Matthew A. Cottrell
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Takes · 12, with receipts

Takes

Opinions I’ll defend in a meeting, each backed by work you can check. When I change my mind, the take stays here with a date and a reason.

  1. T-01

    Enterprise users don’t want delight. They want to go home on time.

    Seven years designing enterprise IT software. Brutal UX zeroes every transition so state changes land in the same frame.

    Receipts · Brutal UX

  2. T-02

    A design system is a mood board until a script can fail it.

    linefield’s build refuses to run when the manifest, the pieces and the README disagree, and its control audit fails anything that reads a value without changing a pixel.

    Receipts · linefield

  3. T-03

    AI gets you to 80% by lunch. The last 20% is still the job.

    My essay The Last 20% is about exactly where AI prototyping stops saving time.

    Receipts · The Last 20%

  4. T-04

    An accessibility report nobody can find is a liability with a cover page.

    VPAT Vault exists so evidence moves into the report instead of ending up in a separate silo.

    Receipts · VPAT Vault

  5. T-05

    Decoration is where hierarchy goes to hide.

    Brutal UX strips every radius, shadow and easing at once. The hierarchy survives. It moves from the channel you scan to the one you read.

    Receipts · Brutal UX

  6. T-06

    Software should be disposable. Your data shouldn’t be.

    The Disposable Architecture of Tomorrow, plus a second brain kept in plain Markdown so the knowledge walks with me when the tools don’t.

    Receipts · The Disposable Architecture of Tomorrow, The Agent Bench

  7. T-07

    Dead controls do more damage than dark patterns, because nobody goes looking for them.

    Twice, a linefield control shipped that read its value and changed nothing, and a human review passed it both times. My old portfolio had one too: a menu button that did nothing above 768 px.

    Receipts · linefield

  8. T-08

    A design review that can’t cite a number is an opinion with a calendar invite.

    UX Skill Repo ties every finding to a contrast ratio or a named law, so “improve the hierarchy” becomes a rule ID and a fix.

    Receipts · UX Skill Repo

  9. T-09

    Background automation without a status page is a haunting.

    The Agent Workspace checks its own health every four hours and says what broke before I notice. Agentic Light goes further: nothing runs that I didn’t start.

    Receipts · The Agent Bench

  10. T-10

    Build the extreme version first. Then buy back only the comfort you can justify.

    Brutal UX is my control group. Once everything is gone, every radius and shadow added back has to earn its place.

    Receipts · Brutal UX

  11. T-11

    Hiring managers don’t read case studies. They read captions and numbers.

    So every screenshot on this site gets numbered callouts, and every case study opens with a title block.

    Receipts · Work

  12. T-12

    Breaking things is a design method. You don’t grow out of it.

    Built to Break: how a childhood urge to destroy things built a career in multimodal design.

    Receipts · Built to Break