Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Frontend Component and State Architecture
Structuring client applications for maintainability: component architecture and code organization, state management and data flow, data-fetching patterns, routing and navigation, micro-frontends, and rendering strategy trade-offs. Covers designing a frontend that scales in complexity without becoming brittle.
Frontend Fundamentals: HTML, CSS, and Responsive Styling
The core web-platform skills behind interfaces: semantic HTML, the CSS box model, cascade and specificity, layout systems (flexbox, grid), and responsive styling. Covers writing accessible, well-structured markup and building responsive layouts that hold up across viewports. The implementation foundation for UI work.
Responsive, Multi-Platform, and Localized Design
Adapting a single experience across the varied contexts real users bring to it: responsive layouts, mobile-first strategy, breakpoint reasoning, touch and gesture design, and platform interaction guidelines (iOS, Android, web), plus internationalization and localization such as right-to-left and multilingual layouts, text expansion, locale-specific formats, and cultural adaptation. Covers respecting device, platform, and regional conventions while keeping a coherent product feel, and anticipating these constraints early rather than as a late patch.
Accessibility and Inclusive Design
Designing and building for the full range of users and abilities: WCAG conformance levels and what they actually require, semantic markup and ARIA, keyboard and screen-reader support, color contrast and non-color affordances, accessible forms and error states, audio and alternative feedback, accessibility testing and audit, and disability-inclusive research. Covers accessible interaction patterns and treating accessibility as a first-class engineering constraint rather than a retrofit. The scope is accessibility as an engineering and design competency: not workplace diversity, inclusion and belonging, not algorithmic fairness or model bias, and not responsive or multi-platform layout as topics in their own right.
Usability Evaluation: Principles, Heuristics, and Testing
Judging whether an interface is usable, both analytically and empirically. Covers the foundational rules of usable interfaces (Nielsen's heuristics, affordances, feedback and system-status visibility, error prevention, consistency, cognitive load) applied through heuristic evaluation, plus moderated and unmoderated usability tests, task-based protocols, and A/B and preference testing. Includes when to test, writing tasks that avoid leading users, interpreting findings, and validating a solution before and after launch. Distinct from generative research in that it measures an existing design against usability criteria.
Rapid Design Exercises and Working Under Constraints
Producing strong design thinking quickly and under pressure: whiteboard and app-critique exercises, rapid problem definition, comfort with ambiguity, and pragmatic trade-offs between complexity, quality, and speed to market. Covers applying design fundamentals live and shipping quality solutions within real constraints. The design-exercise interview surface.
Design Handoff and Developer Collaboration
Getting a design built as intended: the specs, redlines and acceptance criteria a designer hands to engineers, and the communication that keeps the shipped build faithful to the design. Covers what a developer-facing spec must pin down, including component states, interaction and motion detail, breakpoint behavior, edge cases and error states, accessibility notes, and the design tokens an engineer will consume. Covers how the handoff is actually carried, in Figma Dev Mode, Storybook and the sprint ticket, and where those tools stop being enough. Also working with engineers before and during the build rather than only at the moment of handoff, resolving the tension when design intent meets technical reality, and design QA after the build: verifying the implementation against intent, visual regression checks in CI, and triaging drift without needlessly blocking a release. Both sides of the seam are examinable, including the engineer mapping design variants to component props and turning a spec into a typed component contract. Not design system and token architecture, versioning or governance; not building the prototype itself; not auditing an interface against accessibility standards.
Mobile UI Implementation and Architecture
Building native and mobile-web interfaces: mobile client architecture, view-controller and view-hierarchy patterns, responsive mobile UI implementation, and image and media handling on constrained devices. Covers the architecture and implementation decisions specific to delivering polished mobile experiences.
Frontend Performance and Rendering Optimization
Making web experiences fast: Core Web Vitals, the critical rendering path, page-speed optimization, and client-side performance techniques. Covers measuring web-performance metrics, diagnosing bottlenecks in loading and rendering, and the trade-offs of different rendering strategies for perceived and actual speed.