It's like r/Showerthoughts, but about design…or drawings of Batman
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…
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…
This, to the best of my recollection, was an actual objection I recently faced when discussing the future of a product with its manager. “We can’t afford to radically improve [our product]. If we do, the customers we have now might decided that, since they’ll have to transition to the new version, they might as…
I love this talk. It’s, seriously, one of those things that made the light go off in my head the first time I watched it, and here’s why: “Educating” Clients is patronizing bullshit – Clients don’t need to know what font it is, or what Pantone color, or what the fuck Kerning is. They hire…
So, as it turns out, I need to take my own advice. This is a companion piece to my previous piece on the Virtues of Being Expensive. Twice in my career thus far, I have issued a refund. Both times, it’s been for logo design, and both times, it’s been for someone who couldn’t afford…