About Practical UX Design
25 years of UX practice.
One platform to share it.
Practical UX Design exists because good UX knowledge should not stay locked inside project teams, delivery cycles, and conference rooms.
After more than 25 years designing digital services — from early web development in 2000 through to leading interaction design on complex government programmes used by millions of people — there is a lot of hard-won knowledge that simply does not make it into textbooks or training courses. The kind that only comes from doing the work, repeatedly, across different organisations, sectors, and constraints.
That knowledge is what Practical UX Design is built to share.
The experience behind the platform
The work has spanned more than two decades and a wide range of industries — financial services, energy, retail, travel insurance, and government digital services, among others. Organisations large and small, consumer-facing and internal, simple and genuinely complex.
Across those years, the more recent focus has been on government digital services — working with departments including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Planning Inspectorate, designing services used by millions of people across the UK.
Across all of it, the through line has been the same: designing services that work for the people who actually use them, in environments that rarely make that straightforward. Legacy systems, evolving policy, delivery pressure, and stakeholders who do not always speak the same language as the design team. That is the reality of UX practice for most designers, in most organisations. It is what Practical UX Design is built around.
In 2019, that accumulated experience led to a published book — UX for Developers — practical guidance on applying UX thinking in development contexts. Practical UX Design is the next chapter of that work, broader in scope and built for the long term.
What you will find here
Practical UX Design publishes guidance across three areas of practice:
UX Journey Design
How to design journeys that guide users through complex, multi-step services, from mapping through to delivery.
Behavioural UX
How to design for the way people actually make decisions, using cognitive patterns, choice architecture, and friction reduction where it has the most impact.
Practical Prototyping
Fidelity decisions, testing approaches, and hands-on guidance for building prototypes that answer real questions.
Start with the newsletter
The best way to get a feel for Practical UX Design is the weekly newsletter. Every Wednesday, one practical UX idea you can use immediately — written for practitioners who are doing the work, not just reading about it.