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Two videos that make me hopeful about interaction design in the future.

Fri, 18 May 2012 17:24:13 -0400

http://vimeo.com/42053193

Please don’t advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse,...

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:48:00 -0400

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

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:43:00 -0400

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...

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:43:32 -0400

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..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:57:29 -0400

“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.””

- http://www.ac4d.com/2012/04/30/do-you-want-critique-or-a-hug

"Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you..."

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:01:11 -0400

“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.”

- http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/you-must-deliver-marketable-goods.html

explore-blog: Love Is Walking Hand In Hand (1965) –...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:35:59 -0400

explore-blog:

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...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:01:43 -0400

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up - can’t believe how well done this is…

How Gearbox's 'Truth Team' outwitted Borderlands feedback

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:22:21 -0400

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..."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:06:05 -0500

“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.

Love this iPhone in the style of the old Mac OS. (found...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Love this iPhone in the style of the old Mac OS. (found on http://repponen.livejournal.com/80856.html)

WTF Zynga? Why are there 3 options here to not get emails from...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:45:49 -0500

WTF Zynga? Why are there 3 options here to not get emails from you.

"In light of the Stanford study I’d take Clay Johnson’s argument further–instead..."

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:25:10 -0500

“In light of the Stanford study I’d take Clay Johnson’s argument further–instead replacing junk media with more high end media, try using technology to work and read and watch faster. Then use that time to go explore the world or do whatever makes you happier. Is it hanging out online? If you think this, then you probably have not seen the things I have seen away from my computer. You can argue that different styles of life are better and worse for different kinds of people, but as the Stanford study implies, online worlds are just not as of high resolution as real worlds and experiences. Again, Like button”

- http://thewirecutter.com/2012/01/happiness-takes-a-little-magic/

Excellent read from Brian Lam on what’s important in life.

"12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After..."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:14:30 -0500

“12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.”

- http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/i-am-lousy-copywriter.html

Do STEM Faculty want more undergraduates in the first place?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:41:29 -0500

Do STEM Faculty want more undergraduates in the first place?:

It’s a good question to ask - are the right incentives there in the first place?

"Back in 1984, our initial success at Disney was based on the ability to tell good stories well. ..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:54:04 -0500

“Back in 1984, our initial success at Disney was based on the ability to tell good stories well.
…
Intelligently approached, risk is a necessary component to success in the movie business. It is impossible to create new and original — and therefore appealing — new works without taking on the chance that you’ll fall flat on your face.
…
Most important, this is why we should provide a place where talent has the right to fail. By making long-term arrangements with talent we believe in, we can control costs while they can gain the security that’s necessary for taking creative risks and going in new directions.”

- http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/11/some-thoughts-on-our-business.html

Highly recommend reading the whole thing, but especially the first 8 pages of the memo (don’t worry, it’s not that long - they were faxed pages, the text is also available underneath the scans.). I found myself reading into it replacing Disney/movies with companies and actors with engineers/designers. Lots of great stuff in here.

(Found via @rjs)

Why Students Leave the Engineering Track

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:03:52 -0500

Why Students Leave the Engineering Track:

After reading this New York Times blog post, I wonder if the reason there aren’t more engineering graduates is because of how it’s taught. I was reading this article about Sebastian Thrun leaving Stanford to start an online university called udacity and this piece caught my eye:

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good.

Getting a college engineering degree today seems more like a hazing ritual and seeing who makes it rather than a system that’s optimized to help students learn. Having met many folks who’ve been self-taught or learned how to build software through avenues other than an academic route leads me to believe the problem is in how it’s taught.

People have many different learning styles and I’m really excited to see many different approaches being taken to attack the problem from a variety of angles. There’s plenty of room for success, and I’m looking forward to seeing more innovation around education.

Recently watched this talk by Wilson Miner from the Build...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:07:54 -0500

Recently watched this talk by Wilson Miner from the Build conference in 2010. Loved his take on the designer as a craftsman. Designers should care about quality, how it gets made, and appreciate the tools to do so.

cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:52:11 -0500

cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.

Enjoyed this video about a Japanese sword maker from the Etsy...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:13:51 -0500

Enjoyed this video about a Japanese sword maker from the Etsy folks. Really admire his pursuit of trying to recreate an ancient Japanese sword for the last 40 years, along with a sense of responsibility to make his disciples better than he is in technique and passion. The latter is a really simple way of looking at what the mentor/apprentice relationship is about.