Why this matters

You already design things people use. You just might not know why they use them the way they do.

Every navigation label someone ignores. Every button nobody clicks. Every page a user scans for three seconds and abandons. Every form that gets abandoned halfway through. These aren't random failures. They follow predictable patterns — patterns that have been studied, documented, and explained. Patterns that, once you understand them, you can design around.

Most designers learn this the hard way: by watching users struggle with things they built, and gradually reverse-engineering what went wrong. Design for Real People shortens that process. It gives you the framework before the frustration.

The course 10 days. One idea at a time.

Design for Real People is delivered entirely by email. One lesson per day, for 10 days. Each lesson covers a single concept — fully argued, clearly written, immediately applicable.

No platform to log into. No video to scrub through. No cohort to keep up with. Just one well-written email each morning, and 24 hours to let the idea settle before the next one arrives.

What you'll learn The full 10-day curriculum

Day 1 — Don't make me think
Day 2 — How people really browse
Day 3 — Design for scanning
Day 4 — Clicks don't matter
Day 5 — Write less
Day 6 — Navigation is a promise
Day 7 — The homepage's one job
Day 8 — Test, don't argue
Day 9 — Test with one person
Day 10 — The whole picture

10 days. 10 lessons. One idea at a time.

Why it's built this way One lesson a day works better than a course you binge.

Most learning about usability happens in workshops: two days, a room full of sticky notes, a lot of energy, and very little retention. You leave with a process printed on a card and a vague sense that something important happened. Six weeks later, it has mostly evaporated.

Design for Real People is built on a different principle.

One idea per day. Each lesson covers a single concept, fully. Between lessons, your brain has 24 hours to encounter that idea in the real world — notice a navigation label that makes no promise, spot a form that's making users work harder than it should, recognise a homepage that fails to answer the simplest question. That encounter is where learning actually happens.

Spaced repetition, built in. Later lessons reference earlier ones. By Day 9, when you're learning about usability testing, you're also quietly revising scanning behaviour, click confidence, and what good evidence looks like. That layering moves ideas from short-term recall into genuine understanding.

No catch-up pressure. Miss a day? The email waits in your inbox. There's no cohort, no live session, no expiry date. The structure rewards consistency, but it doesn't punish life.

Research in cognitive science consistently shows that distributed learning — small amounts spread over time — produces stronger retention than massed learning, even when total time spent is the same. Ten days of ten minutes each will leave a deeper mark than a single afternoon of two hours.