Over the past two years, I’ve been running the Bridging the gap between research and design survey. What started as a way to better understand collaboration between researchers and designers gradually became something broader: a way of listening to the challenges researchers themselves are facing.

Again and again, similar themes emerged.

Researchers talked about struggling to demonstrate the value of their work. About organisations wanting quick answers rather than deeper understanding. About feeling pressure to produce certainty from ambiguity. About methods and frameworks being treated as more important than judgment, sensitivity, or interpretation.

And underneath all of that was a deeper question:

What does it actually mean to understand people well?

That question became the starting point for Clear Insight.

Clear Insight is a new one-day conference in Brighton for design and research practitioners. It’s for UX researchers who want to become better at understanding people, not just better at running research.

Who is Clear Insight for?

The conference is for researchers at any stage who feel that surface-level findings aren’t enough, and who want to develop the judgment, confidence, and sensitivity that lead to deeper insight. It’s also for stakeholders, commissioners, and leaders who want to think more carefully about research quality, value, and what meaningful understanding really takes.

What's it all about?

This isn’t trying to teach people how to 'do research'.

There are already many excellent conferences, courses, and talks focused on methods, tooling, recruitment, synthesis, and process. Those things matter. But Clear Insight is interested in something slightly different: the gap between observing behaviour and truly understanding people.

In UX research, we’re often very good at describing what happens. What people say. What they click on. Where they struggle. Which journeys fail. But understanding why those things happen is often much harder.

People can be contradictory. Motivations are not always visible. Behaviour doesn’t always fit neatly into frameworks. And people themselves don’t always have easy access to the reasons behind their own actions.

Good research requires more than simply collecting observations. It requires interpretation, curiosity, empathy, and the ability to sit with uncertainty long enough for clearer understanding to emerge.

That’s what Clear Insight is about.

The conference won’t be built around quick tips, growth hacks, or “10 things to improve your usability testing”. Instead, it’s intended as a space to reflect more deeply on the craft of understanding itself.

We’ll explore questions like:

• How do researchers move beyond surface-level findings?
• How can we make insight meaningful rather than merely descriptive?
• How do we handle ambiguity, contradiction, and complexity?
• How do we understand what people are thinking when they might not be aware of it themselves?
• How do we protect the quality of understanding in fast-moving organisations?

Most importantly, Clear Insight is intended to be a conference where research is taken seriously - not just as a process for generating outputs, but as a practice concerned with understanding human beings.

The event will take place in Brighton and will bring together people from research, design, and related disciplines who care about developing deeper, more thoughtful approaches to understanding people.

If that resonates with you, I’d love for you to join us.

We're also looking for speakers, so if you've got something you'd like to share, then send us your idea.

You can find out more about the conference at clearinsightconference.com.

You want people to spend more time engaging with your content and less time struggling to find it. A great information architecture (IA) tells a story, creates flow, and aids discovery for the people using your products or services.

What do your users say about finding your content?

Here are some things I’ve repeatedly heard (or close variations of) in usability testing sessions.

“I can’t buy a product I can’t find on the site … it feels like to find anything I have to get my treasure map out.”

This is the moment the product team observing the session hit their heads on the desk or scream. A poor information architecture leads to a drop in sales.

“I’m not sure how I got here. I’m just going round in circles. I can’t find what I want to find. Perhaps it doesn’t exist.”

You’ve put effort into creating the content, but if it can’t be found, however well-written and designed it is, that effort is all in vain. Publishing content is not the measure of success; a user who consumes and acts on it is.

And from stakeholder interviews …

“When I need to find something on our website, I just use Google. I have no idea how our consumers find anything.”

How can you expect users to navigate your website when your colleagues who know the content exists find it an impossible task?

If you’re hearing similar things from your users and colleagues, then it’s time to take a hard, critical look at your information architecture.

Over the years of helping organisations improve the findability of their content, I’ve whittled down long checklists and many thoughts on information architecture to six key principles. They act as my guide for critiquing and creating a successful site structure.

Principles to shape your information architecture

1. The names and sequence of global navigation terms will determine the proposition, personality and story you are communicating.

What’s the story your primary navigation tells about your website? What’s your invitation and offer to the site visitor? What journeys into the site are you surfacing as the most useful for visitors?

2. Organise content around the key tasks of the intended audience and the way they think about and structure the information.

Why do users visit your website? What are their goals and tasks? What makes for a successful visit? Are the answers to these questions reflected in your navigation?

3. Restrict the number of choices in the primary navigation to create small, confident guided steps; a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

How many choices are you showing? How hard are the edges between the labels used? What can you prune to stop overwhelming users with a paradox of choice?

4. Having content found and consumed is more important than being represented in the global navigation.

What pages in the site structure are given prominence because they’re someone's pet project? Which pages break the website's organisational logic? What looks like it doesn’t belong where it sits?

5. Labels should be short, meaningful and consistent; use terms the audience understand, expressed in the way they speak.

When you listen to users, what words do they use? What labels do you have that use internal product names and organisational jargon? Where do you go to regularly listen to your users' language? 

Online forums, your call centre and service desks, shadowing your frontline and customer-facing staff, are all great places to discover the language your audience uses. A colleague of mine, Ellen de Vries, refers to this as ‘content harvesting’.

6. Create flow into, around and across a website by establishing and reusing organisational metaphors in a consistent manner.

What are the entities you use (e.g. a person, a place, an object, a thing) across your website? How do you connect them together? Where’s the list of entities saved, and how’s it shared across your organisation?

Taking a first step toward an improved information architecture

Your information architecture should be treated as a product rather than a project. It requires ongoing review to keep it optimised.

Take a look at my three-point check-up to spot the tell-tale signs that your information architecture needs attention before it becomes really broken.

We ask for two precious and finite things from site visitors: their time and their attention. Your information architecture should be designed and refined to help users spend more time at the destination and less time on the journey.

Come and learn IA skills

I'll be running a practical workshop on information architecture as part of this year's UX London. The conference runs from the 2nd to the 4th of June 2026 at CodeNode London. I hope to see you there.

 As a consultancy, we’ve worked with many organisations that have a sprawling and diverse digital presence. It’s often hard to keep track of the sites that make up your web estate, with new sites popping up all the time. The scale of an estate often means that management is sparse, with many sites staying live longer than they should. Legacy sites may be vulnerable to cyber attacks that could compromise trust in your brand. How can you start getting your estate under control?

The challenge is often knowing where to start. The following are some practical tips to start building an inventory of your web estate. This is essential to understanding the size of your estate, and deciding what stays, what goes, and what needs updating.

Involve subject matter experts

It’s important in a project like this to involve the right stakeholders from the start. Your web estate almost certainly spans multiple teams, each with their own priorities, systems, and partial visibility of the estate. Involve departments like IT, procurement, digital and cyber security. These are also the teams that will be involved in future management of a web estate inventory, so it pays to involve them in the process early on (rather than surprise them with it later).

These teams may be managing sub-sections of the estate themselves already. These lists and inventories are invaluable when starting to create one source of truth. They may include data that you won’t find in a site scrape. For example, the intended purpose of, and audience for, content, and contact details for site owners.

Use your analytics tools

One way to start uncovering the true scale of your web estate is by using analytics platforms like Google Analytics. Within your GA property, you can navigate to reports that include the ‘Hostname’ dimension (or build a custom exploration in GA4) to see every domain and subdomain where your tracking code is firing. This effectively gives you an inventory of sites that are sending data to your analytics account. This can reveal forgotten microsites, campaign domains, or staging environments still in use.

Use tools to discover subdomains

Another useful technique is to use external discovery tools to find subdomains associated with your primary domains. Tools like these run a subdomain scan to find both known and previously unseen subdomains. This can add to the lists you’ve already discovered, including legacy applications or regional sites that may not be tracked via your analytics environments. This approach can help to generate a more complete picture of your estate, bringing unmanaged properties back under control. We've found success using the subdomain finder offered by PenTest, a free account allows you to find up to 1,000 subdomains.

Add metadata to your inventory

Once you have your list of URLs, you will need additional data points for each in order to start making decisions about what can be retired and what should stay part of your estate. We recommend using a site crawling tool to return metadata for your list of URLs. A tool like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider or SiteBulb's website crawler will return data like status and indexability of each site. 

De-duplicate your list

Ahead of further analysis, removing duplicates from your inventory is essential. You'll be using a variety of sources, so it's very likely that some URLs will appear more than once. Removing duplication provides a clearer picture of your estate. Google sheets and Excel both have built in 'remove duplicates' functionality that make this easy. Including a column for data source (i.e. web crawl, Google Analytics) helps to keep track of your data. 

Creating an inventory of your estate takes work and investigative skills, but it’s worth it. It can help to reveal opportunities for your organisation. Save costs. Reduce risk. Improve your carbon footprint.

It was a day dedicated to the World Wide Web. Not just the foundational languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but also the foundational ideas of the web.

“Share what you know!” That was the original motto of the World Wide Web project. That was the motto of Web Day Out, too.

Look, I’m biased because I put the line-up together, but honestly, all of the speakers were superb! So much knowledge delivered in such entertaining fashion.

I had a blast. And I’ll give myself a little pat on the back for how I grouped the talks into rhyming couplets:

Browsers: Jemima talked about what you can do with just HTML and CSS these days, and Rachel followed up with how to come up with your own browser support strategy.

Performance: Aleth made the case for multi-page progressive web apps that work under any network conditions, and Harry followed up with an impassioned rant about how much time and energy has been wasted on over-engineered single-page apps that ignore what browsers can do.

Styling: Manuel walked us through a whole new approach to writing modern CSS, and Rich followed up with a whirlwind tour of all the great typographic possibilities in CSS.

Standards Jake took us on the standards journey to customisable select elements, including anchor positioning and popovers, and then Lola showed us exactly what it takes to add a new feature to a web browser.

Everything flowed together really nicely.

I was a little apprehensive going into Web Day Out that it would just be preaching to the converted. And sure, there were plenty of veteran devs there who already knew the value of progressive enhancement and making the most of web standards. But I was gratified to also see lots of younger faces in the crowd.

One of those young faces was our very own senior design engineer, Sam O’Neill

“Getting to spend a day with my fellow developers and engineers unashamedly nerding out about all the wonderful and exciting things that are new on the web was a real treat. I left feeling inspired and energised.

Many of the talks got deep into the detail of the latest enhancements that've been brought to the web. Lots of what-to-do, and how-to-do-it. I left with dozens of notes, photos, and code snippets. Several of which I was able to put straight into practice when I came back to work the following week.

The day was nicely punctuated by a smattering of more philosophical talks. We were encouraged to "stay close to the metal" of the web, and use the browser "as a playground". It was very refreshing to hear this praise for the platform and be reminded of just how capable it is these days.

Speaking with friends old and new during the breaks and after the event, I was positively reassured by people's willingness both to make the most of the platform as it stands now, and to contribute to making it even better in the future.”

If you couldn’t make it to Web Day Out and you want to experience some RAMO, here’s just a handful of wonderful write-ups and feedback we’ve enjoyed reading from Amber Wilson, Calum Ryan, Pedro Martin Valera and Dave Letorey. Alongside some lovely photos by Marc Thiele.

Thank you so much to everyone who came. I think you’ll agree it was a most excellent (web) day out.

In its infancy, I experimented with it, and was disappointed with the results. Moreover, I take care in my work and the thought of relinquishing some level of control over it to a machine made me feel uncomfortable. At this early stage, the "benefits" were easy enough to ignore. I placed myself firmly in the anti-AI camp.

As it evolved and became more commonplace, I kept abreast of its developments. The buzz around the technology and the rate at which it was being worked on made that unavoidable. Over time, some potential use cases began to emerge.

I began to see ways in which I could employ AI in my professional work. Ways that I felt could introduce efficiencies that would allow me to reallocate time within projects to more novel challenges faced by our clients.

Further experiments ensued as time passed. Often times, the tech just didn't hit the mark. Verbose code that lacked finesse. Hallucinations aplenty. Accessibility pitfalls throughout, even when specifically prompted to adhere to the WCAG guidelines. The list goes on.

But once in a while, it saved me a bunch of time. On several occasions, I found myself with some grunt work to do. Unavoidable tasks, but ones that would be tedious and time consuming. With increasing frequency, I thought "a-ha, here's something a robot can do for me". Over time, I began to habitually gravitate towards AI for these kinds of tasks. The penny didn't drop suddenly. It was gradual. But sure enough, AI earned its place in my armoury.

All of this being said, I have ethical concerns about AI. Environmental worries, too. I can't in good conscience blindly use a tool that is both detrimental to the planet while failing to represent the original creators of the source material that it regurgitates.

Balancing the tension between the advantages of AI against the impacts of its use is a challenge. I realise I'll be upsetting some people by using it at all. That being said, after some time and consideration I arrived at the following set of three rules to ask myself that encourage me to use AI judiciously.

Rule #1

Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.

This is, to me, the most important of the three rules. #2 and #3 build upon this. If the above isn't true, I go about the task without AI interference/assistance.

To break this down, the first part: "Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do", sets a guardrail that ensures I don't lose the skill of researching, experimenting with, and understanding new tools and methodologies as they are introduced. If I were to rely on AI to solve new or atypical problems that arise, my skillset would narrow relative to the latest capabilities of the web. The risk of doing the inverse of this is very apparent and is why I think early-career developers should be very cautious when using generative AI in their work.

As mentioned above, we're in the business of exchanging time for value. That's where the second part of the phrase - "on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems" - comes in. Often in our projects, there are more problems to solve than time allows. Sensible use of AI can - and in my experience, has - freed up capacity to tend to a client's additional desires.

Rule #2

When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you've made as an input along with a specific prompt.

Once I've established that the first rule is being adhered to, I then get to the point of actually using AI, and doing so with good intention.

To enable this, I find that it's best to ask an AI tool to debug, refactor or otherwise improve some code you've already written to perform a task, rather than create from scratch. This mitigates against introducing slop to my work.

In my front-end development work, this results in prompts often being paired with an attached file or code snippet. Some recent example prompts include:

• I have an SVG containing a world map. Each <path> represents a country. Please add a data attribute - data-country-code - to each path in the attached file (world-map.svg) containing the A-2 code for that country.

• Please refactor the attached CSS file (a-component.css) so all the media queries are mobile first (min-width).

I'll stretch my interpretation of this rule when it comes to documentation, for example:

• "Based on the attached package.json file, please generate a README file outlining the tech stack, system requirements and developer tools for this project."

Here, I am asking it produce something new, but I'm still giving it something that lends context to the problem. I find this sort of use of AI is particularly useful when inheriting legacy, undocumented code written by other developers.

Rule #3

Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

Building upon the first two rules, the third ensures that I must be able to interpret, understand and fix any issues in the output produced by an AI tool. If I can't, I didn't have a sufficient understanding of the problem and how to solve it to qualify the use of AI in the first place.

Doing this is also so important because while generative AI tools have improved, they aren't perfect, so taking a moment to review and tidy up any generated code is an essential step to take before including it in a production codebase.

These rules aren't perfect or exhaustive. They're a useful guide, but sometimes an activity can meet all three criteria, and I'll still forego the use of AI. They are also specifically catered to the context of production-quality client work. AI has utility in other contexts - such as aggregating baseline information about something new during research or rapidly producing prototype code - where I may choose to relax these rules.

The important message, I think, is that we all take a moment to pause before firing up ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever tool you prefer to use, and ask if it's really necessary.

AI offers a lot of gimmicks that do nothing for me personally, but I'm pleased to have found a way to use it amongst a suite of tools in a way that lets me get some value from it, and dedicate more time to crafting solutions to the problems faced by our clients.

Design is not just a line item

An initial stumbling block we’d all seen is a tendency of senior leadership to view design as a cost, not a strategic asset. Design teams are brought in at the last minute, sidelining their contributions until the end. The result is missed opportunities and confusion about why design isn’t achieving its full potential.

Bridging the gaps

While there are pockets of excellent design work in many organisations, these efforts can remain disconnected from the overall strategy. We agreed that for design to really make an impact, it needs to be woven into the fabric of an organisation. Treating design as an afterthought stifles innovation and its overall effectiveness.

Powering up design teams

Empowerment was a recurring theme in our conversations. Design teams excel in environments where they’re encouraged to try new ideas and experiment. Without that freedom, design can quickly become reactive instead of proactive. It’s essential for leadership to actively champion design, ensuring that it plays a vital role in the organisation’s goals. But if that’s not in place, its incumbent on us as design leaders to make it happen.

As we chatted about ways to drive change, we realised that simple, practical steps could make a big difference. For starters, getting hands-on with user research is crucial. As we know good research can give us the insight to make better products and experiences. Inviting people from different departments to observe the process could open up lines of communication and help everyone develop a better understanding of users’ needs.

Introducing a two-way customer-centred approach could help. Sales and customer service teams often have direct interactions with users. Involving them in the design process can help input real-world user demands and also breaking down silos. We felt there’s an opportunity to demonstrate the value of design by showing how insight from other departments gets integrated successfully into design work.

Another important aspect is fostering strong collaboration with developers. Experience showed that building solid relationships helps ensure the design intent remains intact and can speed up project timelines. When design and development work closely together, good things can happen.

Finally, adopting an iterative mindset can enhance the design process. Encouraging teams to think of their work as a series of experiments, rather than striving for perfection right away, allows for growth and adaptability. This way of working can be introduced softly without permission from outside the design team.

Connecting the dots

Truly effective design in a legacy organisation often requires a culture shift. We felt that if we, as design leaders, cultivated a service design mindset, building relationships across different departments to reinforce the idea that design is essential to the business strategy. Ultimately we need to show (through metrics and other business outcomes) how design is beneficial to the organisation. This is not to justify our existence, but to ensure design is understood as a strategic advantage.

How does AI crawl content in 2026?

AI-powered search uses automated tools to scan websites. It's similar to traditional search engine crawling, but the ultimate goal is different: it aims to extract knowledge and summarise it for a user, rather than simply ranking a web page.

Dedicated AI systems gather information in a few steps:

1. Scanning: AI bots visit websites, follow links, and read page content.
2. Knowledge capture: The crawlers pull content that meets the user’s request from multiple sources.
3. Synthesis: This content is sent to a Large Language Model (LLM) – the brain of the AI – which combines it into a single, easy-to-read, conversational response.

With features like Google’s AI Overviews and Microsoft’s Copilot now built directly into the search experience, and the popularity of ChatGPT and Perplexity growing, the user's journey is converging. Users might not see a list of ten links; they might see one direct, AI-generated answer drawn from multiple sources, including yours.

How are search engines and AI search different?

While AI optimisation relies heavily on good SEO practice, the way AI uses content is different.

• Traditional search engines find the best matches for the user’s request. Crawlers build an indexed library of pages which the search engine uses to send users to your website.
• AI search gives users a single response for their request. AI refers to live content on request, rather than a pre-built index. Crawlers find the most relevant and credible information at that moment, and run it through the LLM to return a human-ready response.

How can I get shown in AI results?

Optimising for AI search is sometimes referred to as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).

GEO and improving AI visibility is achieved by focusing on the fundamentals: technical integrity, quality content, and prioritising user needs.

Much like the early days of SEO, where keyword stuffing was quickly identified and penalised, any attempts to game AI systems will almost certainly be ironed out over time.

Technical best practice still wins

Everybody benefits from fast, accessible websites. Sites with strong technical foundations will always be preferred by both people and automated systems.

• Use clear headings, descriptive image alt text, and unique link labels to help users and AI join the dots.
• Use structured data to help crawlers move beyond simple text matching and into semantic understanding of your site content and context.
• Use sitemap.xml and robots.txt files to guide crawlers around your site and tell them where they can and can’t go.

Write quality, concise, human content

Users turn to AI to cut through the noise and get a human-ready response. Your content needs to deliver the core message directly and with authority.

• Keep content concise, but don’t sacrifice depth. Give the appropriate amount of detail for the query you’re trying to answer.
• Establish your authority by showing your expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
• Make it clear who wrote the content, cite reliable sources, and link internally to related, comprehensive content to show deep subject knowledge.

Keep content up to date

Fresher content is more likely to be used by AI.

• Where appropriate, update older material instead of generating a new version. This maintains the piece’s existing authority while signalling to crawlers that the information is current.
• If content is time-sensitive (such as an event or annual overview), make that clear to avoid incorrect referencing by crawlers.
• Set up review schedules to refresh statistics and data points on your site so they reflect the latest information. This will enhance your credibility with both users and AI.

How can I exclude myself from AI results?

If there's a specific reason you do not want your content used in AI-generated summaries (for example, if it's highly proprietary), you can take steps to block AI crawlers.

The most direct approach is to specifically block AI crawlers in your robots.txt file. While not all crawlers respect robots.txt direction (as noted by The Verge), it is currently the best available option.

Be aware that blocking all AI crawlers may impact your visibility within search engines that are increasingly using AI to enhance their results. It's a trade-off that requires careful consideration.

How can AI search be useful for me?

AI search is an evolution of the web, and it creates an opportunity to focus your digital efforts on delivering high-quality value.

Since AI can deliver answers directly, research suggests clicks throughs could decrease (as noted by Search Engine Land). This means simply counting page views is becoming a less important metric.

This shift allows smart teams to focus on measuring what truly matters:

• Conversions and goals: Measure what users do after they arrive on your site: Did they sign up for a newsletter? Did they download a key document? Did they begin a purchase?
• Brand authority: When AI lists you as a source, you build brand visibility and trust. This authority will encourage users to visit your site when they need a deeper interaction.
• Value proposition: If users get their answer from an AI summary, you must provide a compelling reason for them to visit your site. What unique tool, service, or deep expertise do you offer that an AI response cannot?

AI search is a complement to traditional search. It should not detract from good SEO and user experience. Instead, use these optimisation principles to build a comprehensive, high-authority digital presence that is visible everywhere the user looks.

The Clearleft bits

It has been a busy and proud year of projects for us. We've collaborated with fantastic clients, some for the first time and others returning as part of a long-standing partnership. 

• We worked with Anglia Ruskin University to continue iterating their website experience and collaborated with Resolve to Save Lives on content strategy and brand positioing. We launched a new website for fintech start-up ERMI, created a visual identity and design language for The Klezmer Institute, laid the foundations for a design system with University of the Arts London, supported Goodwood with in-depth research, and continued our design partnership with University College London and Imperial College London.
   
• As part of our training services, we ran design and research workshops with BUPA, University of Greenwich, Research by the Sea and Brighton SEO.
   
• We recently voted in new EOT trustees to ensure Clearleft continues to be run with our best interests in mind, and that our teams are happy and supported to do their best work of their careers. Plans for the inauguration ceremony are with the events team...

We've had a year jam-packed full of events. Aside from our flagship UX London and Leading Design events, we hosted Research by the Sea, a one-day conference in Brighton focused on design and UX research, and brought forty design leaders together at Leading Design New York to explore the future of design leadership in an AI-driven world. We also ran an online panel on neurodiversity and accessibility, continued our service design breakfast club, and launched Web Day Out — a one-off Brighton event exploring what modern browsers can do without libraries or frameworks.

Richard Rutter

2025 was the year Clearleft turned 20. As I wrote in January, it’s testament to the fantastic people who have worked at Clearleft over the years that we’re still going strong while others have fallen by the wayside or been absorbed and diminished in buyouts. We’re fiercely independent, employee-owned, and I love that.

As part of turning 20, we refined the way we describe ourselves: as ‘strategic design partners’ we bring our craft of user-centred design to clients, shaping the way their in-house teams do design, and helping the organisation use design to its strategic advantage.

Not all our clients this year were big organisations. In Ermi and the Klezmer Archive, we worked with a bootstrapped fintech startup and a small cultural institution. Whilst very different, both clients were hugely enjoyable to work with, thanks to their enthusiasm and deep knowledge, allowing us to flex our creative muscles and deliver a lot very quickly.

Finally the service design breakfast we host goes from strength to strength, with six meet-ups in 2025 and guest talks covering topics as varied as bringing humanity back into the Government digital service; resilience, change and disruption; and storytelling as a way mapping systems.

Long-term thinking and lasting partnerships

Chris How

Working in an agency suits my thirst for learning new things. The challenge of quickly getting under the skin of an organisation that I’m unfamiliar with appeals to my curiosity. Being guided into a new world by a client expert in their sector, I find energising. However, the downside is that you don’t always get to see the impact of your work or build upon it.

That’s changed for me this year with a slew of projects with previous clients I’ve worked with. Continuing our work with Imperial College London, Anglia Ruskin University, and University of the Arts London has provided the excitement of tackling new challenges whilst also building on previous work. Expect to see some exciting product launches in the early part of 2026.

Sophie Count

It’s been the year of working with outstanding university clients. Diving into one particular industry has been really fascinating, understanding where challenges cross-over between clients, and how large and complex educational institutions operate day-to-day.

I’ve had the opportunity to dive headlong (back) into data. This can be a powerful tool when used as part of discovery and planning work to help give clients a truer picture of the performance of their website.

James Gilyead

In addition to keeping up with some of our brilliant university partners to help them establish and continue systematic design practices, this year I also had the pleasure of working on fresh digital branding with new clients. One of the best things about agency life is the variety – both in the work we get to do and in the people we have the pleasure to work with.

Rhian Evans

For me, working closely with some of our brilliant clients were the moments that stood out. 

Getting to meet lots of new people at The University of Manchester, and supporting them to start rolling out the design and website changes that better reflect their personality, their offer and their ambitions.

Working side by side with UAL colleagues on sprints to evolve their design system – it really was a roll-up-your sleeves, hands on project that was able to achieve an awful lot over an initial discovery phase and three sprints, thanks in no small part to everyone’s commitment.

The infectious enthusiasm of the ERMI team as we supported them to create their new website, and the magic that happens when everyone brings their expertise. Who knew transaction monitoring was so exciting? And we loved Jamie's screen reader workshop that he ran for the team.

As well as the consistent thoughtfulness and commitment to quality, great design and user experience from my super smart colleagues, of course.

Research near and far

Luke Hay

It’s been a busy year for research. I’m ending the year talking to people across four continents for two very different projects. Closer to home and earlier in the year, another interesting project saw me getting away from the screen and undertaking some observational fieldwork on the train from King’s Cross to Newcastle.

I’ve also had the pleasure of running workshops at The UXPA annual conference, World Usability Congress and Web Wey Web.

Finally, it was great to put together the second edition of our annual report on bridging the gap between research and design.

Design systems, speed and collaboration

Alex Edwards

The UAL design system project was a standout piece for me this year. It had a mix of everything: a great institution, an interesting brand, a real problem to tackle, and a fantastic team who all worked together to solve it.

Another highlight for me was presenting our process and thinking at TalkUX, following the project's success.

Sam O’Neill

I've been lucky to work across a range of projects this year. I've most enjoyed those where we've been tasked with delivering value in a small amount of time. Collaborating with the developer at ERMI to solve some juicy accessibility challenges was particularly rewarding.

The people I get to work alongside always stand out as a highlight when looking back on the year. Getting together with clients to co-work – for instance, our fortnightly days with the UAL team while working on their new design system has been great fun, and days with my Clearleft colleagues in the studio continue to inspire and motivate me. I feel lucky to get to work with such a passionate and talented group of people.

Events and the wider design community

Louise Ash

As Head of Events my role is to plan and execute our event programme across the year. In reality that means spending an enormous amount of time with my head in an event spreadsheet. So when the big day finally comes and I get to roll up my sleeves and orchestrate the live event it really is a buzz.

This year's UX London was three days of team work to make the dream work and a brilliant highlight of the summer... thank you to all the speakers and workshop hosts who made the concepts and learning come alive. To the Clearleft gang who do everything from van loading to affinity mapping. And to all the participants who create such a fun atmosphere. It's only six months until we get to do it all over again!

Rebecca Groves

It’s been another big year for Leading Design as we have continued to support global design leaders.

I was so grateful to be trusted to hold space in New York. It was such an important topic and I was energised and inspired by the manifesto the design leaders created.

We continued the conversation at our annual Leading Design London conference. It was another incredible gathering of design leaders. We covered topics including trust in an AI world and how design can solve some of the world’s hardest problems as well as practical things like managing stakeholders and leading inherited teams.

The moments in between

Tessa Watson

My favourite Clearleft moments over the last year have been all the fun, social things we’ve done together. They are often unplanned and slightly chaotic, but really enjoyable.

We’ve had storytelling, screen printing, litter picking and cross stitch sessions as part of our quarterly partners days. Alongside Cornhole contests in the office, impromptu cocktail sessions, barbecues, and lots of luxury munchettes – think crisps of EVERY flavour. (Top tip – Seaweed flavour crisps are an acquired taste)

One of the best evenings, ironically, was a leaving do – obviously we were sad to see a team member go – but we ended up having a hysterically funny time playing the categories game 'Tension' in the office. I’m not sure why, because a lot of us were stone cold sober, but some of our very questionable answers had us crying with laughter, and confirmed our general knowledge has some serious gaps in it.

Frances Ulph

A personal highlight for me this year was returning from maternity leave — not the part where I handed a tiny human and all of my money over to a nursery and tried to remember how to be a functioning adult again (that bit was…a lot), but the way in which a daunting transition was made to feel easy, flexible and incredibly welcoming.

From the moment I stepped away, I never felt out of the loop like I feared I would. I was worried returning and playing catch-up was going to be a real struggle, but I stayed in regular contact with colleagues I’m lucky enough to call friends, and often found myself spending afternoons in the office with my new plus-one in tow, while said colleagues happily doubled as unofficial childcare.

One of Clearleft’s core values is to be as flexible as possible in accommodating our work-life balance, and this has been put in to practice and played an invaluable part in my experience of returning to work while juggling a new schedule at home and a never-ending attack of nursery germs.

A year in writing

We dug into the numbers to see which blog posts you loved most this year. The ones that were read, shared, and featured the most:

1. Why use React?
2. Critical questions for design leaders working with AI
3. Deepening UX insights with longitudinal research
4. Reimagining the employee experience for LNER
5. How to elevate your employee experience

As we brace ourselves for what 2026 has in store, we really need to thank everyone who was part of our year — clients, collaborators, speakers, partners, and colleagues alike. We’ll see you on the other side of the out-of-office.

Over the years, I’ve heard just about every argument against running research. Tight deadlines. Limited budget. Competing priorities. I’ve had to make the case for research more times than I can count, and I’ve found a few approaches that consistently help, which I’d like to share.

Why objections happen

It’s tempting to blame stakeholders when research gets cut from the plan. But in most cases, stakeholders aren’t “anti-research.” They’re juggling scarce time and money, and after design and development take their share, there’s often little left for anything else.

That doesn’t make objections any less frustrating, but it does give us a starting point. If we want research to get the space it deserves, we need to be ready with strong arguments for its value.

From notes to rebuttals

Over the years, I’ve built up a running list of “go-to” rebuttals for the most common objections. Eventually, I realised this list was too useful to sit hidden in my laptop, so I started turning it into something more practical - something other researchers could use too.

That idea became Reality Check: a deck of cards designed to help researchers respond to stakeholder objections.

Reality Check (the deck)

I collected 30 common objections and paired them with clear, effective rebuttals. Then, working with James and Frances, we turned this into a physical deck of cards, which can be used in two ways:

• In the moment: as a reference guide when you’re facing real stakeholder pushback.
• In practice: as a training tool in workshops, where you can role-play objections and sharpen your responses.

You’ll get a chance to use the cards if you join one of my upcoming workshops.

If you’d like to hear more about our Bridging the Gap workshops - or just want to stay in the loop about how we’re helping researchers build confidence in their practice - follow us on LinkedIn or get in touch with me directly.

There are many possible reasons. Alas, none of them relate directly to user experience, other than a trickle-down justification: happy productive developers will make better websites. Citation needed.

It’s also worth mentioning that some people don’t choose to use React, but its use is mandated by their workplace (like some other more recent technologies I could mention). By my definition, this makes React enterprise software in this situation. My definition of enterprise software is any software that you use but that you yourself didn’t choose.

Inertia

By far the most common reason for choosing React today is inertia. If it’s what you’re comfortable with, you’d need a really compelling reason not to use it. That’s generally the reason behind usage mandates too. If we “standardise” on React, then it’ll make hiring more straightforward (though the reality isn’t quite so simple, as the React ecosystem has mutated and bifurcated over time).

And you know what? Inertia is a perfectly valid reason to choose a technology. If time is of the essence, and you know it’s going to take you time to learn a new technology, it makes sense to stick with what you know, even if it’s out of date. This isn’t just true of React, it’s true of any tech stack.

This would all be absolutely fine if React weren’t a framework that gets executed in browsers. Any client-side framework is a tax on the end user. They have to download, parse, and execute the framework in order for you to benefit.

But maybe React doesn’t need to run in the browser at all. That’s the promise of server-side rendering.

The front end

There used to be a fairly clear distinction between front-end development and back-end development. The front end consisted of HTML, CSS, and client-side JavaScript. The back end was anything you wanted as long as it could spit out those bits of the front end: PHP, Ruby, Python, or even just a plain web server with static files.

Then it became possible to write JavaScript on the back end. Great! Now you didn’t need to context-switch when you were scripting for the client or the server. But this blessing also turned out to be a bit of a curse.

When you’re writing code for the back end, some things matter more than others. File size, for example, isn’t really a concern. Your code can get really long and it probably won’t slow down the execution. And if it does, you can always buy your way out of the problem by getting a more powerful server.

On the front end, your code should have different priorities. File size matters, especially with JavaScript. The code won’t be executed on your server. It’s executed on all sorts of devices on all sorts of networks running all sorts of browsers. If things get slow, you can’t buy your way out of the problem because you can’t buy every single one of your users a new device and a new network plan.

Now that JavaScript can run on the server as well as the client, it’s tempting to just treat the code the same. It’s the same language after all. But the context really matters. Some JavaScript that’s perfectly fine to run on the server can be a resource hog on the client.

And this is where it gets interesting with React. Because most of the things people like about React still apply on the back end.

React developers

When React first appeared, it was touted as front-end tool. State management and a near-magical virtual DOM were the main selling points.

Over time, that’s changed. The claimed speed benefits of the virtual DOM turned out to be just plain false. That just left state management.

But by that time, the selling points had changed. The component-based architecture turned out to be really popular. Developers liked JSX. A lot. Once you got used to it, it was a neat way to encapsulate little bits of functionality into building blocks that can be combined in all sorts of ways.

For the longest time, I didn’t realise this had happened. I was still thinking of React as being a framework like jQuery. But React is a framework like Rails or Django. As a developer, it’s where you do all your work. Heck, it’s pretty much your identity.

But whereas Rails or Django run on the back end, React runs on the front end …except when it doesn’t.

JavaScript can run on the server, which means React can run on the server. It’s entirely possible to have your React cake and eat it. You can write all of your code in React without serving up a single line of React to your users.

That’s true in theory. The devil is in the tooling.

Priorities

Next.js allows you to write in React and do server-side rendering. But it really, really wants to output React to the client as well.

By default, you get the dreaded hydration pattern—do all the computing on the server in JavaScript (yay!), serve up HTML straight away (yay! yay!) …and then serve up all the same JavaScript that’s on the server anyway (ya—wait, what?).

It’s possible to get Next to skip that last step, but it’s not easy. You’ll be battling it every step of the way.

Astro takes a very different approach. It will do everything it can to keep the client-side JavaScript to a minimum. Developers get to keep their beloved JSX authoring environment without penalising users.

Alas, the collective inertia of the “modern” development community is bound up in the React/Next/Vercel ecosystem. That’s a shame, because Astro shows us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Switching away from using React on the front end doesn’t mean you have to switch away from using React on the back end.

Why use React?

The titular question I asked is too broad and naïve. There are plenty of reasons to use React, just as there are plenty of reasons to use Wordpress, Eleventy, or any other technology that works on the back end. If it’s what you like or what you’re comfortable with, that’s reason enough.

All I really care about is the front end. I’m not going to pass judgment on anyone’s choice of server-side framework, as long as it doesn’t impact what you can do in the client. Like Harry says:

…if you’re going to use one, I shouldn’t be able to smell it.

Here’s the question I should be asking:

Why use React in the browser?

Because if the reason you’re using React is cultural—the whole team works in JSX, it makes hiring easier—then there’s probably no need to make your users download React.

If you’re making a single-page app, then …well, the first thing you should do is ask yourself if it really needs to be a single-page app. They should be the exception, not the default. But if you’re determined to make a single-page app, then I can see why state management becomes very important.

In that situation, try shipping Preact instead of React. As a developer, you’ll almost certainly notice no difference, but your users will appreciate the refreshing lack of bloat.

Mostly though, I’d encourage you to investigate what you can do with vanilla JavaScript in the browser. I totally get why you’d want to hold on to React as an authoring environment, but don’t let your framework limit what you can do on the front end. If you use React on the client, you’re not doing your users any favours.

You can continue to write in React. You can continue to use JSX. You can continue to hire React developers. But keep it on your machine. For your users, make the most of what web browsers can do.

Once you keep React on the server, then a whole world of possibilities opens up on the client. Web browsers have become incredibly powerful in what they offer you. Don’t let React-on-the-client hold you back.

And if you want to know more about what web browsers are capable of today, come to Web Day Out in Brighton on Thursday, 12th March 2026.

This was originally published on my own site.

Talk UX is an annual conference run by Ladies That UX, and the Ladies That UX Brighton Chapter were chosen to host this year. Having attended many Ladies That UX events over the years, it was exciting to have the opportunity to give back.

With my co-presenter Lucy Blackwell, Head of UX, Design and Research at the University of the Arts London, we had the privilege of kicking off a brand-new talk: "Putting the user at the centre of your design system."

Our talk focused on our recent project to reinvent and relaunch UAL’s multi-product design system. In particular, we focused on our human-first approach to encourage the design system’s future adoption.

Getting the talk ready was a great challenge. We prepared collaboratively, blending our perspectives to create a presentation that flowed. We refined our core message and honed our story, weaving in the realities of design and production. There were moments of “is this good enough? Will people actually get it? Are we addressing the key challenges?" I was grateful to have an extra pair of eyes and ears to bounce ideas off of as we got through the ‘messy middle’ of writing a talk.

In the week before the conference, Lucy and I did a dry run with the Clearleft team. The Clearleft hive mind is always reliable and gave great pointers for where we could add more context and where we needed to edit. We finished the run-through with some reassuring “good job” comments, and we were on our way!

The day of the talk itself was a blur. Stepping up to the front of the room, with everyone looking at us, felt like a massive leap of faith, a moment where all the preparation culminated in this one public offering. But as I found my groove, connecting with Lucy and seeing the engaged faces in the audience – nodding, smiling, and intently listening – those initial butterflies transformed into a surge of energy. It’s always reassuring when you get audience chuckles when and where you want them, too.

Sharing my passion and connecting with so many brilliant, like-minded people made all the hard work totally worth it. The sense of community and shared purpose was truly inspiring. Talk UX delivered a great experience, and I'm excited for the next opportunity to connect and share with our community.

Leading Design London always reflects the moment we’re in as design leaders, and this year’s conference was no different. With 200 attendees, 15 world-class speakers and nine lunchtime table hosts joining us at the Barbican Centre, the atmosphere carried a cocktail of emotions that many leaders are grappling with in the face of AI, alongside a strong sense of camaraderie throughout the two days.

There’s no simple way to articulate the energy in the room at Leading Design London 2025, but I’d describe it as ‘curiously energetic’. People are in equal measures excited about the opportunities AI might unlock, whilst also holding an important sense of scepticism and concern about what an AI-shaped future could mean and what the consequences might be.

As I reflect on the incredible talks and conversations, here are a few standout takeaways that come to mind…

Holding space for intentionality

Being intentional was something that almost every speaker touched on, whether in how we design for AI, how we design in an AI world, or how we use our energy and approach our work.

TB Bardlavens (GM and Director, Product Equity, Adobe) set this up really well on day one, asking what kind of legacy we want to leave and how we can be intentional in shaping it. Intentionality came through strongly in Mary Lukanuski’s (Senior Director, Head of Product Design, Intapp) talk on the value of design in an AI world, and the importance of evolving in an industry that is always changing. Venessa Bennett (Director of UX, Dye & Durham Corporation) encouraged us to reconnect with our purpose, using it as an intentional force to lead our teams through uncertain times.

Daniel Burka and Mahima Chandak (Co-founders, Hard Problems) closed day two by exploring how we can be intentional about the work we choose to do, and how we focus our efforts on problems that genuinely matter to the world.

Being strategic about human connection

Human connection may sound obvious, but a clear theme emerged around how we relate to each other and how we think strategically about the people we work with.

Ariba Jahan (Head of Transformation, North America, Anomaly) explored what it means to truly understand the drivers and motivations of our stakeholders. Kevin Hawkins Jr (VP of Design, Research and Content, Monta.com) built on this by sharing practical frameworks for managing stakeholders and earning meaningful buy-in. It was a reminder that human connection doesn’t just happen, it is strategic leadership at work. 

Craft and the value of the human hand

Dalit Shalom (Design Lead, Trust and Credibility, The New York Times) spoke about how we build trust with our users, and Fergo (James Ferguson, Director of Experience Design, OVO) explored how to build trust within the teams we inherit. Both conversations reminded us that trust, creativity and craft are deeply connected. Building on the idea of intentionality, they encouraged us to slow down, resist the urge to ‘just ship it’ and make deliberate choices that bring a human touch to the work we do.

Leading with self awareness

Sabari Majumdar (Senior Design Leader, Booking) spoke about what it means to be an authentic leader, and the importance of creating space for honest reflection. 

Sabari and Jonas Grinevičius (VP of Design and Research, Vinted) both expanded on this through the lens of self-awareness. They reminded us that effective design leadership begins with understanding how we are showing up, where we can provide the most value, and how that value is carried back into the organisation, whether through the products we deliver, the teams we support or the business metrics we are measured against.

Challenging the status quo

We spoke about design’s need to rebel, to be the provocateur. But how do we do this when the stakes are so high?

Laura Yarrow (Head of Design, Government Digital Service) delivered a brilliant talk about being an intentional rebel, understanding where change needs to happen and how to enact it. As leaders, it is our responsibility to challenge the status quo and act as catalysts for meaningful change.

AI: Friend, foe or catalyst?

Building on conversations at Leading Design New York earlier in the year, Chris How (Head of Experience Design, Clearleft) hosted a panel exploring whether AI is a friend, a foe or a catalyst, which one of the panellists summed up perfectly as “yes”.

Although the idea of AI as a foe sat at the forefront, the conversations still felt empowering. We know it will bring seismic change to our craft and to the world more broadly, but we are still in the driving seat with the agency to influence how that change unfolds.

There are no magic formulas, but frameworks are good

One of the amazing things about the conference is that we drop the facade and talk about the realities of design leadership. 

Yoel Sumitro (Chief Product Officer, Tiket.com) spoke about how to get traction in business-first organisations. The reality is that there are no magic formulas, but he did provide some frameworks to help make an impact, even when design isn’t front and centre. 

Continuing the real-talk, Inayaili León (Director, Design Operations, GitHub) debunked the myth of the well-functioning design team and helped us think about tackling the most valuable problems that need our attention. 

Community and connections

As always, in addition to the value of the content from the stage, our attendees also took so much from simply being together, catching up with old friends and making new connections. We welcomed attendees from around the globe, from design leaders at Google in Silicon Valley to more local attendees from the BBC in London. The conversation flowed during the breaks, and it’s always such a joy to see the camaraderie amongst our attendees and the community which continues long after the conference ends.

See you next year!

If you couldn't make it this year, you can sign up for our Leading Design On Demand platform and gain access to this year’s talks along with our extensive archive.

To make the most of being in the room with the brilliant people from the Leading Design community, grab a super early-bird ticket for 2026!

I'd love to see you there!

Bridging the Gap – 2025

In 2024, we published our first report on the gap between UX research and design. Drawing on input from over 100 UX professionals worldwide, the goal was simple: to understand whether research findings truly make their way into final design outputs, and if not, why.

This year, we set out to refresh those findings. Has the gap narrowed? Does it still exist? And most importantly, what can we do, together, to bridge it?

The Research

To explore these questions, we used a mix of methods:

• Desk research into existing thinking on the gap
• A global survey of the UX community
• In-depth interviews with practitioners
• Collaborative workshops at conferences

Together, these gave us a broad and nuanced view of the current state of UX research and design.

Desk Research

We started with books, articles, podcasts, and videos discussing the research to design process. This helped us spot recurring issues and surface potential solutions, which we then explored through our own primary research.

Surveying the UX Community

Just like last year, we ran a global survey. This was open to researchers, designers, and anyone else involved in shaping user experiences.

Over 100 UXers from around the world shared their perspectives: what’s working well, where friction still exists, and what practical steps could help close the gap.

Designers weren't approaching my research as discovery… they were approaching my work as validation of their designs.

Response from this year's survey

Interviews with UXers

We then followed up with one-on-one interviews. These deeper conversations, held over video calls, uncovered rich stories about what has (and hasn’t) worked in aligning research with design practice.

Workshopping Ideas

Since the 2024 report, we’ve also been running hands-on workshops at leading UX conferences around the world. Hundreds of researchers, designers, developers, and product managers have joined us to brainstorm and test practical ways to turn insights into impactful design decisions.

These collaborative sessions have been invaluable for surfacing both challenges and opportunities across different contexts.

The 2025 Report

All of this work has been distilled into the 2025 edition of the Bridging the Gap report. Inside, you’ll find:

• A snapshot of where the research–design gap stands today
• Fresh insights from the global UX community
• Practical tips to strengthen collaboration and alignment

Download the full report here.

Share Your Perspective

I’d love to hear your take:

• Do the findings resonate with your own experiences?
• What’s worked for you in bringing research and design closer together?
• How can we improve our planning, collaboration, and communication as a community?

Your insights could shape the 2026 edition of the report, so feel free to drop me a message with your thoughts.

Let’s keep bridging the gap.

If you’ve ever been to Responsive Day Out or Patterns Day, the format will be familiar to you. There’s going to be eight 30 minute talks. Bam! Bam! Bam!

Like those other one-day conferences, this one has a laser-sharp focus.

Web Day Out is all about what you can do in web browsers today. You can expect talks that showcase hands-on practical uses for the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs. There will be no talks about libraries, frameworks or build tools, and I can guarantee there will be absolutely no so-called “AI”.

As you might have gathered, this is an opinionated conference.

If you care about performance, accessibility, and progressive enhancement, Web Day Out is the event for you.

Or if you’ve been living in React-land but starting to feel that maybe you’re missing out on what’s been shipping in web browsers, Web Day Out is the event for you too. And I’m not talking about cute demos here. This is very much about shipping to production.

I’ve got half of the line-up assembled already:

• Jemima Abu,
• Rachel Andrew,
• Lola Odelola, and
• Richard Rutter.

Jemima’s talk gives you a flavour of what to expect at Web Day Out:

In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use HTML and CSS to build simpler alternatives to popular JavaScript components such as accordions, modals, scroll transitions, carousels etc We’ll also take a look at the performance and accessibility benefits and real-life applications and use-cases of these components.

Web Day Out will be in The Studio Theatre of the Brighton Dome, which is a fantastic intimate venue. That means that places are limited, so get your ticket now!

This was originally published on my own site.

Now you can do all of these things on the web:

• push notifications,
• offline storage,
• camera access,
• and more.

Take a look at the home screen on your phone. Looking at the apps you’ve downloaded from an app store, ask yourself how many of them could’ve been web apps.

Social media apps, airline apps, shopping apps… none of them are using technologies that aren’t widely available on the web.

“But”, you might be thinking, “it feels different having a nice icon on my homescreen that launches a standalone app compared to navigating to a bookmark in my web browser.”

I agree! And you can do that with a web app. For a developer all it takes is the addition of one manifest file that lists which icons and colours to use.

If that file exists for a website, then once the user adds the website to their homescreen it will behave just like native app.

Try it for yourself. Go to instagram.com in your mobile browser and it to your homescreen (on the iPhone, you get to the “add to home screen” option from the sharing icon – scroll down the list of options to find it).

See how it’s now an icon on your home screen just like all your other apps? Tap that icon to see how it launches just like a native app with no browser chrome around it.

This doesn’t just work on mobile. Desktop browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari also allow you to install web apps straight from the browser and into your dock.

About half of the icons in my dock are actually web apps and I honestly can’t tell which is which. Mastodon, Instagram, Google Calendar, Google Docs… I’m sure most of those services are available as downloadable desktop apps, but why would I bother doing that when I get exactly the same experience by adding the sites to my dock?

From a business perspective, it makes so much sense to build a web app (or simply turn your existing website into a web app with the addition of a manifest file). No need for separate iOS or Android developer teams. No need to play the waiting game with updates to your app in the app store – on the web, updates are instant.

You can even use an impressive-sounding marketing term for this approach: progressive web app:

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web app that uses progressive enhancement to provide users with a more reliable experience, uses new capabilities to provide a more integrated experience, and can be installed. And, because it's a web app, it can reach anyone, anywhere, on any device, all with a single codebase. Once installed, a PWA looks like any other app, specifically:

• It has an icon on the home screen, app launcher, launchpad, or start menu.
• It appears when you search for apps on the device.
• It opens in a standalone window, wholly separated from a browser's user interface.
• It has access to higher levels of integration with the OS, for example, URL handling or title bar customization.
• It works offline.

But there’s still one thing that native apps do better than the web. If you want to be able to monitor and track users to an invasive degree, the web can’t compete with the capabilities of native apps. That’s why you’ll see so many websites on your mobile device that implore you to install their app from the app store.

If that’s not a priority for you, then you can differentiate yourself from your competitors by offering your users a progressive web app. Instead of having links to Apple and Google’s app stores, you can link to a page on your own site with installation instructions.

I can guarantee you that users won’t be able to tell the difference between a native app they installed from an app store and a web app they’ve added to their home screen.

This was originally published on my own site.

First off the usual caveat: this does not constitute legal advice. However it does contain advice about how to check and ensure your website is accessible.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has been in effect since 2019. On 28 June 2025 its requirements became law across the European Union. The EAA applies to all products and services: physical, analogue and digital. It means that all relevant products and services made available on the EU market must comply with the accessibility requirements defined by the directive. The EAA applies to any business with at least 10 staff and a turnover above €2 million, whether or not it charges for it services.

This is a win-win for both consumers and businesses. Accessible services are better for everyone, whether or not you have a disability. Businesses get to ensure their products are available to the whole market – there are an estimated 100 million people with disabilities in the EU alone. The EAA is designed to decrease the complexity of navigating different national regulations by introducing common accessibility standards across the EU, helping business reduce the cost of making their services accessible.

Does the EAA apply in the UK or the US?

Yes, in as much as the EAA applies to any business that trades in the EU regardless of where it is based. So if your company wants to provide products or services to the EU it needs to be EAA compliant. Non-compliance with the EAA can lead to fines and ultimately the termination of EU market access.

While the EAA has not been implemented as such here in the UK, we have the Equality Act 2010 (which replaced the Disability Discrimination Act) which covers pretty much the same ground.

How does the EAA apply to websites?

The legislation includes mandatory accessibility requirements for all websites that provide products or services, for example online banking and e-commerce platforms. Public sector services were already covered by Web Accessibility Directive (and the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations in the UK).

The EAA directive is clear: all relevant websites should conform to the European Harmonized Accessibility Standards EN 301 549 (PDF), which in turn say that websites should follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 to level AA (WCAG 2.1 AA).

WCAG 2.1 AA is already an industry standard for accessibility, so the EAA is not demanding more than should be there already. As far as we’re concerned at Clearleft, accessibility is – and has always been – a fundamental part of what constitutes professional website design and development. Anything less is unprofessional, and you should view it and your suppliers that way, whether they are independent freelancers, Big 5 consultants, CRM software sellers, or for that matter your staff.

We recommend following WCAG 2.2 as the latest version of the guidelines at time of writing. WCAG 2.2 has some useful clarifications and additions, and is backwards compatible with WCAG 2.1.

What are the key accessibility requirements of the EAA?

WCAG looks daunting to the uninitiated. There’s a lot to take in and it can be hard to know where to start. WCAG and the EAA’s requirements can be summarised by the POUR principles which require products and services to be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Jeremy recently explained these as:

• Perceivable: content will be legible, regardless of how it is accessed.
• Operable: core functionality will be available, regardless of how it is accessed.
• Understandable: content will make sense, regardless of how it is accessed.
• Robust: content and core functionality will still work, regardless of how it is accessed.

How do I know if my website is EAA compliant?

Ultimately you’ll need to commission an accessibility audit, ideally one that includes testing with users. We can help you with that (contact us for a quote), but before you do, there’s some testing you can do for yourself. As we wrote recently, not all accessibility issues are created equal. This doesn’t just mean in their severity. Some issues can, and should, be caught early on, while other issues can only be found later.

Jeremy expalins how to run your own accessibility audit using automated tools. It’s really important to understand that automatic tools are helpful but only catch a minority of problems. Some aspects of WCAG cannot be completely tested with automated tools. These criteria require manual testing because they involve meaning, usability, intent, or user experience that automated tools cannot fully evaluate. For example a tool can tell you if there is alt text present for all your images, but they can’t tell you whether that text provides a suitable alternative to the image (if it doesn’t, it fails). Automatic tools can’t tell you if you pass, but they can highlight failures that are often readily fixable.

Remember you’ll need to test as many representative pages as possible, not just your home page.

What do I do if i find accessibility problems?

If your initial audit finds problems, fix what you can (speak to us about helping you with that) and commission a full accessibility audit. A good audit will come back with recommendations for where and why there are problems, and how improvements and fixes could be made. Thereafter you’ll need the services of an experienced front-end developer to implement the necessary code changes.

Don’t be tempted into paying for so-called accessibility overlays. These are no guarantee of making you accessible, and can do more harm than good. Ideally accessibility is not something you do afterwards. It is not an add-on or an option. It should be an integral part of the design and development process, a built in consideration from the start.

You should remember that fixing technical issues alone will not make your site accessible. Accessibility is not a one-time deal, it needs to be addressed constantly with: video captions, helpful alt text on images, unique text for links, properly structured textual content, colour contrast in charts and graphs, and so on. In recognition of this, the EAA legislation requires accessibility commitments and best practices at an organisational level. This includes official accessibility statements (which show intent but are largely meaningless if not adhered to) and providing specialised accessibility training to staff in both technical and content roles.

In summary

The European Accessibility Act will ensure fair and equitable access to products and services for everyone in the EU. It brings best practise into law by specifying WCAG as the standard to follow for web accessibility. It’s great that accessibility is now legal requirement, but above all it is the right thing to do.

You can learn more about the subject by reading our blog posts on accessibility and listening to the our podcast episode on accessibility.

Collectively we wanted to share an asset at the end of the day which would reflect the discussions, meditations and conclusions about the impact of this disruptive technology. I was privileged to be there on the day, and I’m delighted to share the outcome with you now.

The arrival of generative AI to the masses has brought with it a huge amount of hype and understandable discontent. It also brings a set of capabilities to every desktop which would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. But as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

As design leaders we need to tread a fine line between what is acceptable and useful, and what is problematic and harmful. This is precisely what the discussions on the day addressed, and why they came together as a set of critical questions for design leaders working with artificial intelligence.

I had the pleasure of editing the document into series of prompts, conceived by design leaders for design leaders. It does not attempt to provide any answers, but it does offer up critical questions to ask of yourself, your colleagues and your organisation.

To give you a flavour, here are some key questions we captured:

Product design: Is AI necessary to solve this problem? Consider the problem you are trying to solve or the human need you are attempting to address. Ask your colleagues whether AI is the right tool for the job, or whether there might be cheaper, better, more performant non-AI alternatives. Consider whether you are using AI to improve the product, or inserting an AI feature in search of a problem to solve. AI should be an enabler not an irritant.

Design practice: How do you preserve the human touch in the process? AI can generate output quickly and tirelessly, but humans bring heart, soul, empathy, imagination and their lived experience. Think about where human craft should fit into your design processes, and whether you should deliberately add friction into the process around AI.

Design leadership: Who are you leaving behind? GenAI could potentially ease the entry of junior designers into the profession, but at what cost? Curiosity, collaboration and critical thinking are key tools of the experienced designer – they help us simplify and humanise solutions to tricky problems. Consider how you’ll ensure newer members of your team will gain these attributes on the job.

Organisational impact: Are we prepared to stake our reputation on our use of AI? The current crop of LLMs does not come without their controversies and questionable ethics. Their significant energy consumption may not sit well with your organisation’s environmental commitments. Almost all models were trained on copyrighted material without permission of the intellectual property owners, including journalists, artists, authors and scientists. The models themselves contain inherent biases due to the nature of their training data – the good and the bad of the world wide web. What’s more, these biases can be tweaked in the direction of the political leanings of AI company owners, which may also run counter to your organisation’s values.

Read all the critical questions for design leaders working with artificial intelligence.

We owe a huge thank you to all the design leaders who attended our Leading Design event in New York and contributed to this guide. They brought untold experience, wisdom and care to the conversation. In particular I want to highlight Ovetta Sampson and TB Bardlavens for keynoting and bringing tireless energy to the day, and to our partners Funsize and Adobe Design for helping make it happen.

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

Or in English, thus spoke Wittgenstein:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Language and thinking are intertwined. I’m not saying there’s anything to the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I think George Lakoff is onto something when he talks about political language.

There’s literal political language like saying “tax relief”—framing taxation as something burdensome that needs to be relieved. But our everyday language has plenty of framing devices that might subconsciously influence our thinking.

When it comes to technology, our framing of new technologies often comes from previous technologies. As a listener to a show, you might find yourself being encouraged to “tune in again next week” when you may never have turned a radio dial in your entire life.

In the early days of the web we used a lot of language from print. John Allsopp wrote about this in his classic article A Dao Of Web Design:

The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang.

One outdated piece of language on the web is a framing device in two senses: “above the fold”. It’s a conceptual framing device that comes straight from print where newspapers were literally folded in half. It’s a literal framing device that puts the important content at the top of the page.

But there is no fold. We pretended that everyone’s screens were 640 by 480 pixels. Then we pretended that everyone’s screens were 800 by 600 pixels. But we never really knew. It was all a consensual hallucination. Even before mobile devices showed up there was never a single fold.

Even if you know that there’s no literal page fold on the web, using the phrase “above the fold” is still insidiously unhelpful.

So what’s the alternative? Well, James has what I think is an excellent framing:

The landing zone.

It’s the bit of the page where people first show up. It doesn’t have a defined boundary. The landing zone isn’t something separate to the rest of the page; the content landing zone merges into the rest of the content.

You don’t know where the landing zone ends, and that’s okay. It’s better than okay. It encourages you design in a way that still prioritises the most important content but without fooling yourself into thinking there’s some invisible boundary line.

Next time you’re discussing the design of a web page—whether it’s with a colleague or a client—try talking about the landing zone.

The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.

Awareness is good. It’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient.

Accessibility, like sustainability and equality, is the kind of thing that most businesses will put at the end of sentences that begin “We are committed to…”

It’s what happens next that matters. How does that declared commitment—that awareness—turn into action?

In the worst-case scenario, an organisation might reach for an accessibility overlay. Who can blame them? They care about accessibility. They want to do something. This is something.

Good intentions alone can result in an inaccessible website. That’s why I think there’s another level of awareness that’s equally important. Designers and developers need to be aware of what they can actually do in service of accessibility.

Fortunately that’s not an onerous expectation. It doesn’t take long to grasp the importance of having good colour contrast or using the right HTML elements.

An awareness of HTML is like a superpower when it comes to accessibility. Like I wrote in the foreword to the Web Accessibility Cookbook by O’Reilly:

It’s supposed to be an accessibility cookbook but it’s also one of the best HTML tutorials you’ll ever find. Come for the accessibility recipe; stay for the deep understanding of markup.

The challenge is that HTML is hidden. Like Cassie said in the accessibility episode of The Clearleft Podcast:

You get JavaScript errors if you do that wrong and you can see if your CSS is broken, but you don’t really have that with accessibility. It’s not as obvious when you’ve got something wrong.

We are biased towards what we can see—hierarchy, layout, imagery, widgets. Those are the outputs. When it comes to accessibility, what matters is how those outputs are generated. Is that button actually a button element or is it a div? Is that heading actually an h1 or is it another div?

This isn’t about the semantics of HTML. This is about the UX of HTML:

Instead of explaining the meaning of a certain element, I show them what it does.

That’s the kind of awareness I’m talking about.

One way of gaining this awareness is to get a feel for using a screen reader.

The name is a bit of a misnomer. Reading the text on screen is the least important thing that the software does. The really important thing that a screen reader does is convey the structure of what’s on screen.

Friend of Clearleft, Jamie Knight very generously spent an hour of his time this week showing everyone the basics of using VoiceOver on a Mac (there’s a great short video by Ethan that also covers this).

Using the rotor, everyone was able to explore what’s under the hood of a web page; all the headings, the text of all the links, the different regions of the page.

That’s not going to turn anyone into an accessibility expert overnight, but it gave everyone an awareness of how much the HTML matters.

Mind you, accessibility is a much bigger field than just screen readers.

Fred recently hosted a terrific panel called Is neurodiversity the next frontier of accessibility in UX design?—well worth a watch!

One of those panelists—Craig Abbott—is speaking on day two of UX London next month. His talk has the magnificent title, Accessibility is a design problem:

I spend a bit of time covering some misconceptions about accessibility, who is responsible for it, and why it’s important that we design for it up front. It also includes real-world examples where design has impacted accessibility, before moving onto lots of practical guidance on what to be aware of and how to design for many different accessibility issues.

Get yourself a ticket and get ready for some practical accessibility awareness.

This was originally posted on my own site.

Understanding how users interact with a product or service over time is essential for building experiences that truly meet their evolving needs. That’s where longitudinal studies come in...

What are longitudinal studies?

Unlike one-off usability tests or surveys, longitudinal studies track user behaviour, attitudes, and experiences across days, weeks, or even months. They generally comprise multiple research methods including surveys, usability testing, diary studies, observational fieldwork, focus groups and one-to-one interviews. Using different methods enables researchers to use the appropriate method at specific times across the customer journey. They also help to triangulate findings in order to have more confidence in the research findings. 

When should you use them?

While usability testing is a great way to understand how people interact with a website or app it gives less insight into the overall customer experience. If your customers engage with you and your website multiple times over the course of weeks or months then longitudinal research can be useful for getting a deeper understanding of their behaviours over time. 

Longitudinal research is particularly useful for mapping experiences of events with longer lead times, like people booking to attend a festival months in advance. It can also be useful for potentially life-changing experiences, like applying to universities.  

What should you consider when running them?

The first question when deciding whether to run a longitudinal study is whether the topic is appropriate. If you run an ecommerce website where people tend to purchase on their first or second visit then usability testing will generally suffice. But if your product or service needs more long-term engagement from users then you should consider running a longitudinal study.

Once you’ve decided that this is the most appropriate way to run your research then you’ll want to consider when and what. There are frameworks that can help you do this and using a model will help you plot when you want to gain insight into the customer journey and what methods are the most appropriate.

The type of method you use will depend on what you want to understand at each  stage, and whether you want to take a more quantitative or qualitative approach. For example, surveys will help you to get high-level feedback from large numbers of people, while usability testing will give you more in-depth feedback from a smaller number. 

Once you have an outline of your plan, you can complete a research canvas for each of your activities. This will ensure that everything’s on track throughout and that you will be gaining the insight you need at each step. 

After you have completed your study you’ll want to bring all of your findings together. This could be on a journey map as well as a series of reports on findings at each stage. As ever, make sure you’re considering the ‘so what?’ at every step. What actions are you recommending based on your research findings? 

Deeper insights

Longitudinal studies can be time-intensive, but the depth and richness of insight they offer are well worth the investment, especially when you need to understand long-term user experiences. By planning carefully, choosing the right methods at the right moments, and staying focused on the bigger picture, you can uncover patterns and pain points that short-term research might miss. Whether you're mapping a long decision-making process or tracking engagement over time, longitudinal research is a powerful way to design with greater empathy and evidence.

According to the World Health Organisation, over one billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. Despite this, many digital platforms remain inaccessible. Global Accessibility Awareness Day encourages designers, developers and organisations to consider accessibility in their digital products and services, promoting a more inclusive online environment for all users.

At Clearleft, accessibility isn't an add-on; it's built-in, it's a fundamental aspect of our design philosophy. As a leading design transformation agency, we strive to ensure that every product and service we create is accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities. This Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we’ve chosen to highlight some of our recent projects, blog posts, podcast episodes and videos that embody our commitment to accessibility. While we often let our work speak for itself, this day provides a valuable opportunity to share our journey and the principles that guide us in creating inclusive digital experiences.

Thinking:

Awareness - Awareness is good. It’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient.
Applying the four principles of accessibility - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—or WCAG—looks very daunting. It’s a lot to take in. It’s kind of overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start.
Neurodiversity and accessibility: Reflections from our recent panel - Reflections on the ideas and perspectives shared during our recent panel exploring neurodiversity, accessibility and inclusive design.
Designing for neurodivergence is designing for all - Decisions you make in design and build can have real-life impact for neurodivergent people who want or need to use your digital products.
Accessibility audits for all - It’s often said that it’s easier to make a fast website than it is to keep a website fast. Things slip through. If you’re not vigilant, performance can erode without you noticing.
Accessibility testing - I was doing some accessibility work with a client a little while back. It was mostly giving their site the once-over, highlighting any issues that we could then discuss. It was an audit of sorts.
Accessible interactions - Accessibility on the web is easy. Accessibility on the web is also hard.

Listen:

The Clearleft Podcast, season two - episode three: Accessibility. Join Laura Kalbag, Léonie Watson, and Cassie Evans as they dive into accessibility on the web. And experience what it’s like to use a screen reader to navigate a website.

Watch:

Online Panel: Is neurodiversity the next frontier of accessibility in UX design?
Priyanca D'Souza at Research by the Sea 2024 - A more holistic approach to accessibility 
Geri Reid at Patterns Day 2024 - Don't worry, the design system takes care of accessibility!
Irina Rusakova at UX London 2022 - Designing with the autistic community: inclusive design that benefits everyone

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Work:

Case Study - Imperial College London. This is the story of how we worked with Imperial to transform its website, aligning an ambitious new strategy with its bold new brand.
Case Study - Camden Council. This is the story of how we helped Camden Council see user-centred improvements to their special educational needs and disabilities Local Offer website.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day reminds us of the importance of inclusivity in the digital world, reinforcing the message that accessibility is a continuous journey towards a more inclusive digital future.

References:

World Health Organisation: Disability and Health
GAAD: Global Accessibility Awareness Day

A lot of the frustration comes from unmet expectations. You go into the meeting expecting one outcome, and when it doesn’t materialise, you declare the meeting a waste of time. But had you gone into that same meeting with different expectations, perhaps you would emerge from it in a happier state.

We were talking about this at Clearleft recently and I suggested that a simple little taxonomy of meetings might be a good starting point for avoiding frustration.

Divergent meetings

In a divergent meeting the goal is to generate ideas. These meetings often happen early in a project.

Quantity matters more than quality. Plenty of “yes, and…” rather than “no, but…” to create lots of suggestions without having them shouted down. This is not the meeting to point out potential problems with the suggestions.

Convergent meetings

In a convergent meeting the goal is to come to a decision.

The meeting might begin with lots of options on the table. They need to be winnowed down. Poke at them. Dissect them. Ideally dismiss lots of them.

This is not the time to introduce new ideas—save that for a divergent meeting.

Just having those two categories alone could save you a lot of grief. The last thing you want is someone participating in a convergent meeting who thinks it’s a divergent meeting (or the other way around).

Those two categories account for the majority of meetings, but there’s one more category to consider…

Chemistry meetings

In a chemistry meeting there is no tangible output. The goal is to get to know people.

In a large organisation this might be when multiple departments are going to work together on a project. At an agency like Clearleft, a chemistry meeting between us and the client team is really useful at the beginning of our partnership.

Again, the key thing is expectations. If there are people in a chemistry meeting who are expecting to emerge with a framework or a list or any kind of output, they’re going to be frustrated. But if everyone knows it’s a chemistry meeting there’s no expectation that any decisions are going to be made.

There you have it. A tiny taxonomy of meetings:

1. divergent
2. convergent
3. chemistry

This tiny taxonomy won’t cover every possible kind of meeting, but it probably covers 90% of them.

Ideally every meeting should be categorised in advance so that everyone’s going in with the same expectations.

If you find yourself trying to categorise a meeting and you think “Well, it’s mostly convergent, but there’s also this divergent aspect…” then you should probably have two separate meetings instead.

And if you’re trying to categorise a meeting and you find yourself thinking, “This meeting is mostly so I can deliver information” …that meeting should be an email.

This was originally posted on my own site.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting a panel discussion exploring the role of neurodiversity in the future of accessibility. I was joined by Jamie Knight, Craig Abbott, Priyanca D’Souza and Joan Herlinger for a thoughtful conversation on how design must evolve to recognise the full range of human diversity.

For those who couldn't join us, I wanted to share some reflections and highlights from the discussion.

Recognising cognitive diversity

One of the early themes in our conversation was how accessibility often focuses on physical or sensory impairments, while cognitive accessibility can be overlooked.

"Accessibility is not just a technical problem, it is a people problem," Jamie Knight reminded us.

Jamie reflected on how designs that meet technical standards can still create barriers if they fail to account for emotional and cognitive load. It set the tone for a wider conversation about the need to centre human experience, not just compliance, in accessibility work.

Moving beyond compliance

We also explored the limitations of relying purely on accessibility guidelines. Compliance is essential, but it is not enough on its own.

"Meeting WCAG standards should be the start, not the end," said Craig Abbott, highlighting that a technically compliant service can still exclude users if cognitive diversity is not considered from the beginning.

Craig’s point prompted a discussion on how teams must go beyond box-ticking, embedding inclusion into every stage of the design process rather than treating it as a late-stage check.

Designing for flexibility and choice

Another strong theme was the importance of offering users flexibility in how they interact with services.

"Designing for neurodivergent users often ends up improving things for everyone," said Priyanca D’Souza, who emphasised that giving users control over how they experience content is crucial.

Whether it is reducing animation, simplifying navigation or offering alternative layouts, Priyanca made the case for designing experiences that adapt to different needs rather than forcing users into a single way of doing things.

Building accessible teams and cultures

The conversation moved naturally from external design to the internal environments where those designs are created.

"Accessibility needs to be built into the culture, not bolted on at the end," Craig Abbott reflected, speaking to the role leadership plays in making accessibility part of everyday ways of working.

Joan Herlinger expanded on this idea, reminding us that "if workplaces are not accessible, the products they create will not be either." She encouraged teams to think critically about their own practices, from communication to collaboration, to make sure neurodivergent colleagues are included and supported.

The panel agreed that when teams prioritise accessibility in the way they work together, it becomes much more likely that the products they create will reflect those same values.

Practical steps to support neurodiversity

Before we closed the discussion, I asked each panellist to suggest one practical step that organisations could take to better support neurodivergent users.

Jamie encouraged teams to engage directly with neurodivergent people early in the design process, rather than assuming their needs. Craig suggested simplifying user journeys wherever possible to reduce cognitive load. Priyanca highlighted the value of offering users choice and control, while Joan reminded us to look inward first, making sure our own teams and processes are genuinely inclusive.

It was a powerful reminder that small, thoughtful actions grounded in empathy and openness can make a huge difference.

Final thoughts

If accessibility is about removing barriers to participation, then neurodiversity must be central to that work. As our panel showed, designing for cognitive diversity is not just about meeting guidelines. It is about building experiences, teams and cultures that recognise, respect and celebrate the different ways people think and engage with the world.

Thank you again to Jamie, Craig, Priyanca and Joan for sharing their insights, and to everyone who joined us.

Watch the full panel discussion below. 

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Five years ago, Clearleft became an employee-owned company. It was a quiet, intentional step towards securing the future of the business in a way that felt true to our values. No big fanfare, just a simple belief that the people who shape Clearleft every day should also have a say in what it becomes.

“The employee ownership trust has a simple mandate: to ensure the long-term success of the company for the benefit of its employees.”

That idea still shapes how we work at Clearleft. It influences how we share responsibility and how we make decisions with the long term in mind.

So, what’s changed and what hasn’t?

Since then, we’ve seen the impact in many ways. Ownership has helped build more openness and trust across the team. It has encouraged shared responsibility and pride in what we do and who we do it for. It has helped us stay focused on what matters most, especially during times of change.

Being employee-owned hasn’t changed who we are, but it has reinforced the kind of company we want to be. A company built on people, with a culture that supports each of us to do our best work and contribute to something bigger than ourselves.

Looking ahead

It might not be the right model for every business, but if you are thinking about the future of your company and want to explore alternatives to traditional ownership, reach out, we would be happy to share what we have learnt. 

Let’s start with a scenario that might feel familiar.

You’re mid-way through a project. The design team have mapped the flow, built the wireframes, and is ready to finesse the microcopy. It all feels intuitive, clear, and user-friendly. Then the compliance team arrives.

Suddenly, you're adding two extra steps, three warning modals, and a scrollable wall of regulatory text. The journey gets longer. The experience gets clunkier. It all feels profoundly sub-optimal.

If you work in fintech or any regulated industry, you’ve likely lived this. Design wants clarity and flow. Compliance wants caution and control. When they collide, things can get messy.

Lately, they’ve been colliding more often, thanks, in part to the FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation, which puts the onus on firms to prove that their digital journeys lead to good customer outcomes.

At Clearleft, we recently ran a survey of compliance and design professionals across UK financial organisations. The results were revealing. Not because they pointed to villains or heroes, but because they uncovered a shared sense of frustration and a surprising amount of goodwill.

Late to the party

One of the clearest themes was timing - or lack of it.

"The compliance team is usually brought in late… which causes last-minute changes that can disrupt and add extra cost."

It’s not that compliance wants to slow things down. It’s that they’re often invited in too late to meaningfully shape things - so their feedback becomes a blocker, not a co-creator.

Speaking different languages

Another common struggle was lack of shared context.

"Compliance teams need to be educated with background information each time."

Designers often forget that compliance teams weren’t in the early workshops, haven’t met the users, and don’t know the nuances of the journey. And compliance, for their part, sometimes interprets rules with little appreciation for the realities of interaction design.

Same Goal, different tools

Despite the friction, both sides want the same thing: to protect customers. And when that alignment clicks, everybody benefits.

"Designers were heavily involved in re-designing the customer experience for offboarded customers. Compliance advised what we could and couldn’t do, and helped build buy-in."

This wasn’t a tug-of-war. It was a collaboration. Compliance provided the constraints within which designers could weave their magic. And it didn’t only result in more effective design, it also made it easier to gain decision-maker approval.

So what do we do about It?

From our survey (and from our experience), a few ideas stand out:

• Start together. Run a joint kick-off workshop where design and compliance explore goals, constraints and user needs side by side.
• Show your thinking. Share journey maps, research, and rationale early. Help compliance teams understand why a design exists, not just what it looks like.
• Test with a compliance lens. Run usability testing that looks at fairness, comprehension and risk - not just friction.
• Create shared playbooks. Codify what "good" looks like when it comes to balancing regulatory clarity and design simplicity.

The bigger picture

For designers, adhering to regulations can feel like counter-productive box-ticking. But when compliance is seen as a design constraint, rather than a straitjacket,  it can inspire better products that help customers - and organisations - get the outcomes they really need. 

It’s about designing in the real world, where simplicity must coexist with legality. But It’s also a reminder that good design isn’t always about reducing clicks. Sometimes it’s about helping someone make a confident, informed decision - even if that takes a little longer.

"It’s as easy to lose your life savings in a risky fund as it is to order a coffee to go."

That quote stuck with us. Because that’s the real design brief: not just to delight, but to protect.

If you're trying to navigate this tension in your work, we’d love to hear how you're approaching it. And if you want a partner to help you bridge the gap between design and governance - you know where to find us.

LNER is one of the UK’s leading rail operators, running high-speed services between London, the East Midlands, Yorkshire, the North East, and Scotland. Known for its commitment to customer service and innovation, LNER plays a key role in connecting communities nationwide.

With millions of passengers travelling on its network each year, frontline teams are at the heart of the experience. From station staff assisting travellers to onboard teams ensuring smooth journeys, these employees rely on timely and accurate information to provide the best possible service. But in a fast-moving environment, accessing essential details quickly is not always straightforward.

LNER saw an opportunity to improve how its staff interacted with digital tools to support their work. By elevating the employee experience and making these tools more intuitive and accessible, they could empower their teams to deliver an even better service. That's where Clearleft came in.

We partnered with LNER to explore how digital solutions could better support their front-line teams. Through in-depth user research and observational fieldwork, we identified opportunities to make information more accessible, ensuring staff could assist customers more efficiently. Our work resulted in a strategic roadmap that set out both immediate improvements and a long-term vision for LNER.

Clearleft took the time to understand the daily realities for our front-line teams. Their on-site research gave first-hand insights into our people, which remote work alone could not have achieved. This gave a solid foundation for their recommendations about how we can improve the digital experience for our front-line colleagues.

Randall Shortland - Digitisation Product Manager at LNER

The train has officially left the station, and we are proud to have helped LNER shape a realistic and inspiring vision for the future, along with practical next steps for projects over the next 12 to 18 months. Our work uncovered valuable insights into balancing digital tools with traditional methods while striking the right balance between what is achievable and what is exciting.

To learn more about our findings and recommendations, read the full LNER case study.

Employee experience matters

Every organisation has an employee experience, even if it isn’t formally defined. It’s easy to prioritise customer experience – after all, it’s the most visible measure of success. However, focusing solely on external-facing improvements while neglecting internal inefficiencies can be short-termistic.

Here's why:

• Customer service quality depends on staff performance. If employees struggle with inefficient workflows or disconnected digital tools, they cannot deliver a consistently great customer experience, leading to frustration, inconsistency, and preventable service failures.
• Workarounds can reveal hidden opportunities. Staff often create their own solutions when tools or processes don’t fully meet their needs. While this adaptability is valuable, it can signal where a structured improvement could have a bigger impact.
• Staff retention and engagement suffer over time. If employees are dealing with clunky systems, communication gaps, or unpredictable workflows, their motivation can decline, leading to higher turnover, longer training times, and overall stagnation in performance improvement.

Instead, investing in how your team works and their day-to-day experience leads to sustained, long-term gains. Employees who feel fully supported and equipped with the right tools are more confident in their roles, so they deliver even better customer experiences, reduce inefficiencies, and sustain continuous.

Identify your flag in the sand

To improve your employee experience, start by defining a clear long-term goal. A well-defined strategy helps you focus on the right improvements rather than spreading resources too thin.

• Your strategy must be ambitious and measurable. Vague aspirations like “We want to be better” are difficult to track, whereas “We want to reduce service disruptions caused by internal miscommunication by 30%” is clear, actionable, and progress can be measured.
• Identify what behavioural changes you want to see. While metrics such as efficiency or cost savings are useful, some improvements – like ease of use or staff confidence in handling service issues – are harder to quantify. Observing behavioural changes – such as faster response times or increased service consistency – can act as alternative success signals.

Look inward to move forward

Before introducing new initiatives, take time to understand how employees work today. This ensures you are solving real problems rather than adding complexity through well-intended but unnecessary processes.

• Shadow employees to see their challenges firsthand. Workarounds aren’t just signs of inefficiency; they are real-world insights into how processes could be improved. Paying attention to these adaptations can uncover opportunities to design better, more intuitive systems.
• Create a safe space for honest feedback. Many inefficiencies are known to employees, but they may not feel empowered to raise concerns. Open dialogue builds trust and engages teams in shaping solutions.
• Ensure staff feel involved in decision-making. Employees who feel heard are more likely to adopt new systems and ways of working, which increases the likely success of any digital transformation efforts.

Take a small step in the right direction

Ambitious goals can feel daunting, but progress happens one step at a time. The worst thing you can do is stand still while challenges persist.

• Break big goals into smaller, actionable steps. If the end goal is a fully streamlined employee-facing digital experience, start by fixing a single friction point – like simplifying access to real-time service updates or improving internal handover processes.
• Ensure that every change is tested and iterated. The best improvements come from small, measurable interventions that build momentum over time.

Employee experience isn’t a one-time initiative – it’s an ongoing investment. The better equipped your staff are, the better your customer experience will be. Take the time to understand where you are now, define where you want to go, and take your next step forward.

Accessibility has come a long way in the last twenty years, but the journey is far from over. Neurodiversity, which includes the unique needs of individuals with ADHD, autism, dyslexia and other cognitive differences, is reshaping how we think about inclusive design. Digital experiences should work for everyone, but how can we ensure they meet the needs of neurodivergent users?

What we will cover

During this discussion, our panellists will explore the following:

• How designing for neurodivergent users can drive innovation and improve digital experiences for everyone.
• The common barriers that neurodivergent users face and how digital teams can address them.
• Practical steps teams can take to create more inclusive experiences through research design and development.
• The balance between universal design and personalised approaches.

This panel will be valuable for designers looking to make digital spaces more inclusive.

Meet the panellists

We are bringing together leading voices in accessibility and inclusive design: 

Jamie Knight – Digital accessibility specialist, principal engineer, podcaster and lion tamer. Jamie has years of experience in advising organisations on how to create better digital experiences for autistic users.
Craig Abbott – Design lead and accessibility specialist, currently working as a principal accessibility consultant at TetraLogical. Craig specialises in sustainable accessibility and embedding accessibility into organisational policies and processes.
Priyanca D’Souza – Senior user researcher and accessibility specialist. Priyanca works to ensure that accessibility and inclusion are embedded in user research and service design practices.
Joan Herlinger – Experienced UX designer and creative director specialising in accessible, intuitive, and meaningful experiences. Expert in WCAG 2.2 guidelines with a focus on neurodiversity.

I'll be facilitating the panel, guiding the conversation and taking audience questions.

Why attend?

This session will provide insights and practical guidance on designing for neurodivergent users. Whether you are looking to improve your organisation's digital accessibility or expand your understanding of inclusive design, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.

Event details

Date: Thursday, 24 April 2025 
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM (BST) 
Location: Online (free registration required)

Register now to secure your place. 

This is going to be so good! Grab a ticket if you haven’t got one yet.

UX London takes place over three days, from June 10th to 12th at a fantastic venue in the heart of the city. To get the full experience, you should come for all three days. But you can also get a ticket for individual days. Each day has a focus, and when you put them all together, the whole event mirrors the design process:

1. Day one: Discovery
2. Day two: Design
3. Day three: Delivery

Each day features a morning of talks, followed by an afternoon of workshops. The talks are on a single track; four consecutive half-hour presentations to get you inspired. Then after lunch, you choose from one of four workshops. All the workshops are two and half hours long and very hands-on. No laptop required.

On discovery day you’ll have talks in the morning about research, content design, strategy and evaluating technology, followed by workshops on discovery and definition and behavioural design.

On design day there’ll be talks on interface design, a healthcare case study, inclusive design, and typography, followed by workshops in the afternoon on data visualisation and ethics.

Finally on delivery day you’ll get talks on conversion design, cross-team collaboration, convincing stakeholders, and improving design critiques, followed by workshops on facilitating workshops and getting better at public speaking.

Every workshop is repeated on another day so you’ll definitely get the chance to attend the one you want.

Oh, and at the end of every day there’ll be a closing keynote. Those are yet to be revealed, but I can guarantee they’re going to be top-notch!

Right now you can get early-bird tickets for all three days, or individual days. That changes from March 15th, when the regular pricing kicks in—a three-day ticket will cost £200 more. So I’d advise you to get your ticket now.

If you need to convince your boss, show them this list of reasons to attend.

See you there!

This was originally posted on my own site.

Speakers tackled some of the biggest challenges facing the industry, including the future of technology, the ethics of AI, and the realities of working in complex organisations.

Some talks pushed boundaries and confronted difficult truths. Others sparked new ideas and offered practical ways forward. Every session left the audience with something to take away, questions, challenges, or new ways of thinking.

In this post, we revisit some of the key themes and highlights that emerged.

Every minute you are here

Steph Troeth, head of data & insights at DXW

Steph opened the day by asking why everyone was there, not just in the physical sense, but in what they hoped to gain. Drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman and storytelling theory, Steph explored how experiences shape memory and influence decision-making.

Steph challenged the idea of a tipping point as a moment of no return, showing that climate change happens over time with both negative and positive shifts. The way issues are framed affects how people respond. Research and storytelling, when done well, can drive action rather than just highlight problems.

Key insights

• Memory shapes decisions. People act not just on experiences but on how they remember and interpret them.
• Stories can drive change. Reframing issues influences engagement and solutions.
• Action is still possible. Climate narratives often focus on catastrophe, but systemic and individual choices still matter.

Steph encouraged researchers and designers to think about the stories they tell. Instead of reinforcing a sense of helplessness, shifting narratives towards possibility and agency can lead to meaningful change.

"If we keep perpetuating the same stories, we will end up in the world they describe. What if we told different stories?"

Steph left the audience with a compelling question. What future do we imagine, and how does that shape the choices we make today?

What happens when we listen to the birds?

Tamsin Bishton, co-founder of Wilsome

Tamsin explored how paying closer attention to the natural world can shift perspectives. Researching the impact of birdsong on human connection, Tamsin examined how attentiveness to nature influences attitudes and actions towards climate and biodiversity.

Participants in the study reported deeper relationships with their surroundings, a greater sense of responsibility, and a shift in how they saw themselves in relation to nature. Research methods that embrace the environment provided richer, more meaningful data than traditional interviews.

Key insights

• Environment shapes insight. Research conducted in natural settings can surface deeper, more embodied responses.
• Connection builds responsibility. The more people engage with nature, the more they value and protect it.
• Research can be participatory. Expanding the definition of stakeholders to include the natural world challenges human-centric assumptions.

Tamsin encouraged researchers to rethink their approach. Taking conversations outside, observing interactions with nature, and exploring non-traditional methods can create new ways of understanding.

"We need methods that acknowledge our fundamental interconnectedness, rather than reinforcing the idea that humans are separate from the world around them."

The session left the audience reflecting on how research can not only observe change but also contribute to it.

Designing communities

James Lang and Madeleine Paige, Together by Design

James and Madeleine explored the power of community and how research and design methods can be applied to strengthen human connections. Community provides belonging, resilience, and support, yet many products and services fail to consider collective experiences.

Together by Design has studied what makes communities thrive and created a pattern library of proven approaches. The principles of user experience and research can be used to create stronger communities both online and offline.

Key insights

• Community enhances wellbeing. Social isolation negatively affects health, but strong communities foster resilience.
• Trust and participation matter. Designing spaces where people feel safe and engaged strengthens connections.
• Growth is not always the goal. Instead of expanding endlessly, communities thrive when they replicate and adapt.

James and Madeleine highlighted examples of community design, from structured onboarding to traditions that strengthen shared identity. They encouraged the audience to use their research skills to foster better group experiences.

"If you can design an app, you can design a community. The same principles apply."

The session left the audience with a clear call to action. Community building is an intentional process, and research and design can play a key role in making it stronger.

How to see and be seen: Navigating organisational complexity

Dr. John Curran, anthropologist and organisational consultant

John explored the hidden dynamics of organisations and why research teams often struggle to make an impact. Organisational culture is shaped by rituals, hierarchies, and unspoken rules that influence how people behave. Recognising these patterns is key to creating change.

John shared the story of a UX researcher who felt undervalued until realising that navigating the system was as important as the work itself. By finding allies and framing research in terms leadership cared about, the researcher was able to gain visibility and influence.

Key insights

• Culture is not static. Organisational structures and power dynamics constantly shift.
• Perception shapes influence. How work is framed determines whether it gets attention.
• Conflict can drive change. Tension is often necessary to challenge assumptions and move forward.

John encouraged researchers to think beyond their immediate tasks and consider the wider system. Understanding organisational rituals, reading unspoken power structures, and positioning research within the right conversations can make a significant difference.

"To be seen, do not fear organisational hierarchy. Read the room, find allies, and be clear on what you bring."

The session provided a practical framework for navigating complex organisations and ensuring research is heard.

Picking up the pieces

Cennydd Bowles, technology ethicist, author and futurist

Cennydd delivered a stark but necessary assessment of the future of the tech industry, urging the audience to reconsider assumptions about stability and growth. The golden age of tech, with endless job opportunities and unchecked expansion, is over. Layoffs, AI-driven automation and geopolitical tensions have reshaped the landscape, making it clear that the old ways will not return.

Key Insights:

• The industry has changed permanently. Layoffs, AI replacing roles and shifting political alliances mean the old career paths no longer exist.
• AI is not a neutral force. Even if it is not better than human workers, companies will use it if it is cheaper. Many roles will be automated before new jobs emerge.
• Technology is no longer human centred. Profit and political influence now drive innovation, replacing the ideals of user focused design.
• New futures must be actively shaped. Instead of longing for the past, designers and technologists must redefine their value, reject harmful ideologies and insist on ethical, human first technology.

"It is a really poor choice to live your life and your career on autopilot when autopilot seems to be taking us into a mountainside." 

The industry will not reset to its previous state. What happens next depends on those willing to shape the future.

A more holistic approach to accessibility

Priyanca D’Souza, senior user researcher

Priyanca highlighted the risks of designing services without considering how different barriers interact. Many systems assume users fit into neat categories, overlooking those with complex or overlapping needs. Using the example of autism and eating disorders, the talk demonstrated how failing to design for intersectionality can have life-threatening consequences.

Key Insights:

• Intersectionality matters. Many conditions, disabilities and lived experiences overlap, yet services often treat them separately.
• Real people cannot scope out parts of themselves. If a service only considers one aspect of a person’s needs, it risks excluding them entirely.
• Barriers are often compounded. Systems that fail to accommodate one need often fail to accommodate others, creating unnecessary struggles.
• Complaints are not always visible. The absence of complaints does not mean a service is accessible. Many people do not have the time, energy or means to push for change.

"Not considering or serving the needs of people who need our help will not make them disappear." 

People who need the most support will suffer if they are not considered in design decisions. Services must account for complexity rather than forcing users to fit into rigid categories. Accessibility goes beyond compliance. It must be built into every stage of research and design.

The spirit of Bartleby: In defence of refusal

Michael Kibedi, design researcher and writer

Michael explored the power of refusal in digital culture and design. In an industry that prioritises efficiency, automation and mass participation, refusal can be an act of resistance against extractive and exploitative systems. Drawing on historical and artistic references, the talk challenged the audience to rethink engagement with technology and consider refusal as a design principle.

Key Insights:

• Technology mirrors state power. Digital platforms shape society in ways similar to government systems, often reinforcing oppression rather than reducing it.
• Refusal is protective. It defends against harm, exploitation and the erosion of dignity in digital spaces.
• Refusal is collective. Real change happens through community action, not individual resistance alone.
• Refusal is joyful. Saying no to harmful systems creates space for better alternatives and liberatory futures.

"This is an invitation to conspire, to breathe together, to draw liberatory futures closer to ourselves." 

No is a generative and creative source of disorderly power. To refuse is to reject the systems that diminish people and imagine something better. The challenge is to resist collectively and reimagine technology’s role in society.

Debrief panel

Jeremy Keith, Dr. John Curran, Michael Kibedi, Cennydd Bowles, and Steph Troeth

The final panel brought together John, Michael, Cennydd, and Steph for an open and honest discussion on the themes of the day. The conversation covered ethics, power, and the changing role of design and research.

Key Insights:

• Ethical red lines matter, but must be chosen carefully
  Cennydd argued that setting boundaries is essential but should not be arbitrary. "If a red line prevents progress, it’s the wrong red line."
• Technology is not neutral
  Michael highlighted how technology reflects existing power structures. "Technology is often framed through a white, male, Western lens. What happens when we shift that perspective?"
• Hope requires action
  Steph challenged the idea of passive optimism. "Hope is being punk. It’s not about waiting for the future to be better but actively shaping it."
• Technology can reinforce inequality
  John pointed out that innovation does not always mean progress. "Technology does not just create new possibilities – it can also entrench existing inequalities."
• Strength comes from collective action
  Cennydd emphasised that speaking up is easier with support. "One person raising an ethical concern is easy to ignore. A hundred people standing together is much harder to dismiss."

The discussion left the audience with plenty to reflect on. The industry is shifting, but those willing to challenge and build something better still have power to shape the future.

Final thoughts

Research by the Sea was not just a conference; it was an invitation to reflect, challenge, and rethink the role of research in a shifting landscape. Throughout the day, speakers shared personal reflections, bold ideas, and practical insights, touching on themes of community, resilience, ethics, and the evolving role of technology.

Some talks brought hard truths about the impact of AI, the complexity of organisational change, and the ethical dilemmas researchers face. Others offered hope and direction, reminding us of the power of community, the importance of accessibility, and the need to listen to nature, to each other, and to the wider world.

A common thread emerged: research is not just about gathering insights; it is about how we shape and influence the world around us. Whether through the questions asked, the boundaries set, or the communities built, researchers have a unique opportunity to advocate for meaningful change. “We do not get a chance to reset the future of our industry very often. Now is the perfect time to do the work that will define us.”

This was a day of big conversations, but also one of connection, curiosity, and optimism. As researchers, designers, and strategists return to their work, the challenge is not just to apply what was learned, but to continue these discussions, to keep questioning, listening, and building towards a more thoughtful, inclusive, and impactful future.

Read more of our user research insights here. 

Inclusive design is an opportunity to mitigate the risk of excluding neurodivergent people, and make your digital products better for everyone as a consequence.

How do common design decisions affect different people?

Neurodiversity is a term that refers to the different ways the brain can work and interpret information. It highlights that people naturally think about things differently.

There are ways that we can design better for everyone that avoid designing against neurodivergency.

Reduce sensory overload

Flashing animations, videos and audio that auto-play, unreadable fonts, and complex patterns. All of these examples cause sensory overload for neurodivergent users. 

Too much information being presented at once can lead to an inability to process, and a subsequent lack of engagement with your product. In summary, keep it simple, focus on what you want users to understand from each site page. 

An example in practice. When working with Imperial College London, we wanted the homepage of their website to reflect their innovative and bold brand. We used video content in the hero, but gave users the control to pause and play.

Avoid unnecessary constraints

Arbitrary time constraints, for example to complete a form, cause stress and anxiety for people who take a bit longer to process information. This can lead to missed opportunities, failure to pay bills or worse. 

Trying and failing adds to a demotivating experience for people when using your product or service. 

Don’t make opting out difficult

It goes without saying that deceptive design patterns are bad, but they can especially impact those who are neurodivergent. 

Take an example where you are only able to cancel an online service via a phone call. This is a pain for anyone, but can be near impossible for someone with executive dysfunction. What should be a simple task, now involves planning (calling between certain hours), prolonged focus (waiting on hold) and answering multiple unexpected questions over the phone. 

Commonly referred to as ADHD tax, or neurodivergence tax, deterrents like these on your site or service can end up costing neurodivergent people more money and time in their day to day life than others. 

Why is this so important?

Neurodiversity includes conditions like ADHD, Autism and Dyslexia, and also includes instances where neurodivergency is acquired, like Dementia. In the UK, it is estimated that 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent, however, the number of diagnoses of neurodivergent conditions are rising year on year. 

It is becoming increasingly important to consider a neurodiverse audience in your designs. To ignore their requirements is to alienate a significant part of your potential market. Not only this, but designing with neurodivergent people’s interests in mind creates a better experience for everyone. 

Want to dive deeper into this conversation? We're hosting a panel discussion exploring how designing for neurodivergence leads to more inclusive experiences for everyone.

 Sign up to join the discussion.

MAGNUM

Having run this activity in workshops and training courses over the years, I’m confident there’ll be some mental images of chocolate-smothered ice cream, a few Clint Eastwoods in Dirty Harry, maybe the legendary photo agency, a Tom Selleck or two, or an oversized bottle of champagne. There are lots of ways to interpret and visualise this single word.

It’s a good demonstration of what happens in most meetings. Everyone nods and agrees and leaves happy, thinking their Magnum is the one everyone sees and agrees with. Disappointment and disagreement are postponed for another day.

Somewhat perversely, many people host meetings so they don’t have to make a firm decision. They encourage people to talk in the abstract without anyone having to commit.

As designers, our skill is in taking the abstract and making it real.  It’s good to create something everyone can look at and have a shared conversation around. Being able to go from 0 to 1 at speed is a form of alchemy (and we can repeat this trick when what we show needs changing). 

We turn our thinking into sketches, scamps, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs. We lower risk, save money and speed up project delivery by communicating ideas that facilitate more meaningful discussions. As a designer, don’t go to a meeting without one or two visuals to focus the conversation around.

Be selective. Not everything in every fidelity.

In design projects, I’ve noticed a tendency for folk to fall into the trap of stepping through the fidelity of the designs in a linear fashion. Some rounds of 6-ups then become sketches for pages before being tidied up into wireframes and passed into Figma. But you don’t always need every step for every page.

A colleague of mine has a phrase I really like: “We’re designing websites for users, not pictures of websites for users”. It’s a useful reminder that the digital design process has an end goal, and our efforts should be targeted at getting useful solutions into the hands of the user as soon as possible. In the wise words of designer Brenda Laurel: “Design isn’t finished until someone’s using it”.

The following three questions are helpful when working out what to create and what’s the right fidelity at the right time.

1. What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?

Your visual output should be steered by the problem you’re trying to solve and the people you need input from. The work you create should help you explore the challenge at hand. At the early stages of a project, I generally find exploring concepts more important than the execution of the artefact. Even more so when I can show and talk through the ideas.

I’m always looking to do less where I can. The time I save can then be invested where it’ll have the most impact or where the design challenge is the trickiest. 

I sketch on paper when I need to think freely, flesh out unusual ideas, or generate a wide range of possibilities. When I need to add finesse, polish and personality, I tend to work in high fidelity. But not always. If a developer can work from a sketch on a napkin or an ordered pile of post-it® notes then this is as far as I’ll take my design work. 

Low fidelity doesn’t mean shallow thinking. In fact, the opposite. The best way to arrive at the concepts, metaphors, and models that will drive any design work is to do it early in a project and through many iterations and critical reviews.

You’re answering different questions with different mediums. In one complex project working with a travel company, a whiteboard was the perfect canvas to start investigating ideas. Working in a team in a shared space helped unblock inertia. The whiteboard forced conversation and collaboration, and whiteboard pens excel at preventing any chance of drawing in fine detail. 

Most importantly, in this project, the next design decisions were made by people in the room who could congregate around the whiteboard.

2. What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?

It’s easy for interesting ideas to get lost in the backlog or to be considered only at the end of a project if there’s any time left. Creating micro demos throughout a project helps avoid this. 

These small proofs of concept don’t have to be digital. It’s amazing what you can mock up with paper, pens and basic craft equipment. You don’t have to wait until you’ve figured out the entire end-to-end journey. Better to create demos for parts of the product as you go along.  

As designers, we can over-fixate on the precision of execution to the detriment of the thinking behind the design. With a demo for a concept, it’s useful to remind yourself you’re not showing the proposed design; you’re showing your ideas that may (or may not) edge toward being the delivered design. 

Performance, accessibility, browser compatibility, alignment with brand guidelines, considered typography, and beautiful touches of design delight are all important, but not yet. At this stage, it’s perfectly okay for your demo to be bootstrapped together with poor code and held together with sticky tape. Test out your ideas with something tactile and throwaway while you have the time and space in a project.

I worked on a project with an intricate checkout flow with layers of conditional logic. Designing small discreet demos to pilot novel interaction ideas helped evaluate and develop our potential solutions. In this case, getting a feel for how something behaved in a browser was the fastest way to try and share new ideas without becoming too attached and committed to any of them.

3. How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?

Until you get into the final phases of delivery, the thinking behind the design is more important than how it looks. Early design sketches are ways of expressing your thinking. The success of your sketches is in helping whoever’s looking at them more easily imagine the final product.

In communicating the thinking behind the designs, I’ll take time to identify who needs to make what decisions and what will help them to do so. 

In most projects, you use a variety of channels and formats to share your work in progress. The trick is to use the best channel for the decisions you want made and the situation of the decision-makers. To do this, I start by answering some questions:

• Who is the decision-maker, and what do they need to make a confident decision?
• Is the conversation going to be synchronous or asynchronous? If there’s a choice, what’s my preference?
• What’s the perceived size and implication of the decision being made?
• What type of feedback am I looking for? A firm agreement or a nod to indicate that I’m moving in the right direction?
• How familiar are people with the challenge, and how much context is required?

Your job is to make it easy for the decision-makers to arrive at a timely, informed, and confident conclusion on how to progress.

I’m a big fan of using screen recordings to show work early to get feedback on ideas. They’re quick to produce, easy to distribute, and for the viewer, they are convenient to watch when they have the time and space to do so.

Showing the work and simultaneously sharing the thinking behind it is a potent combination. This approach is especially useful when the design ideas are more radical and when decision-makers benefit from having more time to reflect on and consider the proposed approaches.

I’ve found that keeping videos short and focused on a single design decision is most effective. The recordings don’t need to be Hollywood blockbusters. However, like all good stories, they need to have a beginning, middle, and end. Avoid a tour through the interface. Instead, highlight the problem you’re trying to solve and explain why and how your proposed ideas provide an interesting and impactful solution.

Putting the ink into design thinking

Design can make the abstract concrete. It allows us to play around with and stress-test new ideas. Design enables us to explore possible futures and then bring them to life.

In articulating ideas, look to create just enough to express an idea, to spark a better conversation, and to rapidly investigate alternative (and hopefully radical) options.

I like to think about my work as being a step on the road to confident decision-making. Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this. The value is in the depth of thinking and clarity of communication that comes from creating visuals to share. That’s more important than the quality of the marks on the page.

User interviews are essential for great UX, but the process can often be time-consuming and complex. From recruitment to analysis, traditional methods require significant effort and skills.

Together with our friends at Voxpopme, we invite you to join us in exploring how AI can support qualitative research. By leveraging AI tools, UX teams can streamline workflows, gain deeper insights, and reduce the manual effort involved in setting up user interviews.

Gain practical tips and experience a live demo of the tools that could help you spend less time managing research logistics and more time doing what you love: understanding your users.

What you’ll learn

• Why UX teams are turning to AI to make user interviews smoother and faster.
• How AI can help you prepare like a pro, helping to craft discussion guides and questions for both moderated and unmoderated research.
• How to fast-track your analysis with AI-powered summaries and interactive chat.
• Real-world examples of teams using these tools to enhance their research.

What we'll cover

This free webinar is designed to give you practical insights and hands-on exposure to AI-powered research tools. You'll learn:

• Best practices for integrating AI into your existing research processes.
• How AI can save time and improve the quality of your user research.
• Actionable tips from industry experts on overcoming common research challenges.
• A chance to ask questions and see AI tools in action during a live demo.

Speakers

• Tom Higgins, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Voxpopme
  An experienced SaaS marketer with a focus on video-first research, helping teams facilitate meaningful conversations efficiently and at scale.
• Katie Walker, Product Manager, Voxpopme
  A product manager with a background in UX research and customer experience. Katie is also certified in UX design by the Interaction Design Foundation and the Nielsen Norman Group.
• Facilitated by (me) Luke Hay, Senior UX Researcher, Clearleft
  A Senior UX Researcher with over 20 years of experience in UX and user research.

🔗 Register now to secure your spot! Sign up here.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Richard got right to the heart of it:

“The aspect that makes me most proud about Clearleft is its people.”

Jeremy highlighted the post, noting how much warmth and appreciation came through in the comments. Former Clearlefties, clients, and peers all shared what Clearleft has meant to them over the years:

“An absolute privilege to work at Clearleft. Fantastic people producing fantastic work. I learned more in my few years there than anywhere else combined.”

“Still my fondest and proudest work memories, great fun and greater people, here’s to all the Clearlefties, new and old!”

It’s a reminder that while we’re always looking ahead, the impact of what we do is shaped by the relationships we’ve built along the way.

So while we’ll be celebrating a little this year (and getting all nostalgic), we’re also keeping our focus firmly on what’s next. Here’s what has been keeping us busy lately.

Adding value

Alex wrapped up the final design amends and, alongside Sophie, delivered a Sprint 2 playback for a leading SaaS company specialising in inventory planning and e-commerce operations, who have been brilliant to work with - responsive, adaptable, and fully engaged in the process. They have embraced user research and can see its real impact. Their team is particularly excited about rolling out an onboarding journey for their self-serve customers. Next up, a senior stakeholder playback, where we will further demonstrate the value of research-led design.

It's always a great feeling when a client returns to work with us, a testament to the trust and value we have built together. This week, we quickly turned around three templates for a nationwide estate agent’s careers section of their website, drawing on our existing understanding of their brand and design needs. Picking up where we left off meant that we could move faster, deliver with confidence, and focus on refining the details.

Meanwhile, Sam has been deep in the build of a new website for a global non-profit, collaborating with colleagues and the client team to resolve emerging challenges. He also ran a training session for content managers and editors on their bespoke CMS, which was well received. Alongside this, he has been working with the non-profit’s IT department on infrastructure and DevOps, ensuring that the platform is built for long-term success.

Exploring and prototyping

Chris has been exploring AI tools to assess how they might enhance our prototyping workflow. Early impressions? The code can be a bit bloated, and crafting the right prompts takes practice, but tools like Bolt and TeleportHQ show promise for rapid ideation. He’s also written a blog post, putting the ink into design thinking, about the value of creating something tangible that teams can gather around and discuss, stay tuned for that one.

James has been adding the final touches to and rationalising a new component library, while refining page designs in Figma for a client project. He’s also been responding to Utopia queries, updating the Figma Utopia project kickstarter file, and exploring non-Adobe animation tools.

Engaging conversations

Fred and Jordan have been shaping an upcoming panel discussion on neurodiversity in design, an area we’re keen to explore further. They’ve been gathering insights, refining topics, and ensuring we open up meaningful conversations about designing for (and with) neurodiverse individuals. Expect a thoughtful, practical discussion on how to create more inclusive experiences.

On the Leading Design front, Rebecca has been having some fascinating conversations this week. A chat with Dalit Shalom from The New York Times explored AI and trust, what the future of news might look like and how people decide what to trust. Meanwhile, a discussion with John Payne, Head of Design at The Public Policy Lab, touched on the challenges of driving design-led change in large organisations. 

Keeping the wheels turning

Louise is in the final countdown to Research by the Sea (27 February), nailing down catering, print materials, and scholarship placements. There are still a few tickets left, so if research is your thing, now’s the time to jump on board.

Rhian has been orchestrating project retrospectives and internal catch-ups, making sure insights from recent work don’t slip through the cracks. From discussing process improvements with project teams to unpacking follow-ups from our EOT all-hands, as always, she’s helping to shape how we work together more effectively.

Looking ahead

We’ve kicked off 2025 with a mix of reflection and momentum, from wrapping up projects and exploring new ideas to shaping industry conversations.

With events on the horizon, new collaborations taking shape, and plenty of design challenges ahead, there’s a lot to be excited about.

I always recommend Erika Hall’s book Just Enough Research as a starting point for people looking to run their own research into the behaviour of their users. It’s a great overview of research methods and how to better understand your users and their needs. As the title suggests though, more strategy and thought is required in order to get the most from your research efforts.

Research should be run regularly. While there is still a time and a place for one-off large-scale research studies, iterative usability testing is a powerful way to answer important design questions and evaluate whether a prototype meets with user needs. Taking a ‘little and often’ approach to research can lead to rapid, effective product development.

Attitudinal generative research also benefits from being regularly updated as peoples’ attitudes and contexts change over time. Artifacts like personas, for example, need revisiting to ensure they’re still representative of your target audience. 

Where does research fit?

Treating UX research as merely a ‘resource to tap into’, as a commodity or a support function can be problematic. This mindset often undervalues researchers as it ignores the strategic expertise and critical thinking that experienced UX researchers bring to the table, reducing their work to "just running tests" or "gathering feedback”. It can also minimise the scope of research meaning that research is only used to validate pre-existing ideas or provide quick fixes. Treating research as a resource risks reducing collaboration, as it can feel like researchers are separate from the main design team.

A better approach is to treat UX research as a strategic partner in product development, embedding research, and researchers, as a key part of the team. This helps to ensure that research is a continuous consideration throughout the design process, rather than just a box to tick and empowers both researchers and the broader team to deliver better outcomes. Regular research can also help to bridge the gap between research and design.

Regular research gets results 

Regular, visible research is essential for impactful design. While it can be challenging to measure the direct value of research, its role in shaping effective, user-centered designs is undeniable. By integrating regular research into your process, you’ll empower your team to deliver better results and create products that truly meet user needs.

Each month, we curate a list of the best design articles, tools, and insights for our Clearleft, UX London, and Leading Design subscribers, showcasing the ever-evolving design world.

In this series, I’ll share the nine most popular links, three from each newsletter, plus an occasional bonus link for something special we’ve achieved or an event update.

Here are the top three picks from Clearleft’s December newsletter!

Stressed and overwhelmed...

10 learnings that changed how I think about emotions by Brené Brown.

2-minute read

Going Offline is now online, for free...

Clearleft's Co-founder, Jeremy Keith, wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now, it’s available to read for free. 

Read it here

Nudging user decisions...

Applying foundational theory from behavioural economics to UX and service design.

14-minute read

Next, here are your top three links from the UX London curated links newsletter last month.

Words matter...

We all know alt text is part of accessibility basics. By adding descriptions to our images, we explain them to visually-impaired users and boost our SEO in the process. But how do we decide which words to choose for our descriptions? This practical guide from Emma Cionca and Tanner gives some actionable tips to help us find the right words when they really matter.

15-minute read

Do less research...

This might be a surprising viewpoint (especially as we are looking forward to a 
conference all about research, but Carol Rossi is making us think with her question: "Are you doing too much research?". Here she explores when research is critical, when it can be skipped, and – critically – how we tell the difference.

7 minute read

Visual stimulation...

How many ways can you visualise a set of data? Do you often return to your favourite techniques, or do you explore new ways to tell each story? The Data Viz Project is a brilliant resource full of ideas on how to turn numbers into visuals.

Explore the visuals

There wasn't a curated link newsletter for Leading Design in December, instead, here are some of the things the team have planned in 2025. 

Online coaching...

A 10-week group executive coaching programme for mid-to-senior design leaders. Hurry, our next cohort starts February 4th. 

Secure your place

A sold out Leading Design New York...

Leading Design New York will bring design leaders together for a meaningful conversation on the future of design in a rapidly changing, AI-driven world. The event has sold out, but you can join the waiting list. 

Join waiting list

Leading Design London 2025

Since 2016, Leading Design has convened leaders from around the globe to learn, share, and grow. This world-class conference is designed for people leading design teams or overseeing design direction. Can't make it in person? Check out Leading Design On Demand, our extensive archive of talks.

Be a super early-bird

Finally, from us…

Going on a research safari...

This is the story of how we helped London North Eastern Railway better understand how digital can help create an industry-leading staff experience.

The result? A practical starting point for change combining immediate next steps for projects over the next 12–18 months with an inspiring vision for the future. This balance of ambition and practicality is already driving excitement across LNER.

Read the full case study

Before you go...

The links in this blog are snippets of longer versions; if you would like to subscribe to any of our newsletters exclusively and be the first to receive the full version of any of our curated links newsletters, you can sign up for links from Clearleft, from UX London, and Leading Design.
 

What is observational fieldwork?

Observational fieldwork is a part of ethnographic research. It invites us into participants' worlds like no other research technique. Going behind the scenes at an airport, doing a shift with the catering team onboard a train, or shadowing installation engineers fitting electric car chargers allows us to gain insights that would be hard, or even impossible, to obtain through interviews alone. By immersing ourselves in the day-to-day lives of people, we can understand their behaviours better than by interviewing them in abstract settings, removed from their natural environments.

This approach allows us to see what people do, rather than just what they say they do.

Tips for running observational fieldwork

Running effective fieldwork requires planning, immersion, and an understanding of context. To get started, it’s important to immerse yourself in the environment you’re studying.

Decide on your role

Consider what role you’d like to play. Are you going to be purely observing, or will you engage in some of the activities?

We recently completed a project for a train operator, researching the day-to-day tasks their staff undertake. We spent time with staff at stations as well as on trains. Seeing first-hand how they assist passengers with additional needs was invaluable for understanding their roles.

In this rail project, we took a hands-on approach at times, helping staff serve their customers. In the past, I’ve worked in-store at telecom providers, which was more observational; looking at how staff answered customer questions. 

Think carefully about which approach will enable you to understand and empathise with participants while keeping the behaviour you’re observing authentic.

Build trust

Once you’ve planned your approach and started your research, you’ll want to establish trust and rapport with your participants as quickly as possible. Be transparent about what you hope to observe and why.

Be non-judgemental and ethical at all times, paying particular attention to privacy and confidentiality. Participants may fear you’re there to evaluate their performance or even assess whether their job is necessary. Reassure them that this isn’t the case, and put safeguards in place to help them feel comfortable. Participants are also likely to be more open and honest if you assure them that you won’t associate their names with any of your observations.

Observe behaviour

When conducting research, consider both explicit and implicit behaviours. Explicit behaviours are conscious, controlled, and deliberate, while implicit behaviours are less conscious and more emotional. People are often unaware of their own implicit behaviours and attitudes.

Pay attention to non-verbal cues, such as body language, and watch for patterns and routines. If you’re observing someone in their workplace, you may find much of their behaviour is procedural; they might not consciously think about what they’re doing but react instinctively based on experience.

In our rail research, we found that staff needed to react to a variety of customer behaviours and situations. As a result, some actions were reactive rather than strictly procedural.

Record your findings

Capturing the experience is vital for accurately representing your findings.

Take notes and photos regularly to document key insights. Photos help demonstrate your findings more effectively than simply presenting them as your opinion. Be sure to note or record any key quotes you hear. Representing participants in their own words brings your findings to life, but ensure anonymity to protect privacy.

Use whatever method works best for capturing your learnings. My preference is to carry a small notebook and a couple of pens (you never know when one will run out of ink). Underlining or highlighting keywords in your notes is helpful for reviewing them after a busy session. I sometimes create mind maps to show relationships between people and processes. Additionally, I often make rough sketches to visually capture situations as they unfold.

Be flexible

While starting with a clear plan is essential, field research should be open-ended and adaptable. This flexibility allows you to explore unexpected findings and adjust your focus as new insights emerge.

Observational field research is about discovery, so approach it with an open mind and the ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

During our train research, many unexpected events occurred. Passengers attempted to board with six suitcases, injured themselves running for trains, or boarded the wrong train by accident. No two journeys were identical. Observing these situations first-hand and seeing how staff reacted provided invaluable insights into the realities of working aboard a train.

Triangulate with other methods

As with all research methods, observational fieldwork is just one approach. Use other methods to triangulate your findings and fill in gaps in your data.

Observation is more valuable than listening

Observational field research provides valuable contextual insights to deeply understand participants' perspectives and experiences, fostering empathy. It helps us identify the needs, values, and pain points that people have, which is key for creating effective solutions to their problems.

This type of research is essential for understanding human behaviour in complex, unpredictable, real-world settings.

Patience is rewarded

Gaining a deep understanding of someone’s day-to-day life takes time, especially when no two days are the same. However, this type of research offers a depth that other forms of research often lack.

Flexibility and persistence are key to deriving useful insights from observational fieldwork. Getting away from your desk and observing participants in their environments is the best way to see things from their perspective and gain true insight into their processes.

The relationship between research and design has long been a subject of discussion in the field of user experience. While research generates critical insights about user needs and behaviours, these findings often fail to translate effectively into design outcomes.

Clearleft’s report, bridging the gap between research and design, examines this issue in depth. Based on industry research, it incorporates responses from over 155 UX professionals across 23 countries. The report highlights the key reasons for this disconnect and offers practical approaches to address it. 

The report, led by Luke Hay, Clearleft’s Senior UX Researcher, delves into the barriers that prevent research insights from being fully utilised in design processes. Luke’s extensive experience in user research and data analysis has helped shape the report’s actionable insights and recommendations.

Download the full report to discover what our research revealed about the relationship between UX research and design—and how your team can benefit from these findings.

Help shape the next report and a chance to win a Research by the Sea ticket

We’re working on our 2025 follow-up report to explore how the landscape has evolved over the past year, and we’d love your insight. By participating in our upcoming survey, you’ll have the chance to contribute to the conversation and help shape the findings we share with the UX community.

As a thank you for getting involved, all participants will be entered into a draw to win a ticket to UX London’s Research by the Sea, a one-day conference for design and research practitioners. 

From a personal perspective it’s great to look at Clearleft and see how true we still are to our original values and ambitions. We wanted to make the world a better place, one website at a time. We wanted to continuously hone our craft and have a positive and lasting impact everywhere we worked. These still hold true, and we’ve recently refined the way we describe ourselves to reflect that latter point. As strategic design partners we take great pleasure in bringing our craft of user-centred design to clients, shaping the way their in-house teams do design, and helping the organisation use design to its strategic advantage.

Our programme of events has always been fundamental to our efforts at raising the bar across the design industry. We ran our first conference within 3 months of starting Clearleft. Our next events will see us exploring the impact of AI on design in New York, and the future of design research here in Brighton.

The aspect that makes me most proud about Clearleft is its people. I’m continually surrounded by a brilliant team of colleagues who are passionate about what they do, absolute experts in their fields, ambitious and determined, curious about others, and downright nice to be with.

It’s testament to the fantastic people who have worked at Clearleft over the years that we’re still going strong while others have fallen by the wayside or been absorbed and diminished in buyouts. We’re fiercely independent, employee-owned, and I love that.

Each month, we curate a list of the best design articles, tools, and insights for our Clearleft, UX London, and Leading Design subscribers, showcasing the ever-evolving design world.

In this series, I’ll share the nine most popular links, three from each newsletter, plus an occasional bonus link for something special we’ve achieved or an event update.

Here are the top three picks from Clearleft’s November newsletter!

Product design process...

There is no such thing as a universal product design process. Every org is different and uses the process that works best for its needs. Yet, it’s possible to establish a general set of actions that (with some alternations) work for many companies.

5-minute read

Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free...

Initially published in 2018, Flexible Typesetting has sold thousands of copies and given a new generation of designers fresh mental models to craft meaningful, multidimensional typography. It is required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged the rethinking of core curricula.

"Few things in my career have been as rewarding as writing and sharing this book. I’m so excited to give it to you for free." - Tim Brown.

Download the PDF

Design leaders should go “Founder Mode”...

The future of design leadership is not to aspire to ever-higher executive roles, ruling over a vast UX empire. Rather, embrace the “Founder Mode” concept of hands-on and vision-based leadership of small and highly effective design teams.

How can founders balance the intense focus required in "Founder Mode" with the need to manage broader organisational responsibilities effectively?

8-minute read

Next, here are your top three links from the UX London curated links newsletter last month.

The harsh truth about real purpose...

We live and work in a world where terms like 'purpose' are waved around with increasing abandon, as brands seek to present themselves in a positive light. As advocates for users, customers and citizens, this can place us in challenging conversations with colleagues and clients. This straightforward post from marketing veteran Dave Trott shines a light on a simple fact about purpose. Prepare for some uncomfortable reading.

3-minute read

Book review – Transport for Humans: Are we nearly there yet?

The design and function of transport represent one of the most complex, significant and difficult realms of user experience. This intriguing book by Rory Sutherland and Pete Dyson considers transport not so much as a matter of logistics but of perception and psychology. Whether or not your work is directly related to the movement of people, it's full of brilliant insight.
 

22-minute review

Nobody wants software...

We all need a wake-up call from time to time, and this one from Jane Ruffino is stark but welcome. As we get bogged down in the self-importance of our work, she reminds us: It's just computers. Nobody wants to use any software. Indeed.

12-minute read

Moving on to your top three links from last month’s Leading Design curated links newsletter for design leaders.
 

Reframing design leadership in the age of generative AI...

The design world is transforming fast. Generative AI is doing more than speeding up workflows — it’s redefining our role as leaders and inviting us to rethink what “good design” really means. As AI takes on some of the grunt work, we have an opportunity, and maybe even a responsibility, to ask ourselves: what does leadership look like when technology can handle the pixels? How do we make space for ethics, purpose, and real human impact in a world that’s increasingly automated?

4-minute read

Design Better podcast: Eric Snowden, Head of Adobe Design, on AI + design...

In this conversation with Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter, co-hosts of the Design Better podcast, Leading Design New York 2025 guest Eric Snowden (VP of Design at Adobe) talks about his leadership journey, generative AI’s place in a modern creative environment, and how supporting creativity and creative people has been a consistent thread throughout his career.

53-minute listen

The uneven distribution of AI’s environmental impacts

The adoption of AI has been rapidly accelerating across all parts of society, bringing the potential to address shared global challenges such as climate change and drought mitigation. Yet underlying the excitement surrounding AI’s transformative potential are increasingly large and energy-intensive deep neural networks. The Harvard Business Review unpacks how growing demands of these complex models are raising concerns about AI’s environmental impact.

9-minute read

Finally, from us…

Clearleft wrapped: Our year in highlights

As the year draws to a close, we thought it would be fun to celebrate the quirks, triumphs, and memorable moments that made 2024 special for Clearleft. From croissants to lino printing, here’s a lighthearted look at what makes Clearleft, well, Clearleft. 

Clearleft wrapped 2024

Before you go...

The links in this blog are snippets of longer versions; if you would like to subscribe to any of our newsletters exclusively and be the first to receive the full version of any of our curated links newsletters, you can sign up for links from Clearleft, from UX London, and Leading Design.
 

Most valuable team member: The Clearleft events bell

Would it even be a Clearleft event if you didn’t hear the joyous ringing of this iconic bell? Its bright tones signal the end of lunch and the start of another insightful talk from a global design expert. Whether at UX London or Leading Design, the bell’s unwavering dedication to punctuality ensures we all stay on schedule.

Do you know we produce events like Leading Design London and New York, UX London and Research by the Sea? Tickets for 2025 are already available—don’t miss out!

Most service designers and pastries in the same room at one time* (maybe): Service Design Breakfast Club

If there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s that great service design pairs perfectly with flaky, buttery pastries. The Service Design Breakfast Club not only brings together brilliant minds to discuss design challenges but also offers an impressive spread of breakfast treats.

Hungry for more? Sign up for future Breakfast Clubs here.

Not so chocolonely: Making the most of Imperial's colour palette

When working with Imperial College London, we wanted to ensure the vibrant new colour palette shone through in every aspect of the project. However, one particular colour didn’t make it into the final site design. So, we found the perfect opportunity to feature it—on a custom Tony’s Chocolonely wrapper as a gift to the Imperial team to celebrate the site going live! A sweet way to tie up loose ends, wouldn’t you agree?

Check out the Clearleft and Imperial case study.

Best design by a non-designer: Lino printing

This year’s creative highlight was undoubtedly the lino prints created during one of our many group activities. Proof that creativity thrives at Clearleft, even outside of the design team!

Want to see more of our culture in action? Check out our Instagram.

Most miles travelled in the name of work: Luke Hay

Luke’s passport had another busy year! From running research workshops at UX conferences in Edinburgh, Leeds, Florida, and Malaga to completing hours of observational fieldwork for a national train operator, Luke’s travel highlights were hard to top. And let’s not forget his trip to Barbados SEO last year—strictly for work, of course (wink). He’ll kick off 2025 closer to home, facilitating his ‘Making an impact with quantitative UX’ workshop at Research by the Sea in Brighton.

Learn more and secure your tickets here.

Best conference host outfit: Rebecca’s skinny jeans vs. Jeremy’s paisley shirts

Every event needs a great host, and ours bring style to the stage. Whether it’s Rebecca Groves’s effortlessly cool skinny jeans or Jeremy Keith’s iconic paisley shirts, they add a touch of personality to every event with their signature looks.

See what’s coming up on our events calendar.

Most creative TAM quiz - Spooky Halloween quiz

From sci-fi nerding to iconic adverts, our TAM (Thursday Afternoon Meeting) wouldn’t be complete without a bit of friendly competition. A standout moment? James Gilyead’s spooky Halloween quiz. James generated images of Clearlefties as iconic horror movie characters. The challenge? Guess who it was, what movie it was from, and the cleverly reimagined title James had based on the featured Clearleftie. What do you mean this is Operations Manager - Tes Saw atson?

Current-ly the best event branding: Research by the Sea

We do love to be beside the seaside! The playful branding for our upcoming research-focused event brings a splash of coastal charm. We had to stop ourselves from going overboard (wink) with UXR/coastal puns, but here are some of our favourites: “anchored in great ideas,” “riding the waves of innovation,” and “beach-combing for brilliant insights!” We’re ‘shore’ we’ll have even more by the time the event rolls in!

Explore the making of the website for Research by the Sea in Jeremy’s blog post.

Best learning journey: The UX London bus

This year, the UX London bus became more than just transportation; it was a moving hub of conversation, camaraderie, and learning. We’ll never look at a double-decker the same way again.

Join us at UX London 2025 for another three-day conference covering all aspects of user experience, from discovery and design to delivery.

Best unintentional comedic timing: Chris How at Leading Design London

Chris welcomed attendees to Leading Design London 2024 with his usual charm, creating a moment that had everyone chuckling thanks to some unplanned but perfect background messaging. Thankfully, the sold-out event was nothing but a roaring success!

Join us at Leading Design in 2025 in London or New York. Alternatively, stay home with Leading Design On Demand or participate in our online group coaching.

Thanks for joining us on this retrospective journey through 2024. Here’s to another year of creativity, collaboration, and, of course, croissants!

This online event will take place on Tuesday, 28 January 2025, from 12:30 to 13:30 GMT and is specifically tailored for professionals in student recruitment, digital services, and marketing at UK universities.

From our work with universities, we know that student recruitment is one of the biggest challenges facing the sector. With reports that over 40% of institutions are projected to run budget deficits this year, the need to fill all available course places is clear.

The webinar will provide valuable insights from our How Prospective Students Choose a University report and will focus on practical strategies to improve engagement with prospective students. Attendees will explore how to refine their digital offerings to create a seamless and compelling experience for applicants, positioning their institution more effectively in an increasingly competitive environment.

During the webinar, you will:

• Discover what motivates prospective students during their application journey.
• Learn how to turn research insights into actionable steps to align with your recruitment strategy.
• Get advice on implementing proven strategies that engage and convert prospective students, including those applying through clearing.
• Gain confidence in how to optimise your website to stand out in a crowded digital landscape.

About Luke

Your host Luke is part of Clearleft’s design research team. He digs deep into the needs of users and customers through user interviews and user testing, gaining empathy and domain insight. He then shares this empathy and context with the wider team in order to empower their design decisions for the benefit of our clients and their customers.

Participation is limited to 10 attendees to ensure an interactive and personalised experience, offering the opportunity for focused discussions with experts from the Clearleft team. Register now to secure your place and take the first step towards optimising your digital presence.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

This was originally posted on my own site.

The practice of dividing organisations into separate functions dates back to the armies of ancient history, where infantry, cavalry, and artillery first operated as independent units. While this specialisation enabled more formidable armies to take to the field, these divisions could prove fatal in battle if lines of communication didn’t function and attacks weren’t coordinated.

Today's organisational silos might not lead to your civilisation being wiped off the face of the earth, but for ambitious companies, their impact can still be existential.

Ask any leader of a large organisation and they'll tell you that silos hurt their business. When teams become isolated, the problems multiply: development lags, bugs slip through because Jeff never talked to Rachel, and you start falling behind your competitors. The blame game begins, people retreat further into their silos, and the atmosphere turns toxic. Your best talent jumps ship. The employee experience suffers, delivery slows, and product quality drops. This costs money - and executives don't like that at all.

"How do we fix this mess?" they wonder. But here's the catch: unless you address the forces that caused silos to form and become entrenched in the first place, any solution you try will likely fail. You might even make things worse.

Let's look at three common silo-busting approaches that sound good on paper, but often fall short in practice:

1. The Tech Solution: "Let's get everybody using this shiny new collaboration tool!" Sounds easy - but people are attached to their current ways of working. Why would they adopt a tool that disrupts their workflow and creates short-term pain? Without genuine buy-in, your expensive new platform becomes just another unused digital dust magnet.
2. The Social Solution: "We need more water-cooler moments!" Yes, those spontaneous cross-team conversations were valuable. But forcing people back to the office full-time ignores the benefits of flexible working that emerged post-Covid. And while organised social events and buddy programs aren't bad ideas, they often feel contrived and fail to generate authentic connections.
3. The Democratic Solution: "Let's ask the teams what they want!" Workshops are run, surveys are sent, but when nothing actually changes - or changes don't work - trust erodes and things quickly revert to the status quo.

The Hidden Barrier: Psychological Safety

There's one fundamental issue that dooms these well-intentioned initiatives: a lack of psychological safety.

When workers don't feel trusted to give their best, when mistakes are punished rather than treated as learning opportunities, it becomes dangerous to do anything outside the explicit parameters of your role - like point out a problem, suggest a new idea or consult with someone from a different department.

If it’s not your job to tell the cavalry commander they’re charging into an ambush, why risk your head?

The safe option is to retreat into that nice, cosy, familiar place where you feel at least somewhat insulated from danger.

When a workplace lacks psychological safety, no amount of tools or team-building will break down silos. Real change becomes damn-near impossible.

Here are three indicators of poor psychological safety.

• Top-down hierarchies where obedience matters more than innovation

• Short-term stability being prioritised over long-term success

• Leaders who talk about change but don't model it

These are the real entrenched problems that hurt your business. Silos are just a symptom.

The Path Forward

Breaking down silos requires structural change, which is hard. Just as ancient armies needed decisive leadership to unite their forces, modern organisations need leaders who can:

• Exercise powerful humility and self-awareness

• Take calculated risks rather than clinging to the illusion of stability

• Create environments where cross-team collaboration feels safe, not threatening

• Model the vulnerable, open behaviour they want to see

The tools, social connections, and employee input matter - but only once you've created the psychological safety for them to work. Without that foundation, you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Ready to design better work structures at your organisation? Contact Clearleft, and let's explore how we can help.

Each month, we curate the best design articles, tools, and insights for our Clearleft, UX London, and Leading Design subscribers, showcasing the ever-evolving design world.

In this series, I’ll share the nine most popular links, three from each newsletter, plus an occasional bonus for something special we’ve achieved or an event update.

Here are the top three picks from Clearleft’s October newsletter!

Figma’s battle against Figma clones...

New competitors frequently emerge in a billion-dollar industry like design software, often trying to reinvent the wheel or directly challenge each other. Unsurprisingly, companies like Figma aren't happy with their influx of rivals and actively work to outcompete or shut them down.

4-minute read

Creative career conundrums...

In-house teams haven’t always had the same cool allure as agencies. This reader is itching to get back. In this week’s Creative Career Conundrum, Katie Cadwell discusses if you can transition from in-house, back to agency.

2-minute read

Taking responsibility in the age of AI...

In 2023, researchers from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech (ID) spoke with design leaders and business executives from a range of high-profile organisations about the most daunting imperatives they face today. In the process, they learned why and how design can have the transformational impact required to thrive in the age of AI.

Explore the report

Next, here are your top three links from the UX London curated links newsletter last month.

5 funny metaphors to explain why it needs a UX professional...

This article tells five little entertaining stories to explain why you need (UX) experts to design interfaces. The intended audience of those stories is all people involved in product development processes. The people who could use those metaphors are meant to be designers.

6-minute read

Empathy mapping, why and how to use it...

This article discusses how empathy maps help designers understand user perspectives by organising what users say, do, think, and feel. These maps enhance team communication and provide valuable insights for better design decisions, though they work best when combined with other methods.
 

29-minute read

JPEG VS AVIF - the battle of compression...

Embedded YouTube video

Imagine being able to make your photos not only smaller in size but also better in quality. This would allow you to load web pages faster, store more images without paying for extra space, and make sharing and backing up your photo collection easier.

Moving on to your top three links from last month’s Leading Design curated links newsletter for design leaders.
 

How to survive the design leadership reckoning...

Design leadership as we know it is over, but it’s going to be OK. With traditional roles and methods no longer fitting today's tech landscape, Martyn Reding advises design leaders to embrace adaptability, expand their skill sets, and experiment with new tools to thrive in a market shaped by fierce competition and AI-driven change.

6-minute read

Taking ctrl: the secret to team chemistry...

Venessa Bennett shares insights on building high-performing teams through authentic leadership and strong team chemistry, emphasising the importance of values, personal branding, and creative communication for global teams. Design leaders will gain practical tips on fostering psychological safety and encouraging team members to bring their whole selves to work.

53-minute listen

Why design is hard...

Embedded YouTube video

What we call designing is in reality mostly advising. We make things as suggestions for other powerful people—clients, executives, and project teams—and they often ignore our expertise. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Design-industry veterans, Scott Berkun and Bryan Zug, explore how to use the skills you already have to navigate, negotiate, and influence the people, power, and systems that currently hold you back.

Read more

Finally, from us…

Research by the Sea early-bird ticket sale ends soon!

Brought to you by Clearleft, we’re taking UX London to the south coast for a full day dedicated to design research. Join the conversation and explore the future of UXR in Brighton amongst fellow design and research practitioners.

🗓 27 February 2025
📍Brighton Dome Studio Theatre

Secure your place at our early-bird rates today; hurry sale ends Friday, November 29. 

Be an early-bird

Before you go...

The links in this blog are snippets of longer versions; if you would like to subscribe to any of our newsletters exclusively and be the first to receive the full version of any of our curated links newsletters, you can sign up for links from Clearleft, from UX London, and Leading Design.
 

Background and context

Hold your breath.

The last few years have been traumatic. As individuals and researchers, we’ve weathered a perfect storm of wicked problems that have left us exhausted with the status quo and pessimistic about what is to come.

• The economic downturn, mass layoffs, the UX research reckoning and the threat of skills atomisation.
• The post-pandemic optimisation of working methods and short-term thinking of austerity service design.
• The enshitification of digital products with features consuming vast amounts of energy, built on stolen data.
• The increasing societal division, polarisation and loneliness.
• The real and tragic consequences of the climate crisis.

Faced with so much uncertainty,

• where might we find sources of hope?
• Who can be our beacons for change?
• What new mindsets and methods should we adopt?
• How might we begin to imagine positive futures for people, our cultures and our planet?

Now breathe.

Learning objectives 

Research by the Sea aims to explore some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities in our careers as researchers and broader societal, and global contexts.

What is the future of research?

Our central research question – what is the future of research? - aims to probe at the futures we are moving toward, the futures we actually want, and how we as researchers are best placed to shape them.

We will examine this question from three different topics:

• People – the people included in our process and recipients of what we create.
• Culture – the cultural systems our practice, products and services interface within.
• Planet – the natural environment and our responsibilities toward it.

As Judd Antin wrote:

It’s time for us to lean into the future, to realize the last 15 years was more fools golden than golden age. That’s ok. Researchers are learners — we know how to adapt. So let’s get busy.

Questions to answer

People

• How might we become more inclusive in our research practice?
• How might we design for people who actively choose not to engage with digital services?
• How might we use alternative solutions spaces to solve user needs?

Culture

• How might we make more impact by better understanding our organisation’s culture?
• How might we use new methods to identify future insights and opportunities?
• How might we confidently navigate ethical design decisions?
• How might we responsibly use the currency of data to solve user needs?

Planet

• How might we use futures storytelling to inspire restorative action?
• How might we approach our research activities with a regenerative mindset?

Participants

• 12 experts within the field of research.
  • Mix of career backgrounds
    • UX and design researchers
    • UX, content and service designers
    • Anthropologists
    • Academics
    • Ethicists
  • Mix of service perspectives
    • In-house
    • Agency
    • Consultancy
  • Mix of lived experiences, heritages and genders
• 175 curious, futures thinking industry peers.

Methodology

• 7 20/25 minute in-person talks
• 1 Q&A session, addressing the questions surveyed during the day
• 1 after-party of socialising and discussion
• 3 half-day workshops

Timeline

• 1 day of talks – Thursday 27th February 2025
• 1 day of workshops – Friday 28th February 2025

Resources

• Visit the conference website and learn more about the speakers and their talks
• Purchase your tickets, currently Early-bird discounted at the time of writing (2024-11-25)
• Add the event to your calendar (usercalendar.com)
• Read about the story behind this year’s theme
• Subscribe and listen to the podcasts that inspired this year’s theme (huffduffer.com – content updated periodically)
• Ask me more about the conference on LinkedIn

This article was originally posted on my own website.

The history of the Consumer Duty regulations

The Consumer Duty regulations introduced by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) aim to establish a higher standard of consumer protection in financial services. The process started in 2018 when the FCA began assessing how firms treat consumers, highlighting weaknesses in communication, fairness, and transparency. From their findings, work began on a consultation paper, which became fully implemented in 2023.

The regulations

The guidelines ensure that financial service providers focus on customer understanding and outcomes. The products and services they offer must be designed to deliver clear, predictable, and positive outcomes for users. Communications must be easy to understand, enabling customers to make informed decisions based on clear information. Firms must act to ensure products are suited to customer needs and provide fair value.

The regulations support vulnerable customers. Customers should have the tools and information they need to make informed decisions. Financial service companies need to continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of their offerings for all customers in order to ensure products meet their needs.

The risk of non-compliance

The FCA can impose substantial fines on firms found in breach of the regulations. The size of the fine depends on the severity of the breach and the firm's financial position. They may also be required to provide compensation to affected customers, covering financial losses or other harm caused by non-compliance.

The FCA can impose restrictions on a firm's activities, such as halting the sale of specific products or services until compliance is achieved, not to mention the reputational damage if the findings are made public.

The design perspective

The following guidelines will help ensure compliance, though you need to do rigorous research and testing to make sure you’re following these guidelines:

• Design should prioritise clarity in interfaces, ensuring users understand the benefits, risks, and features of financial products.

• The language used should be simplified to improve readability and comprehension.

• Navigation and design patterns should be intuitive to minimise confusion.

• Design choices should be ethical; steering users toward decisions in their best interest without manipulation.

• All interfaces should be fully accessible, complying with accessibility standards such as WCAG.

• Users should be offered multiple communication options (e.g. live chat, phone support, self-service tools) so they are not left unsupported.

• Feedback should be sought and behaviour analysed to identify current and potential issues and pain-points.

• Continuous iteration and improvement is encouraged in order to stay compliant and ensure that all customers are catered for.

How to comply

Design with clarity, fairness, and inclusivity as central principles. You’ll want to foster trust by eliminating deceptive practices and building interfaces that prioritise user comprehension and accessibility.

One key area to prove compliance is regular testing and iteration, particularly with diverse audiences. Not only will this help you remain compliant with the legislation, but it will also enhance user satisfaction and ultimately loyalty.

We’re currently working with a multinational financial services company to research the usability of their design changes prior to launch. We’re running several agile studies on a range of different product areas using interactive prototypes. The results of these studies have led to confidence that new feature launches will meet squarely with the needs of their customers.

At this time of year, the attention of Year 10 students will be turning to their university applications. The window for UCAS applications is now open, and the deadline for 2025 applications is January 29th. Roughly 60-70% of total UK university applications are submitted by the UACS January deadline each year.

Cutting it fine

According to UCAS's annual reports, there is a large surge in applications during the final week before the January deadline. Often, around 30% of January deadline applications come in within the last week leading up to the deadline, and many arrive in the last two days. This is perhaps unsurprising as students spend their time ensuring that their applications are as good as possible.

UCAS reports indicate that the highest application submission day is often the deadline day itself. Naturally, students want to make final tweaks, and the involvement of teachers and school counsellors also adds time to the process. Many schools also plan their internal UCAS deadlines in line with the January deadline, which encourages students to wait until this period.

Schools in the UK often also conduct mock exams or assessments around November and December, so students may be waiting to assess their progress before submitting applications. They may also just be busy studying during these months!

While the majority of completed applications won’t be submitted until January, a lot of prospective students will already have begun their research into which universities to apply to.

Upcoming changes

Tuition fees will rise next year, for the first time in almost ten years. While the rise is relatively small, around 3%, it may impact the number of applications at a time when young people are very aware of the cost of living challenges that they face.

When the UK raised tuition fees in 2012, there was an initial drop in application numbers, though they gradually rebounded as financial aid options adjusted and the perceived value of a degree remained high. However, applications from part-time students, who are often older and more debt-averse, have remained lower since the fee increase.

This UCAS window will be the last time that prospective students have to submit personal statements in their current form. The changes coming into place will allow applicants to complete three separate questions on their suitability, rather than having to write one complete statement.

It remains to be seen how much impact this change will have, but the reasons for bringing it in are to make the process more accessible, fair and focused on student's key strengths and experiences rather than narrative writing ability. This could lead to an increase in applications from those who consider themselves less traditionally academic. Our research has shown that producing personal statements can be stressful for prospective students, so this change may improve the process for future windows.
 

Considerations
 

Most UCAS undergraduate applications are submitted close to the January deadline, with an especially high concentration of submissions in the last week and on the deadline day itself. This pattern is driven by students’ desire to perfect their applications, align with school timelines, and maximize their chances of acceptance.

With tuition fees increasing this year there are concerns about the number of applications dropping slightly, particularly from prospective students from low and middle-income backgrounds.

Changes to the application process come into play next year and are aimed at making the application process less stressful and more inclusive. Time will tell how this will impact application numbers.

To find out more about the student application journey, and the part that university websites play in this, download our report which covers both the UCAS window and Clearing.

If you’d like to know how our research team can help you increase the number of student applications during this window then please get in touch.

 

Data for this blog post has been obtained via figures supplied by UCAS.

As I reflect on the incredible talks and conversations, here are a few standout takeaways that come to mind...

There is power in community

There is always a tangible feeling of camaraderie in the room at Leading Design events. But this year, there was a real conviction around the importance of design leaders to not only focus on themselves but to nurture the next generation of leaders. There was a collective focus on how leaders show up for themselves and others, setting the tone for continued growth and mentorship within the Leading Design community.

Design drives change

Change emerged as a central theme. Maria Giudice opened the conference with the idea of ‘change makers’, and our responsibility as design leaders to implement design concepts when driving change across our organisations. This idea was reinforced by Chris How, who spoke about shaping organisational culture through conscious leadership, and Nishat Akhtar, who emphasised that how we show up as leaders sets the tone for change.

Leadership goes beyond the title

Vuokko Aro spoke brilliantly around the idea of finding your authentic superpower as a design leader. She explained that if we don’t show up as designers in the boardroom, we try to morph to reflect others around the table and end up doing a disservice to ourselves and to the business.

Katrina Alcorn delivered a pep talk about the incredible versatility of design leaders’ skill sets, and how we can leverage these skills beyond traditional design roles, extending to chief roles. Because at the core, every challenge is a design problem, and a human-centred approach to leadership can transform our careers and our organisations. Having said this, Tom Takigayama challenged us to keep our egos in check and not to fear moving back and forth between leadership and personal passion.

Leading in times of turmoil is ultimately just leading

Now, more than ever, design leaders must navigate their teams through uncertainty. Will Miner’s talk on turmoil set the tone for discussing culture within organisations. Turmoil will impact us as leaders and, consequently, our teams, so it’s crucial to have a backdrop of core leadership skills to draw on. Similarly, Fonz Morris encouraged us to build out the skills of collaboration, communication, and conversation in preparation for the challenges we will inevitably face. Erin Casali provided really helpful insights from both a practical and psychological standpoint, unpacking how, during times of turmoil and change, respectful and actionable feedback is essential.

Speak the language of business

Ryan Scott tackled the hot topic of proving design’s business impact, encouraging leaders to focus on asking the right questions rather than trying to prove the ROI of design in the wrong context. As an interesting aside, half of this year’s Leading Design conference speakers, including Ryan, have MBAs, demonstrating the importance of business acumen in design leadership.

Focus on the future

Tey Bannerman’s insights on the evolution of design leadership encouraged us to think about how we are setting the stage for the next wave of leaders. This theme of looking ahead was underscored by Chris How’s reflection on Clearleft’s 20-year history and a forward glance at the impact of emerging technology on the future of design, which aligns with our Leading Design New York event on 27 March 2025, where 40 design leaders will gather in Manhattan to shape a shared vision for the future of design leadership in an AI-driven world.

Take ownership of your narrative

Christina Goldschmidt gave an empowering talk about taking ownership of our stories, no matter what happened. She helped us understand that what some may see as setbacks can actually be unique moments to craft competitive differentiators for your career and how the transformative power of storytelling can help you continuously unlock career success.

The planet is primary user

In the face of all our discussions on change, potentially one of the largest changes that is going on affects the planet. Julia Whitney and Ray Ho concluded this year’s conference with a discussion around ‘planet as primary user’, with provocations around how we as leaders can design with the planet in mind and integrate sustainability into our practice.

If you couldn't make it this year, you can sign up for our Leading Design On Demand platform and gain access to this year’s talks along with our extensive archive.

To make the most of being in the room with the brilliant people from the Leading Design community, grab a super early-bird ticket for Leading Design London 2025.

I'd love to see you there!
Rebecca and the Leading Design team.

Imperial College London is a globally-renowned university. Its scale and impact is impressive, with 23,000 students and 8,000 staff, cutting-edge research with collaborations in 192 countries, and 284 startups launched in the last five years from its enterprise incubator.

Imperial had a new organisational strategy, and had commissioned a rebrand from the famous branding studio, Pentagram. This was the catalyst for change, and the digital team at Imperial seized the opportunity to take a fresh look at their website.

They brought in Clearleft to redesign the website in order for it to better represent Imperial’s incredible achievements, stories, people, and community. What’s more we needed to take Pentagram’s radical new branding and make it work for the website.

The new Imperial website is now live and looking amazing. We’ve had lots of positive feedback already, and the go-live went smoothly. It’s a big improvement and a focal point for the new Imperial brand. It’s been great working with you over the last eighteen months.

Dan Sprawson - Director of Digital at Imperial

This was a significant project to work on as we transformed the Imperial College London site and rolled out a new Pentagram brand. So many teams have worked together to make this happen. Seeing it out in the world is amazing.

Read the full Imperial College case study for the behind-the-scenes story of how we made it happen.