It's like r/Showerthoughts, but about design…or drawings of Batman
Are you subtly subverting your own brand by choosing a common Front End Framework? It is often overlooked by proponents of these systems that they are equal parts User Interface Convention and Brand Expression. Although they have benefits, they have costs as well.
The problem is not that we can’t predict bad behavior online, it’s that we can’t agree on what’s bad.
This morning, I was chatting with a colleague about a contentious interaction with a stakeholder in which they asserted decision rights over our work. I think I surprised her with my response: “It’s just like working with clients. When it’s your money, and you have to live with the outcomes, you get to make the…
There is an almost certainly apocryphal proverb that goes something like, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” and I think of it often when trying to take on large/complex projects, because I see this thinking get a lot of teams in trouble. One of the…
Update: Upon re-reading this post, I decided that I was being a dick. So, I’m editing it, to be clearer, and less of a dick. Last night, I had a simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating conversation with a group of designers that I know through AIGA. It was the night before the national conference started in…
I really enjoy strategy, but I’m not as good at it as I want to be. I’m pretty bad at chess. I’m awful at Monopoly. I’m even pretty bad at tic tac toe sometimes. Recently I’ve been analyzing my own behavior, and I’ve started to see a pattern. I have a blind spot. I am…
The site I work on at work gets requests like this pretty often: “When will you support Internet Explorer [version number way lower than 11]?” And, the answer is, “Never. A very small part of our users use IE[-3], and the cost would be prohibitive.” And their answer to that is typically something like, “Our…
In the past few years UX has become a big part of the conversation about design and its benefit to business. It had previously been a relatively small corner of the design universe, mostly concerned with how information is organized, how a user gets from Point A to Point B inside your application, and what…
I frequently have arguments with people about wasting time “re-doing” things they spent time on already. They’ll say things like, “I know this isn’t the best solution, but if we change it now, we will have wasted the time we spent making it.” Here’s the thing. You’ve only wasted that time if you never learn…
I am particularly fond of the misattributed (or completely fabricated) Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s spirit is something I identify pretty strongly with…that the market is incapable of thinking beyond the horizon. Buyers and users have a really hard time conceiving of…