://a42.fr/numeros-fictifs