The Planning Inspectorate

Interaction Designer

Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

Department for Education

Ministry of Justice UK

HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS)

Sage

UX Designer

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Frontend Developer/Interaction Designer

KIDLY

Financial Times

JUST EAT

UX Prototyper

I’m an interaction designer and a GDS trained design assessor. I have good knowledge of the GOV.UK Service Manual, GOV.UK Design System, GOV.UK Frontend and GOV.UK Style Guide.

Here’s my story:

When I was 16 years old, I wanted to design logos and websites.

I had an eye for design, but lacked the practical skill to do it. So I ended up going into frontend development which was more technical.

But most of the designers I worked with gave me complicated and inaccessible designs to implement.

Sometimes I’d suggest changes to simplify the design and improve accessibility. But no matter how solid my rationale or how simple my solution, I couldn’t convince the designers to make changes.

I felt frustrated having to go back to my desk to implement designs which were harder to build, inaccessible and slow to load.

As a result, I started to believe that designers only cared about aesthetics.

In 2014, my wife and I had our home renovated just in time for the arrival of our first baby. But three weeks into a new six-month contract, I was let go. I’d never had so much responsibility and so little money.

But I got a new contract as a UX prototyper at Just Eat, the UK’s leading takeaway delivery service.

Prior to this role I wasn’t part of the design process. So by the time designs were given to me to implement, it always felt too late to give feedback and suggest changes.

But at Just Eat I was embedded in the design team where I could influence solutions from the start.

To my surprise, the designers there weren’t just focused on aesthetics; they cared about UX. We did user research, ran A/B tests and tracked performance.

I worked closely with Mark Jenkins, the lead designer. But he wasn’t like the other designers I had worked with before. He listened to what I had to say and valued it. He advocated for doing the most basic thing, doing it quickly and learning. He didn’t fuss over pixels.

Most importantly, he showed me that, not only was it possible to be a designer like this but that it was better to be a designer like this.

For example, we redesigned the checkout journey by using the most basic and accessible solution. The result was an increased conversion of 5% – 37,000 orders a week.

Mark also encouraged me to start a blog. And 2 of my early posts went viral on Hacker News (multiple times over).

I realised I wasn’t alone and that others resonated with my design philosophy.

Now I’m trying to be the designer I wish I got to work with when I was a dev.

You can find links to my newsletter and courses below ↓

Github’s Design System now bans toast messages.

In case you don’t know, toast messages are little messages shown on top of the UI to give feedback about an action that you’ve just taken.

Banning toast messages is an excellent decision because they have bad UX and are terrible for accessibility.

Here’s a few reasons why:

(1) They disappear automatically after a few seconds (at best this is stressful, at worst you’ll miss it)

(2) They obscure the content underneath which is frustrating and slows users down.

(3) They’re hard to spot because they’re small and shown at the edge of the screen.

And there are plenty of other issues which I’ll link to below if you’re keen.

Let’s hope Github bans tooltips next.

Adam Silver

Designer with engineering background | I talk about designing products that are ridiculously simple and accessible to use.

Webpage titled "Toasts" explaining that GitHub no longer uses toast notifications due to accessibility and usability concerns, with an overview and recommendation to avoid them.

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