Marcelo Paiva. I design experiences and ship accessible code that runs them.
Marcelo Paiva
I design experiences and ship accessible code that runs them.
I write about the people our defaults leave out, and what it takes to design for them on purpose. The work is where I try to do it: leading a team that builds with AI agents, where designers ship code through the same gate as engineers.
Latest writing
Who is an accessibility file for?
GitHub now gives accessibility its own tab on a project, next to the license. I added the file to this site, and the part I did not want to write turned out to be the useful one.
What does a model owe you when it is not sure?
Every tool I have built can be fluent about something it got wrong, and I had never thought of that as a design choice.
Who writes the alt text for a picture nobody drew?
Alt text has always been written by someone who looked at the picture, and I had not noticed how much that assumption was carrying.
What should a team hand each other instead of a picture?
For as long as I have worked in this field the unit of design communication has been an image, and I am no longer sure it can carry what we need it to.
Who verifies what the agents built?
Generation got faster and review did not, and I keep wondering what is falling into the space between them.
Who can afford to participate?
We say participants give us their time, which is a polite way of saying we asked them to work and did not always plan to pay for it.
Is a terminal a user interface?
We argued for twenty years that screens should be readable, then moved our working day into one nobody ever measured.
What should an agent be allowed to do without asking?
A tool I built quietly rewrote my own source files six times before I noticed, and I had been watching it the whole afternoon.
How do you stop being the person who knows?
Everybody brought their questions to me. It felt like the most valuable thing about me. It was also the reason my team never had to learn.
How do you keep something powerful approachable?
I spent years being told that good design means less on the screen, and the best interface I ever worked on was one of the densest things I have seen.
Selected work
ClearCo: rebuilding a research and design team for agents
Head of UX and accessibility — product, design and engineering; one of the leads of the AI transformation2024–present
UKG: asking 184 customers what they were trying to get done
UX manager — commissioned the study, co-authored the enterprise analysis2019–2020
Letting an agent do the recruiter's job, with the recruiter's permissions
Head of UX and accessibility — led the team on server, client and security model2026
Help that knows which screen you are on
Head of UX and accessibility — led the team on the extension, the MCP server and the authoring agent2026
CCDS: a design system that ships itself
Design system architecture, component design and implementation2026