Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
The software I build seems to work okay. It won’t impress a Google engineer, that’s for sure. But it serves its users and the business reasonably well.
It became a hidden project in our task-tracking system called Monsters Under the Bed, and whenever we’d have a few minutes, we’d open the Monsters, contemplate one of them, and find a novel way to kill it.
“This work in the alpha phase would have been really hard to parallelize. You can’t hire a bunch of engineers to make that go faster […]. Hiring a bunch of people would have made it harder to be nimble and change the direction of that foundation,” he says.
Most importantly: how is this wall of text more maintainable than a class name like “primary”?
Do I need another wall for the white button?
You could use a collection of utility classes for that, but I find creating a group class is just more practical.
In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color.
Design leaders need more than just design skills. Understanding business and strategy is one the most impactful things designers can learn to lead teams and attain meaningful results.
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
But these new generative tools help you with the first half of the process, taking you from nearly zero to a lot of initial ideas.
Like that first solution with the diluted potions, designer Wyatt Cheng says “we weren’t totally thrilled with this solution as we were putting it in, but we did it anyway. We knew that even though this might not be a solution that we’re willing it was something that was going to teach us a lot more about the problem”.
This is vague, but important. You should be deliberate about absolutely everything in your design. This means whitespace, alignment, size, spacing, colour, shadows. Everything. If I point at a random part of your design and you don’t have an explanation for why it looks that way, you’re not finished.
“I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,” Garland says. “They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket.”
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it”.
Given this crucial aspect of scientific production—that early exploration is indispensable but typically has little impact on the wider scientific community—an excessive reliance on citations in the evaluation of scientists effectively punishes the exploration of new ideas.
For the vast majority of our species’ history, those were the two principal categories of human relations: kin and gods. Those we know who know us, grounded in mutual social interaction, and those we know who don’t know us, grounded in our imaginative powers.
But now consider a third category: people we don’t know and who somehow know us. They pop up in mentions, comments, and replies; on subreddits, message boards, or dating apps.
Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?”
It is impossible to test against all the version combinations of all components in the library. Is Button v3.4 compatible with Accordion 1.2 and Modal 5.3? Library maintainers can’t guarantee quality, which means when issues arise consuming teams and maintainers have go on an easter egg hunt to pin down where compatibility problems are occurring.
A focus on building the solution “right” means you do not let debt you take on stay around for long. You keep it visible and eradicate it fast as you deliver new features. And you do this because you recognize the longer the debt lives on, the more the interest hurts.
Splitting Product Discovery and Delivery across two teams is a form of a functional silo.
Instead of thinking of the daily stand-up as a ritual for the people, think of it as a ritual where the Work Items Attend (e.g., User Stories in an Agile context) and the people attend only to speak for the work items… since obviously the work items can’t actually talk.
Discovery work often results in killing ideas. At the end of every test you’ve got a decision to make: build it, kill it, or keep learning. Yes, what I’m really saying here is discovery work can and should result in killing ideas. Not everything goes forward.
After all that work, after establishing all that shared understanding I feel like we pull all the leaves off the tree and load them into a leaf bag–then cut down the tree.
That’s what a flat backlog is to me. A bag of context-free mulch.
The idea is to test as many solutions as possible during discovery and discard all the wrong ones during this phase; this way, only the right solutions are developed during delivery.
Playing a videogame for someone is a far more elaborate skill than just playing to win.
You’ll want to focus on nouns that might represent objects in your system. If you are having trouble determining if a noun might be object-worthy, remember the acronym SIP and test for: Structure Instances Purpose.
When the return sweep does not reach the beginning of the new line (undershoots), it is followed by a small leftward saccade to move back towards the beginning of the line. This is described as a corrective saccade.
Dependencies suck; dependencies rule. Other people’s code is like getting other people’s work for free. The downside is that it comes with their opinions, hobbies, and hygiene attached. All code comes bundled with a code smell. Usually, there isn’t anything you can do to prevent it from stinking up the place.
…and even if you have all of that, something being unique does not automatically grant it quality. NFTs operate on the principle that being one-of-a-kind grants something value by default.
In the classic buildup-climax-resolution structure of drama, the JoJo pose is not the climax. A crucial moment has already happened when characters assume their stances. That’s why I think it’s part of the resolution.
In other words, solutions should only be considered if they help us deliver on one of our target opportunities. If they don’t connect to the tree, they should be considered a distraction.
But the problem with not doing anything and just jumping right into the product is that it is generally a good idea to look before you leap. The challenge is to do this in a quick, lightweight, yet effective manner.
When engineers build ad retargeting platforms, they build something that will continually funnel more content for the things you’ve indicated you’re interested in. On average, that’s the correct thing to do, Seyal said. But these systems don’t factor in when life has been interrupted.
The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.
This is the impact of entertainment on real life. People assume that what they see in movies, tv shows, and social media is real. And they try to mimic it.
Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if it’s subconscious.
Disabled buttons don’t explain what’s wrong. They communicate that something is off, but very often it’s just not good enough. As a result, too often users are left wondering what’s actually missing, and consequently locked out entirely.
Should they engage in the journalistic practice of building information around a strong central narrative, leading with a protagonist or an anecdote like the one that began this piece? Or should those hoping to accurately communicate science stick with a drier approach to persuasion, one that’s less likely to use the same rhetorical tricks as misinformation campaigns?
When Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, heard of Diderot’s financial troubles she offered to buy his library from him for £1000 GBP, which is approximately $50,000 USD in 2015 dollars. Suddenly, Diderot had money to spare.
Shortly after this lucky sale, Diderot acquired a new scarlet robe. That’s when everything went wrong.
If you want to make sure your application works as expected, is inclusive to as many people as possible, runs efficiently, and is well-designed, then testing needs to be a core part of your workflow, whether it’s automated or manual.
When I say em size is absolutely arbitrary and is not related to anything in the font at all, it’s not an exaggeration. It actually is not!
Instead of thinking of design as a procedure, think of it as a toolbox. For different projects, you need different tools. If you’re asked to pound in a nail, grabbing a screwdriver isn’t ideal.
I make a window bigger when I want to see more information, not the same information presented in a larger size. […] I have no data to back this up, but my intuition says that it’s the amount of available space, not the size of visible content, that people are playing with when they resize windows.
As for the lyrics, I tried to get all the languages I could find and wrote down interesting words in katakana. Then I changed these into words that Japanese people would find cool, so that people could not recognize individual words of any particular language. I had invented my own language.
Spotify is focused on “capturing the share of time listeners spend elsewhere.” This is why Ek talks about “audio” generically, because it doesn’t matter specifically what those listeners are doing elsewhere, Ek just wants them doing it at Spotify instead.
Eradicating these impostor tactics is possible, but it would require tech companies to admit that the design of their systems aids and abets media manipulators.
Even though your plan is liable to become immediately irrelevant, you still need to invest in writing it up. Why? There are two reasons. The first is to surface disagreements that may otherwise remain hidden. […] The second reason is that it provides a platform from which change can be leveraged.
Any time you break up a story based on functional roles (back-end/front-end, for example), you are diluting the story and creating a dependency management game.