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.
- The AI answer at the top of Google that won’t show its work
- Why an AI that guesses your age within two years still isn’t allowed to
- The card that gets declined with no reason, and no way to argue
- The AI accessibility widget the FTC fined — and lawyers now use as evidence
Sample Crumbs
The Pattern Library
Designing Financial Flows
Beta · 5 patterns · $39
The same thinking, turned into a working tool. Five regulated financial-services flows — KYC, APR disclosure, adverse action, privacy consent, accessible authentication — each paired with a Regulatory Breadcrumb: the rule that shapes it, what the rule requires, and where it stops and your design judgment starts.
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.
More about me→