About
Career
I'm Erich. I've been designing for the web since the mid-1990s, which means I started before most of the conventions of the field existed and have watched them get invented, abandoned, and reinvented several times over. The throughline across all of it has been the same: understanding the people on the other side of the screen and solving the problems they actually have, not the problems it would be convenient for me to solve. That work has run through commercial, medical, non-profit, and church sites in the early commercial-internet years, then nearly a decade designing for U.S. federal agencies and large nonprofits, then eight years in the geospatial world at Esri, and most recently lead product design on an elections management system. The resume page has the long version if you want it.
He fights for the user.
Influences
Four people have shaped me into the designer I am today, more than any others. Aaron Draplin, for the conviction that craft is a moral position — that doing the work properly, with your name on it, is the whole job — and for the equally important reminder that design is a skill, not magic. Anybody willing to do the work can do the work. Mike Monteiro, for the argument that design has consequences and that ducking that responsibility is itself a design decision. Don Norman, who taught me to look at the world as a series of badly-designed objects you can choose to either complain about or fix. And Jared Spool, who taught me that research isn't a phase, it's a posture.
If people are given a week to use a broken thing, they will learn to use it and be upset when you try to fix it.
Engineers
The other half of how I think comes from engineers. I've spent most of my career sitting close to the people who actually ship the code — sometimes literally pair-designing with a front-end engineer, sometimes reviewing pull requests, sometimes just asking a lot of questions about why a thing is hard. The reason I care about design systems isn't aesthetic; it's that I've watched what happens when designers and engineers don't share a vocabulary, and what happens when they do. When the vocabulary is shared, handoffs are clearer, what gets built is higher quality, it ships faster with fewer bugs, the user experience stays consistent across the product — and a working relationship forms between the two functions that makes everyone's job easier. That last one is the part you can't put a price on, and it's the one I'd protect first.
Users will very often tell you what they want. It's the designer's job to figure out what they actually need.
Off the clock
Outside of work, I live in northern Virginia with my family on a small farm — there's always something to build, fix, or maintain. I ride adventure bikes, which means any kind of road is fair game and the trip itself is usually the point. I'm active with Rally for Rangers, an organization that delivers motorcycles and equipment to park rangers working in remote and under-resourced places. I've helped deliver 30 motorcycles to rangers in Bhutan, and motorcycles and equipment to rangers of the Oglala Sioux and Northern Cheyenne tribes. And I take coffee more seriously than most people take their jobs.
If you've read this far and want to talk about design, farms, motorcycles, or coffee, I'd be glad to.
