👋 Hey Growth Enthusiasts!
December's here, and we're separating strategy from the stuff that just looks like it.
This month, we're exploring why your roadmap isn't actually your strategy, how NHS England designed UX principles when lives are literally on the line, and what happens when AI makes developers 10x faster (spoiler: designers need to adapt, fast).
Also on deck: why your copy keeps breaking under pressure, building platforms that serve no one by catering to everyone, and Fitts's Law (because the size and position of that button matters more than you think).
Stay clear. Stay strategic. Stay adaptable.
🔥 Top News: What We’re Watching (and Side-Eyeing)
A rapid-fire digest of the stories catching our eye—plus our take on what they really mean for product, growth, and building things that actually work.
Your Roadmap Isn't Your Strategy (9 min read)
Our 🎬 - Most teams confuse strategy with plans, goals, or vague roadmaps. Strategy is what you do and don't do (and why), not a Keynote deck. Six components, zero fluff, and a reminder that design without business alignment is just expensive decoration.
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When Healthcare Design Meets Life-or-Death Stakes (8 min read)
Our 🎬 - Bad UX in healthcare can actually kill people, so NHS England built design principles that treat clinical safety as foundational and not an afterthought. They baked "safe" directly into their UX heuristics (rule of thumb) alongside the usual suspects like "obvious" and "efficient." Turns out mortality risk changes how you think about button placement.
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When Devs Ship 10x Faster, Designers Panic (or Adapt) (5 min read)
Our 🎬 - AI coding agents just gave developers massive productivity booms. Now design teams are scrambling. Some are drowning, some are evolving. These are the most common reactions and what actually works when the pace suddenly goes hyperspeed and nobody asked if you were ready.
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Finally, A Color Picker That Doesn't Gaslight You About Accessibility (Tool)
Our 🎬 - Most color tools make you guess if your palette passes WCAG. This one uses HSLuv so lightness actually means lightness, making accessible color combos easy to find without the trial-and-error hell. No auto-magic either. You stay in control while the tool handles the math.
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🌱 What We’re Thinking About
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You know that moment when you try to carry all the grocery bags at once—then drop the eggs?
That’s what happens when you overload your copy. Headlines stretch, voice hedges, and clarity breaks.
Not because the writing’s bad but because we keep piling too much on.
In our latest post, we unpack why copy cracks under pressure and how to give it space to do its job.
Read the full story on Niftic.com →
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💻 Behind The Build
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How do you serve students, legislators, researchers, and dental professionals from one platform?
When NYSADC came to us, their mission to expand dental access across New York was clear, but their digital presence made finding critical resources nearly impossible.
Explore how we built a flexible platform that makes their impact as accessible as their vision.
Check out this case study on Niftic.com →
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🍿 Design Snack: Size Matters ... and Distance too.
Ever notice how easy it is to tap a big button at the bottom of your screen versus hunting for a tiny link buried in the corner? That's Fitts's Law at work. The bigger and closer a target is, the faster and easier it is to hit.
💡 Quick Tip: Make your primary actions big, bold, and easy to reach. The most important buttons should dominate the screen and live where thumbs naturally land.
🔍 Real-World Example: Same product page, wildly different effort required.
The "Don't" version makes you work:
- Small text link tucked in the top corner
- Requires precision targeting and scrolling back up
- Easy to overlook, annoying to hit
The "Do" version respects your thumb:
- Large "Add to cart" button spans the full width
- Positioned at the bottom where it's easy to reach
- Impossible to miss, effortless to tap
One design removes friction. The other creates it.
💭 Something to Think About: Are your most important actions sized and positioned for effortless interaction? Or are you making users hunt and tap with surgical precision?
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Founding partner. Strategy lead.
Remy works at the point where clarity starts to matter. She helps organizations untangle the complicated parts — the language, the structure, the decisions — so the work can move forward with purpose instead of noise. Her background spans brand and campaign programs across the U.S. and Asia, shaped by a mix of behavioral insight, systems thinking, and a steady respect for design craft. She was recognized by Salt Lake City’s mayor with the Deedee Corradini Women’s Leadership Award, though she’ll tell you most of her real work happens far from the spotlight — in notebooks, long conversations, and the questions no one else wanted to ask.
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Teams know her for bringing calm to complex moments and for making hard problems feel workable again.
Outside of work, she’s slowly expanding her Mandarin and noticing the small design decisions — in food, in cities, in everyday objects — that say more about a place than any guidebook ever could.
🎶 In the Stack: Oboe
Experimentation should be fast, flexible, and focused on real growth—not buried under red tape.
Enter Oboe stage right. It’s lightweight, powerful, and lets our team (and our clients) run clean experiments without slowing down.
