Two videos that make me hopeful about interaction design in the future.
Please don’t advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …
- Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.
- Communicate effectively with other human beings.
These are skills that extend far beyond mere coding and will help you in every aspect of your life.
from Please Don’t Learn to Code
Increasingly I think it’s simpler things like respect, curiosity, communication, and humility that are way more important than how good you are at coding, designing, whatever.
Link bundle
http://www.swiss-miss.com/2012/05/the-ten-commandments-of-teaching.html - All of these are fantastic; in particular: 1, 8, and 10.
http://bokardo.com/principles-of-user-interface-design/
http://www.peterme.com/2012/05/04/user-experience-is-strategy-not-design/ - “UX adds value by bringing design practices to strategic endeavors. This means generative and exploratory user research, ideation and concept generation, scenario writing and roadmap planning. The impact of those strategic endeavors will not be limited to product and service design, but should be felt across business development, corporate development, marketing, engineering, sales, and customer service.”. Couldn’t agree more with this article.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details.html - This is a great essay on how to design products and services. Our job is to thoughtfully obsess over details, and strive to get them right.
I was grabbing lunch nearby and decided to check out a deli that seemed inauspicious, but it’s been there for a while - so maybe there’s something to it.
Overall there was nothing remarkable about the place, but one small thing stood out to me. I was paying for my sandwich and the woman behind the counter handed me some napkins. The detail that stood out was that the napkins were from Chipotle. My first thought was that wow, that’s hustle.
I wrapped up my lunch, but something left me unsettled about those napkins. I realized that I definitely applaud the hustle, but bristled at the lack of integrity. I’m thankful that the deli taught me something about myself – that I don’t value hustle without integrity, but I also won’t be eating there again.
A “bad critique” is one of the most valuable things a designer can receive, because it short-circuits the expert blindspot and helps you see things in new and unique ways, and it does it quickly. But sometimes in the design process, you don’t actually want feedback at all: you want affirmation, and you want someone to celebrate your work so you feel good. Learning to understand the difference is critical, because if you ask for critique, people will give you critique. But if you ask people to tell you the three best parts of your design, they’ll probably do it. As Adam Connor offered in his IA Summit talk, “Don’t ask for critique if you only want validation. If you want a hug, just ask.
Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form.
Love Is Walking Hand In Hand (1965) – the Peanuts gang defines love through the simple acts and moments of everyday life.
Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up - can’t believe how well done this is…
How Gearbox's 'Truth Team' outwitted Borderlands feedback
Armstrong and Puri were careful to explain that the Truth Team doesn’t just ignore focus tester feedback. Rather, it analyzes the intention behind that feedback for the most effective solution.
“In that example, the problem wasn’t that there were too many Skags, it’s that the pacing was bad,” Armstrong said. “But the tester might not have known how to say ‘The pacing is bad,’ so we had to figure out what they really meant.
“If you interpret everything your testers are giving you as straight fact,” Armstrong added, “our solution would have been to remove all the Skags, and we would have had a game that was slightly more boring.”
The three rules outlined by the Borderlands developers while they were playtesting are useful for product design as well. Digging deeper into the feedback your customers give you is a key skill for any product person.
There’s a risk to saying no, but it’s a risk worth taking; a good editor is crucial in product development. It is more likely that a product that has gone through multiple releases has some features that aren’t essential to the value proposition, or just don’t work as the team imagined they would. The right thing to do, the hard thing to do, is to edit these features out, to remove them and help make the product overall a better product.
http://momentnyc.com/b/2012/03/08/aiming-for-a-new-target-the-perfectly-featured-product/
The folks at Moment are putting some great content up on their blog. Highly recommended.
