June 3, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #510
This newsletter issue was sent out to 189,996 subscribers on Tuesday, June 3, 2025.
Editorial
How do we make better decisions? In code, in design, in estimates, in prioritization? In my experience, the only way to get better is to spend a bit more time in planning and discovery before jumping to experiments or premature conclusions.
In this newsletter, we look at things we all should know to set realistic expectations and drive better decisions — and to help us all feel a bit more confident and more comfortable when making those decisions to drive success.
Later this month, we’re travelling to New York 🇺🇸 (June 23) for our new pilot — in-person workshops near you, on design patterns and AI. We’d love to see you there — and please share the word with your colleagues and friends. Jump to the details.
We also have new online workshops coming up in June:
- Design Patterns For AI Interfaces 🔮 (starts Jun 4) with Vitaly Friedman
- Accessibility For Designers 🪴 (June 16–24) with Steph Walter
Thank you so much for your kind support, happy reading, and we are wishing you a wonderful rest of the week!
— Vitaly
1. Effort Vs. Value Curves
Do you and your team use “level of effort” as a key factor in prioritization conversations? If so, you might want to consider a different approach. John Cutler points out that the level of effort assumes only one fixed effort point and doesn’t take the expected value curve of the work into account. Instead, he suggests that teams shift the conversation and discuss the hypothesized relationships between effort and value.
To help you paint a picture of the high-level curve you’re dealing with, John shares an overview of six different effort vs. value curves. They visualize different scenarios, such as developing a new product feature that initially has low adoption but becomes a key selling point or implementing UX improvements that mean quick wins and then gradually taper off with more work. A great way to better set expectations of when your team might observe progress. (cm)
2. Better Time Estimates
Estimating how much time is needed for a project is incredibly hard, and if the estimates are too optimistic, we risk delays. So how can we improve our time estimates? Vitaly shares practical tips to help avoid surprises down the line.
Buffer time and scope of work are the two key terms when it comes to better time estimates. Vitaly recommends investing enough time in understanding the scope of the assignment first. To prepare for any unexpected issues that may come your way, add at least 15% buffer time, assuming that you have around 6 to 6.5 hours of productive time per day.
As he points out, this isn’t going to work all the time, but it will give you slightly more time and space to produce good work and prevent late-night sessions and last-minute changes. (cm)
3. The Work Is Never Just “The Work”
The work is never just “the work.” Maybe you’ve also had to learn this the hard way; Dave Stewart certainly did when a seemingly short, easy-to-deliver project turned into a task that dragged on over a year. But why does that happen? Why is our perception of the actual work sometimes so off?
Dave decided to get to the bottom of why the project took so much longer than he had thought and turned his findings into a framework to improve future estimation. The key takeaway: Even a detailed estimate of “the work” can miss significant “invisible” work like meetings, reviews, research, debugging, support, and updates — and all of this “invisible work” can take up to 80% of the total project effort, as Dave found out.
Even if the proportions and tasks in your project are different, the framework helps you become more aware of all the seemingly little things that impact the time and cost of a project. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 4–18 - Accessibility for Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Jun 16–24 - Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christina Vallaure. July 23–29 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Aug 20–29 - UX Bundles + Certificiation UX
with Vitaly Friedman. - Jump to all workshops →
5. Developing An Effective UX Strategy
A well-considered UX strategy helps you ensure that user needs are at the heart of every design and development decision you make. But what makes an effective UX strategy? And how can you develop one? Chloe Garnham wrote a helpful guide to support your UX strategy efforts.
In the guide, Chloe dives deep into the key components of an effective UX strategy — from creating a vision statement to defining key milestones and breaking goals into actionable steps. She also explains how to execute the strategy with all stakeholders, customers, and users involved. Valuable insights into why having a UX strategy matters and how it helps create user-centered experiences. (cm)
6. Overcoming Barriers To Scale
“We aren’t shipping fast enough.” “We need to deliver feature x in the next six months, but the next eight quarters are already packed out.” “We can’t sign up enough customers because our tech stack won’t support any more.” These are just a few examples of products that slow down or don’t go as fast as needed. But what blocks products from growing? And how can you overcome these barriers?
Dave Baines wrote a comprehensive guide to diagnosing scaling challenges in which he describes some of the most common hurdles, their underlying causes, and what you can do to push through them.
As Dave points out, scaling challenges are inevitable, and the issues that cause them are often interconnected and demanding to solve. To untangle and address them, he recommends decentralizing decision-making, reducing work-in-progress, and fostering collaboration. A must-read, particularly for CEOs and product engineering leaders who are in the best position to influence these areas. (cm)
7. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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