Hello! I’m Jason Godesky, a product designer with full-stack development experience from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Most of my work is protected under NDAs and other such agreements,* but here’s a small portfolio of some of the work that I can talk about.

The Essential Public Radio Frontpage

The Essential Public Radio Frontpage

Design isn’t just about the way things look, but the way they work. This case study highlights that by focusing on a problem that had nothing to do with appearances, but had a huge impact on web production for a local news radio station in Pittsburgh.

Topics: Authoring experience, algorithmic experience design

The CMMI Institute Design System

The CMMI Institute Design System

I first read about atomic design a few hours after Brad Frost tweeted the link to his original article back in 2013, and I’ve loved it ever since. I’ve made several design systems inspired by this idea, but none have been used as widely as the one that I helped develop for the CMMI Institute.

Topics: Design systems, system-driven design, progressive enhancement

The Fifth World

The Fifth World

I’m free to say whatever I like about the Fifth World, because it’s my own project. Unfortunately, that also makes it the one that I can only work on during evenings and weekends, and that sometimes shows. While it’s not my most polished work, it does give me an opportunity to step through how I approach product design and development from a broader point of view.

Topics: Value proposition canvas, design systems, visual design, typographic design

* If I could talk about some of those other projects that are protected under NDAs and other such agreements, I’d be telling you stories about things like UX research and design efforts for one of the 50 largest corporations in the United States, web modernization efforts for one of the top 10 banks in the country, iOS apps for regional retail chains, and maybe even the time I designed a website that I wasn’t able to look at because I didn’t have the security clearance.


And here are my Github repositories.

https://github.com/taggerkeeper

I find that I keep coming back to wikis, though often with slightly different requirements for them. Tagger Keeper is my attempt to write a wiki that will meet all of my needs. The idea is to allow for plugins that can recognize custom XML- or HTML-style tags in the wiki text to render content in special ways, create semantic relationships between pages, and even support specialized API calls. I’m building it API-first, then developing a modular design system that can support skinning and theming, and finally setting up a server that can bring the two together to present a wiki to the user (though the API-first approach and the public design systems means that any number of apps besides my server could make use of this system).

https://github.com/thefifthworld

This account includes the repositories for The Fifth World (see the case study above). Once Tagger Keeper is complete, I intend to replace these systems by making the Fifth World one of the first sites to use my new system. For now, though, these are the repositories running the Fifth World website. As with Tagger Keeper, this was an API-first project with a design system and a thin server to bring the two together.

https://github.com/jefgodesky

Tagger Keeper and the Fifth World contain my most serious personal projects, but there are, of course, a handful of others that don’t fit into either of them. Those projects end up in my personal Github account. These are mostly quick projects that I threw together to support my hobby of running tabletop role-playing games.

I sometimes publish articles on Medium about design and development. Here is a selection of the most important ones:

Embracing Change with System-Driven Design

Published in UX Collective

System-driven design is a new approach that relies on a design system to lower the cost of change as time goes on. This approach flips our assumptions about how design works on their head, creating the conditions for designers to become more agile.

Agility, UX, Building & Dwelling

Published in UX Collective

The difference between agility and UX isn’t between quantity and quality. Both are focused on how to satisfy users. They differ in their perspective on how that can be done. UX generally relies on what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls “the building perspective,” while agility relies on “the dwelling perspective.”

ChatGPT Cannot Do User Research

Published in UX Collective

The value in UX research is right there in the first “U”: it’s what we learn from talking to real users. ChatGPT can help with a lot of things, but it can’t tell you what real users can about their experience — it can only trick you into thinking you know more than you do.

Why Scrum Fails

Published in Better Programming

The overwhelming majority of Scrum horror stories could be solved by actually following the process of Scrum, as outlined in the Scrum Guide — but while we all follow a process that we call “Scrum,” almost none of us follow the Scrum Guide. So what is it about Scrum that attracts so much attention, but so little follow-through?

The Art of the Vertical Slice

Published in Better Programming

Agility is all about taking a small step towards your goal, seeing where that puts you, and then taking another small step. That first requires teams that are capable of taking steps by themselves. That means that you need cross-functional teams. Then those cross-functional teams need to start taking small steps towards their goals. That means working in vertical slices.

A Practical Guide to Progressive Enhancement in 2023

Published in Bits & Pieces

I made the same app twice — once as a standard React app, and once more with progressive enhancement. This article walks you through a productive approach to progressive enhancement with modern Javascript, including links to Github repositories for both versions of the app so you can compare and contrast what the two approaches have in common and where they differ.