Notes on the work.
My thoughts about research, design, development, and my journey to becoming a UX Engineer.
- research · my story
Parsing purple: what raid log analysis taught me about reading behavioural data
Before I ever opened GA4 professionally, I was staring at combat logs trying to work out why my healing throughput dipped for four seconds during a boss fight. It turns out reading a raid log and reading a session funnel require almost exactly the same instinct.
15 September 2026 · 7 min readread - Development
Designing child safeguarding into a music practice app from day one
Safeguarding treated as an application-layer feature can be switched off by a bug. Building Jorvik Media's music education apps meant pushing safeguarding down to the database itself, and designing every user flow around a child who can't consent to most of what happens to their data.
11 September 2026 · 9 min readread - UX Laws · Design
Jakob's Law: when following convention is lazy, and when it's correct
Users expect your product to work like the ones they already know. On when following convention is the correct call, when it's a cover for not thinking, and how to design a deviation clearly enough that it reads as intentional.
4 September 2026 · 8 min readread - research · workflow
Reading GA4 and reading a user are two different skills
A dashboard will tell you with total confidence that 68% of users dropped off at step three. It will never tell you why — and the people who assume those two skills are interchangeable are usually the ones shipping the wrong fix.
3 September 2026 · 6 min readread - Neurodivergence · Design · UX Laws · research
Designing for neurodivergent users
Most of what I knew about cognitive load was written for users having a reasonably okay day. This is what changed once I started designing for the worst five minutes of someone's week.
31 August 2026 · 9 min readread - my story · Design · Development
The career-switcher's case study
My entry into this industry started in World of Warcraft. Four years on, training the next batch of career-switchers, here's what I got right, what I got needlessly wrong, and what I'd hand my 2022 self.
18 August 2026 · 9 min readread - workflow · Development
Solo, not alone
"So who checks your work?" The honest answer is a version of me, deliberately made unfamiliar with the work, using tools built to compensate for the fact that I can't unknow what I already know about it.
2 August 2026 · 7 min readread - research · Neurodivergence
Researching users who can't always tell you what they need
Standard UX research assumes the user can tell you what they need, if you just ask the right question. That assumption fell apart the moment I started researching for people who might open the app mid-crisis.
27 July 2026 · 7 min readread - UX Laws · Design · Neurodivergence
Miller's Law, chunking, and what DBT skills taught me about grouping information
Miller's Law says working memory holds about seven items. Building the information architecture for a DBT skills app taught me that the real skill isn't counting items — it's finding the grouping logic the user already carries in their head.
19 July 2026 · 7 min readread - Development · workflow
Building a client portal instead of buying one
I replaced ClickUp and Notion with a custom-built client portal. Not because off-the-shelf tools are bad, but because they were solving a problem I didn't have while quietly ignoring one I did. The real trade-offs of build vs. buy.
9 July 2026 · 8 min readread - Development · Design · Neurodivergence
Modelling debt without modelling shame
A binary paid/unpaid field is the obvious way to model a debt payment. It's also the wrong one. The schema decisions behind Mirian, and why a data structure can encode shame just as easily as a UI can.
27 June 2026 · 8 min readread
New notes land every few weeks.
Mostly research write-ups, accessibility notes, and what I got wrong on the way to shipping something.