Simple is expensive

Why do people think simple solutions are cheap? Simple is hard. Simple requires a lot of knowledge, experience and experts. Simple is expensive.@rakyll

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Join thousands of designers, developers, and product people from companies like Amazon, IDEO, Figma, and Shopify on my mailing list. Usually once or twice a month.

Newsletter

Join thousands of designers, developers, and product people from companies like Amazon, IDEO, Figma, and Shopify on my mailing list. Usually once or twice a month.

Popular posts

The power of product principles

Consequences in design

How to sell design

Creating Meaningful Design Systems: Embracing the Box and Reaping the Benefits

Designers: design less, think more

Stakeholder interviews: asking the right questions

Why wireframes are becoming obsolete

Why Designers Need To Speak Business

Creating a UX Strategy

Working as a UX-lead

All posts

Why carousels don't work

December 4, 2023

One question changed feedback for me

November 20, 2023

How I write for design

November 6, 2023

The power of product principles

October 24, 2023

The tools I use to run my business

October 9, 2023

Unreasonable hospitality

September 13, 2023

The Importance of Kindness and Alignment in Building Exceptional Teams

August 18, 2023

My newsletter list is getting smaller, just as I intended.

August 12, 2023

Consequences in design

July 28, 2023

How to sell design

June 29, 2023

Working with Anton

May 25, 2023

Why I write

April 27, 2023

AI: Do we really “get it”?

April 13, 2023

New year, new brand, same Anton

March 25, 2023

Creating Meaningful Design Systems: Embracing the Box and Reaping the Benefits

January 26, 2023

2022 - Year in Review

December 9, 2022

Curiosity drives us forward

December 5, 2022

Interview: Matthew, Head of Product

November 7, 2022

Just write

September 13, 2022

Buying a car online? Polestar does it right

August 31, 2022

Ask the right questions: Company Culture

July 4, 2022

Website refresh

June 29, 2022

AirBnB may be mapping out the future of work

May 23, 2022

Imposter Syndrome

May 9, 2022

Did UX designers ruin fun for efficiency?

May 2, 2022

Connecting the dots

April 5, 2022

When will the Web grow up?

January 31, 2022

Work is more than a list of tasks

January 19, 2022

Junior vs Senior: A Conversation

January 10, 2022

2021 - Year in Review

December 20, 2021

Utilizing feedback

November 24, 2021

Profits or culture

November 1, 2021

Exercising your potential: As if

November 1, 2021

Break your own laws

October 11, 2021

What does "best" mean?

September 22, 2021

Design Systems 101

August 23, 2021

First to market don’t always succeed

August 12, 2021

Defining the WHAT and WHY of Design Principles

August 5, 2021

Structure, Not Design By Committee

July 30, 2021

Full-time? I feel a change coming

July 5, 2021

Ethics in Design - Part 2

June 8, 2021

Ethics in Design - Part 1

May 31, 2021

Career trajectories aren’t a straight line - and that’s ok

May 4, 2021

What are Design Principles? Part 4

April 19, 2021

What are Design Principles? Part 3

April 12, 2021

What are Design Principles? Part 2

March 29, 2021

What are Design Principles? Part 1

March 22, 2021

Home office or office at home?

March 8, 2021

40 - halfway there

March 1, 2021

My typical day

January 25, 2021

Looking back - 2020

January 2, 2021

Restoring your team’s passion

November 17, 2020

Creating connections

November 2, 2020

Make it fun: chaos in Product Design

October 30, 2020

China plans to focus on quality over speed

October 29, 2020

Manager of one

October 12, 2020

Function + Feeling - Haraldur Thorleifsson, Ueno (Config Europe)

October 8, 2020

Finding balance: giving in vs standing your ground

October 5, 2020

Good design

October 1, 2020

Books that helped me grow

September 21, 2020

Do not tolerate brilliant jerks.

September 21, 2020

Don’t draw the UI, draw the priority

September 7, 2020

Designers: design less, think more

September 7, 2020

Successful Product Design

September 3, 2020

User Experience is a Spectrum

August 25, 2020

Working as a UX Lead - following up

August 24, 2020

A good design review

August 19, 2020

More isn’t better

August 10, 2020

Freelancer vs Consultant​

August 3, 2020

Marketing features

June 23, 2020

Summer update

June 22, 2020

HEY, Controversy

June 22, 2020

Managing a distributed team

June 8, 2020

Notion: A small company with a big audience

June 4, 2020

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

June 4, 2020

Habits of High-Functioning Teams

June 4, 2020

The Need for Speed, 23 Years Later

June 1, 2020

Stakeholder interviews: asking the right questions

May 25, 2020

My 2020 Setup in Notion

May 15, 2020

How to Combat Zoom Fatigue

May 15, 2020

Treat It Like Trash — Let’s Learn Design Systems

May 15, 2020

What you do ≠ what you are

May 11, 2020

Design better, not more

April 27, 2020

Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid

April 16, 2020

Designers: the only certainty is change

April 16, 2020

Scoping & Running Projects

April 13, 2020

The USER

April 8, 2020

Regarding Zoom

March 31, 2020

Why wireframes are becoming obsolete

March 30, 2020

Get static

March 29, 2020

Emotions and work - know yourself

March 16, 2020

All books are now free

March 16, 2020

Stuck at home

March 11, 2020

From Error to Understanding: The Importance of Brand Voice When Things Go Wrong

March 11, 2020

Wireframes are too concrete

March 11, 2020

What Great Managers Do

March 11, 2020

Answering your question - How I design

March 2, 2020

Hard startups

March 1, 2020

The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck

March 1, 2020

Wasting it

February 24, 2020

Understanding team culture

February 17, 2020

Engagement is an antimetric

February 14, 2020

Investing in things that don’t go out of style

February 12, 2020

What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy

February 10, 2020

How Slack ruined work

February 10, 2020

Basecamp is releasing a new product, Hey

February 7, 2020

A newsletter is a relationship

February 5, 2020

UX: What happens when the user wants out?

February 4, 2020

Debbie Millman - Time Well Spent

January 30, 2020

The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com

January 28, 2020

Fathom Analytics

January 22, 2020

Redesign to learn

January 20, 2020

How putting a price on speed helped one retailer increase mobile revenue in just 2 months

January 15, 2020

Accessibility drives aesthetics

January 15, 2020

Smart people use simple words to make others feel smart.

January 14, 2020

Year in review: 2019

December 16, 2019

Who’s listening?

December 2, 2019

Will millions in funding ruin 1Password?

November 18, 2019

The Enemy

November 18, 2019

How to Have a Successful UX Career at Google (Or Anywhere Else)

November 14, 2019

Tool tips: How our design team switched to Figma

November 14, 2019

Why Designers Need To Speak Business

November 4, 2019

Interview with Cap Watkins

October 24, 2019

Choosing simple over complex

October 21, 2019

Finding Your Professional Path

October 8, 2019

Leave the Phone at Home

September 25, 2019

Learning UX From The Real World

September 24, 2019

Ad Age 2019 A-List no. 6: Work & CO

September 10, 2019

Apple VP Nick Law: creative agencies must learn new capabilities or they’re f*cked

September 10, 2019

UX of Email Newsletters

September 9, 2019

How we work with microcopy

August 29, 2019

Measuring UX with HEART

August 26, 2019

Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely

August 23, 2019

Analytics are reshaping fashion’s old-school instincts

August 23, 2019

What to Do When You Feel Uninspired at Work

August 20, 2019

People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Actually Work

August 20, 2019

Fast Software, the Best Software

August 20, 2019

Stay in your lane and outlast your competition

August 20, 2019

“I Just Knew I Was Going to Surpass These Guys I Was Working For”

August 20, 2019

A Mindful Approach to Technology

August 20, 2019

Data-Driven Design Is Killing Our Instincts

August 19, 2019

Freelance and Business And Stuff

August 16, 2019

UX can’t be defined by one set of "rules"

August 12, 2019

5 Years - 300+ Posts!

July 30, 2019

Superhuman and email privacy

July 24, 2019

Why Consultants Quit Their Jobs to Go Independent

July 24, 2019

Give them candy: small details make all the difference

July 16, 2019

Your inbox is spying on you

July 10, 2019

On Modus: It’s Time for a Code of Ethics for Designers

July 10, 2019

Frank Chimero on causing ’good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture

July 5, 2019

Advertising: contextual vs. behavioral and why it matters

July 1, 2019

Citrix improves UX and cuts costs by 65%

June 28, 2019

Delight Comes Last

June 27, 2019

Tim Cook’s Stanford Commencement Address

June 19, 2019

The Cost of Lies

June 18, 2019

Let’s assemble like the Avengers and... do work

June 18, 2019

You care more about your privacy than you think

June 18, 2019

Big Mood Machine

June 13, 2019

How Notion Is Going After Atlassian and Why It Just Might Win

June 7, 2019

Dos and dont’s on designing for accessibility

June 7, 2019

Just write: why Product Designers should write, and how to get started

June 7, 2019

Simplicity is a war

June 7, 2019

Hiring a Management Consultancy for Digital Is a Mistake

June 7, 2019

I’ve redesigned my website and it looks exactly the same

June 4, 2019

Good reads this week

May 24, 2019

Simple is expensive

May 23, 2019

The next iPhone

May 20, 2019

Whose problem are you solving?

May 20, 2019

What “intuitive” really means

May 13, 2019

Hey Google, stop trying to redefine privacy

May 11, 2019

There’s no crazy like soccer crazy

May 10, 2019

Running my own company for ten years

May 5, 2019

Scapegoating User Experience Design

April 29, 2019

Clip sharing with Overcast

April 29, 2019

Why don’t we just use Material Design?

April 24, 2019

Accenture sued $32m+ over website redesign for Hertz

April 24, 2019

Creating a UX Strategy

April 23, 2019

Venture capital money kills more businesses than it helps

April 23, 2019

The elegance of nothing

April 16, 2019

Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa

April 11, 2019

Working as a UX-lead

April 8, 2019

Gumroadday: Get my books at -17% discount

April 3, 2019

Working as a UX designer

March 25, 2019

Meet Q: The First Genderless Voice

March 20, 2019

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

March 20, 2019

How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure

March 11, 2019

What’s the meaning of work?

March 11, 2019

Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing

March 6, 2019

Accessibility, a powerful design tool

March 6, 2019

Neurodiversity and the Digital Divide: how our neurological differences shape the way we experience the web

March 6, 2019

What is worth waiting for?

February 25, 2019

Leadership or management

February 22, 2019

Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes

February 22, 2019

Everyone should own a dog

February 18, 2019

Silence is gold

February 15, 2019

Voice assistants - are they really the future?

February 11, 2019

Cameras that understand

February 7, 2019

Humans, not users

January 29, 2019

Writing as part of the UX process

January 28, 2019

Keeping AI Honest

January 23, 2019

Imagine a world without ads targeted by personal information

January 22, 2019

Right to privacy

January 18, 2019

Prescribed Technological Therapy: Is this our future?

January 14, 2019

Why we need to slow time and scale down

January 3, 2019

2018 in review

December 28, 2018

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design Ethics

December 20, 2018

What’s my location?

December 17, 2018

The State of UX in 2019

December 13, 2018

We need the right kind of growth

December 11, 2018

Seth Godin: A lesson in good content creation

December 3, 2018

Why scrap scrappy?

November 29, 2018

Why do we feel so busy? It’s all our hidden ‘shadow work’

November 22, 2018

The Most Important Survival Skill for the Next 50 Years Isn’t What You Think

November 22, 2018

How Playing Games Helped Me Succeed at Business

November 19, 2018

Smartphones are our ever-present computers

October 29, 2018

Time travel through words with Merriam-Webster

October 29, 2018

I’m taking a break

October 22, 2018

Morgan Knutson on Working as a Designer on Google+

October 16, 2018

Organized for browsing

October 12, 2018

Stay humble, stay eager

October 8, 2018

Tim Cook talks to VICE News Tonight about privacy

October 8, 2018

What about ’my’ responsibilities?

September 24, 2018

Tesla, software and disruption

September 18, 2018

Forget the new iPhones - Apple’s best product is now privacy

September 16, 2018

The iPhone Franchise

September 13, 2018

Automation, Unemployment, and Universal Income

September 12, 2018

The Long Goodbye (To Facebook)

September 12, 2018

Serving your customer, valuing yourself

September 10, 2018

Living among baby robots

August 30, 2018

Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind

August 30, 2018

Voice Input’s Effect on Social Norms

August 28, 2018

How I kicked my email compulsion

August 28, 2018

Facebook's struggle to moderate itself

August 24, 2018

The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness

August 21, 2018

Google Employees Are Organizing To Protest the Company’s Secret Search Engine

August 19, 2018

Why Small Teams Win

August 17, 2018

Back to Work!

August 13, 2018

The Bullshit Web

August 12, 2018

Nikhil Sonnad on the banal evil of Facebook

August 1, 2018

Five questions UX employers should be asking

July 23, 2018

Just keep at it

July 20, 2018

Yes, Alan, There Is An ROI For UX Design

July 18, 2018

High Fives, AI, and Connecting the Dots: MailChimp’s VP of Design on What Business can Learn from Design

July 18, 2018

The Race to a Trillion

July 16, 2018

Rands Information Practises

July 16, 2018

What Elon Musk Should Learn From the Thailand Cave Rescue

July 16, 2018

Cheap Shower Curtains

July 16, 2018

Tech Sector Values are Broken?

July 2, 2018

Confirmation Bias in Design

June 25, 2018

Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?

June 24, 2018

Retail is Not Dying, But it Has to Evolve

June 21, 2018

Good product writing is conversational

June 21, 2018

The Netflix Binge Factory

June 15, 2018

We are all trapped in the “Feed”

June 14, 2018

From the Drawing Board to the Board Room

June 13, 2018

Turn off your push notifications. All of them.

June 13, 2018

Stop “feeding” your users

June 13, 2018

Think inclusively at every step

June 12, 2018

No classes, no professors: the alternative to business school

June 11, 2018

Designer Ethics & The Moral Implications of our Apps

June 11, 2018

Conversion optimization with A/B tests

June 4, 2018

AI Ethics - A New Skill for UX-Designers

May 28, 2018

Netlify now shows your deploy status on its favicon

May 25, 2018

Let them eat cake

May 24, 2018

Netflix Culture

May 21, 2018

Skype

May 16, 2018

How do you learn UX?

May 14, 2018

The New Google Assistant

May 9, 2018

What Happened to Apple’s Whimsy?

May 8, 2018

Who would you trust more with your data, Apple or the government?

May 8, 2018

Unfoundered

May 7, 2018

Microcontent: A Few Small Words Have a Mega Impact on Business

May 6, 2018

GDPR is ruining my life

May 5, 2018

What’s in a pattern name

May 5, 2018

Requests for Personal Data From Apple, Google, and Facebook Compared

May 5, 2018

Twitter logged all user’s passwords in plain text

May 5, 2018

A Modest Guide to Productivity

April 27, 2018

Google Debuts a Standalone To-Do App, Google Tasks

April 27, 2018

Apple Should Make an Instagram Clone

April 27, 2018

Vanity Metrics

April 26, 2018

Tech is not Neutral

April 24, 2018

Facebook to exclude North American users from some privacy enhancements

April 23, 2018

Sen. Blumenthal: “Your business model is to maximize profit over privacy.”

April 18, 2018

Netflix has to "produce great content, market it well, serve it up beautifully."

April 18, 2018

Design Systems: Better UX through Defined Standards

April 16, 2018

Productivity

April 16, 2018

My #1 Piece of Advice to Freelancers: Lean Into The Moment

April 16, 2018

Europe’s tough new data-protection law

April 12, 2018

Tim Cook - We care about the user experience

April 12, 2018

The Real Technology Problem

April 11, 2018

Phone Bored

April 9, 2018

Creative Class is open

April 9, 2018

Whose risk?

April 9, 2018

Karim Rashid

April 9, 2018

Why Small Teams Win

April 9, 2018

Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack: Swedes turn against cashlessness

April 3, 2018

Dieter Rams

April 3, 2018

What’s a ‘User Experience’ Anyways?

April 2, 2018

Bleeding Out

March 29, 2018

Fake News is spam

March 29, 2018

Dropbox

March 27, 2018

Conversational Design

March 27, 2018

How Tech Giants Design For Transgender Users–Or Don’t

March 27, 2018

Don't use the F word (freelancer)

March 27, 2018

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

March 23, 2018

Everyone Is Going Through Something

March 23, 2018

Flight Crews Don’t Decide Where To Fly

March 21, 2018

New Tools Don’t Always Equal Productivity

March 20, 2018

The seat at the table

March 19, 2018

Bye bye Facebook

March 19, 2018

Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But YouTube, Facebook And Google?

March 19, 2018

Cuba

March 19, 2018

Why I hate your fake redesign

March 16, 2018

Your competitors don’t matter

March 15, 2018

Diversity in the design industry

March 15, 2018

Givenchy

March 15, 2018

Apple’s "Sound on the Go" Strategy

March 13, 2018

The Most Important Design Skill For An AI-Dominated World

March 12, 2018

Love letters to trees

March 11, 2018

Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs

March 9, 2018

You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters.

March 6, 2018

Voice Input is the Next Big Thing - Or is It?

March 4, 2018

Specialize

February 28, 2018

Pricing Philisophy

February 28, 2018

AMP for email is a terrible idea

February 27, 2018

Is this Finnish school the perfect design?

February 26, 2018

The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change

February 25, 2018

A Year of Learning and Leading UX at Google

February 22, 2018

C.A.R.E - A simple framework for user onboarding

February 22, 2018

Inside Facebook´s Hellish Two Years

February 19, 2018

A better user experience...or?

February 19, 2018

Reflections on working on an iPad

February 11, 2018

Personas

February 11, 2018

Everything Easy is Hard Again

February 11, 2018

How to succeed at freelancing

February 6, 2018

The iPhone X is Apple’s underrated masterpiece

February 2, 2018

Make me think

February 1, 2018

No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X

January 22, 2018

The Future of Retail

January 22, 2018

Hawaii Missile Alert

January 15, 2018

2017 review

January 8, 2018

Why Design Systems fail

January 5, 2018

What You Build

January 5, 2018

Has Apple lost its design mojo?

January 5, 2018

Cindy Gallop - The Most Provocative Woman in the World

January 5, 2018

Measure your worth, know your motivations

December 12, 2017

The secret formula for great user experiences

November 27, 2017

Enjoyable UX vs. Usable UX

November 14, 2017

Checkout for Winners

November 10, 2017

Living a Testing Culture

November 10, 2017

What do you do?

October 31, 2017

Calling bullshit on ‘Apple is really bad at design’

October 16, 2017

Creative Class

October 7, 2017

UX-writer: A New term, a Big Need

October 3, 2017

Tobias Ahlin: Where´d all the feelings go?

October 3, 2017

Stop Saying E-mail is Broken

September 25, 2017

How To Predict Your Future

September 25, 2017

Carpe Diem UX-designers

September 11, 2017

What´s Good Design?

September 4, 2017

Chasing Growth

August 29, 2017

Github

August 28, 2017

Medium

August 25, 2017

Are Your Customers Flowers or Plants?

August 21, 2017

What Would Augment Reality?

August 16, 2017

A Redesign

August 15, 2017

The One Ingredient All Great User Experiences Share

August 9, 2017

Being Freelance Podcast: Episode 100

July 14, 2017

Design quotes

July 10, 2017

Enough

July 7, 2017

True fans or just followers?

July 5, 2017

Why?

July 4, 2017

No Share Buttons on Mobile Sites

June 30, 2017

The Why before the Why

June 30, 2017

Groundwork for Creating Great User Experiences

June 30, 2017

ARKit

June 30, 2017

4 Reasons Why Your Body Text Should be Bigger

June 30, 2017

Now that Apple is talking about AR and VR, should we be too?

June 26, 2017

Think like an artist to create better designs

June 20, 2017

Investing in businesses and products

June 13, 2017

10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More

June 8, 2017

Become a better UX-designer with these three words

June 8, 2017

Vox Media Accessibility Guidelines

June 6, 2017

Writing for UX: some practical tips

June 5, 2017

The future of the UX-Designer

May 30, 2017

How to attract top recruiting talent

May 28, 2017

Why Designers Need to Write

May 25, 2017

You are the Alfred to Batman

May 22, 2017

How better onboarding cut our drop-off rate dramatically

May 22, 2017

Understanding Great User Experiences

May 17, 2017

New isn’t always better, but it makes the old feel worse

April 5, 2017

Designing for Mobile

March 28, 2017

The Possibilities of Automated Personalized Content

March 20, 2017

Atomic Design: where science and design collide

March 13, 2017

Is Less More?

March 6, 2017

Designing for Accessibility

February 21, 2017

Why Simple is Hard

February 7, 2017

Becoming a Better Designer

January 19, 2017

Without Struggle, There Isn’t Success

January 5, 2017

Email Marketing: High Returns, Low Investment

December 10, 2016

Apple is User Hostile… Or is it?

November 28, 2016

Pricing It Perfectly

November 22, 2016

Habits: Small Actions can have Big Results

October 31, 2016

Product or Sales? Chicken or Egg?

October 11, 2016

Failure, Reflect, Renew

September 28, 2016

From Idea to Market: Launching a Product

September 12, 2016

What do Conversions Mean to You?

August 23, 2016

User Experiences that Matter 2:nd Edition

August 9, 2016

5Things Football can Teach Us About Building Products

July 11, 2016

Trusting Your Gut

June 27, 2016

What are Bots and Why are They Important?

June 10, 2016

Change is Quick, Results Take Time

May 30, 2016

Making Promises Your Clients Will Feel

May 17, 2016

Designing with Emotions in Mind

April 30, 2016

UX Design as a Problem Solver

April 18, 2016

The Life of a Freelancer Shouldn’t be a Lonely One

April 11, 2016

The Secret Feature that Everyone Knows About

April 4, 2016

No One Really Knows What They Want Anyway

March 21, 2016

Built to last

March 7, 2016

Be the Butcher not the Supermarket

February 22, 2016

The Interactive Car Dashboard

February 9, 2016

Simplicity – Be Your Own MVP

January 25, 2016

Why User Experiences Matter

January 12, 2016

An Eye on the Future

December 16, 2015

The Fundamentals of Good UX

December 7, 2015

What is a Great User Experience?

November 17, 2015

The Extra Effort for Great UX

November 3, 2015

Everyone is a UX-designer and Why I Hate the Term

October 19, 2015

Coming soon: User Experiences that Matter e-book

October 6, 2015

Increase conversions by removing social sharing buttons

September 21, 2015

Time vs. Attention: Which is More Valuable?

September 21, 2015

Growing Relationships by Understanding Values

September 3, 2015

UX is Much More than Software

August 24, 2015

Hey Siri, what’s the future of user interfaces?

August 11, 2015

Understanding Pain Dream Fix

July 28, 2015

I am Professional Because I am Personal

July 13, 2015

MVP: Is Your Product Really Minimum AND Viable?

June 30, 2015

How designers can earn a seat at the table

June 26, 2015

The days are long but the decades are short

June 23, 2015

Growth

June 16, 2015

Working with UX-designers and getting results!

June 16, 2015

What is the cost of sharing?

June 3, 2015

The path of a successful app

June 2, 2015

Freelancer for Life: 5 Reasons Why This Works

May 12, 2015

Working with me

May 5, 2015

Planners and UX-Designers

April 23, 2015

UX Design explained

April 14, 2015

Kudos: Social Media framework

April 14, 2015

Understanding UI Design

April 14, 2015

Look and Feel and Feel

April 13, 2015

Great user experience

April 9, 2015

Golden Krishna on Our Job as Designers

April 7, 2015

Naming your icons

April 7, 2015

Conversations

November 13, 2014

Cost, pricing and perceived value

April 9, 2013