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.
If you’re tasked with writing microcopy, first learn as much as you can about the component you are writing for, particularly its constraints. When you finally sit down to write, don’t worry about getting it right the first time.
[…] think about reiterating significant changes in one-on-ones, group settings, via email, and in passing. Change is scary, but the more people hear about something, the less scary it tends to be.
It is certainly the mark of the internet: email, chat forums, social media and comment threads have all engendered a culture of multiple exclamation mark usage and abusage. It’s really interesting!!! The more you use them, the more you need to use them!!!!!! The more you need to use them, the more you increasingly make no sense!!!!!!!!!!!
(A.) The map could be incorrect without us realizing it; (B.) The map is, by necessity, a reduction of the actual thing, a process in which you lose certain important information; and (C.) A map needs interpretation, a process that can cause major errors.
We can’t be afraid of a tale if no one lives to tell it. More survivors can make something seem more dangerous rather than less dangerous because the volume of stories makes them more memorable.
Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”. Many steps are even omitted, likely because they are “obvious”.
Ads are digital goods. What else are ads? Spiritual goods? They are the digital good. They are what is driving the digital economy in the first place! And, yes, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on do have direct transactions built into the apps. And, no, they do not pay any fees to Apple for these in-app transactions.
An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never.
[…] it’s concerning that the Hoover Institute will freely give you Richard Epstein’s infamous article downplaying the threat of coronavirus, but Isaac Chotiner’s interview demolishing Epstein requires a monthly subscription, meaning that the lie is more accessible than its refutation.
The result would be an asynchronous retrospective spread across multiple days in order for the team to collaboratively build off each others ideas and eventually come to an action plan without requiring anyone to wake up in the middle of the night to participate.
While we all hold an opinion on almost everything, how many of us do the work required to have an opinion?
Instead, consider a hundred years as a minimum threshold for long-term thinking. This is the current length of a long human lifespan, taking us beyond the ego boundary of our own mortality, so we begin to imagine futures that we can influence but not participate in ourselves.
Can stories reproduce? Well, yeah, not spontaneously, obviously—they tend to need people as vectors; we are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes—but they can, and they do.
It’s not that you can’t do something it’s that unless you have literally done everything, you’re choosing not to because the price is too high. Stop lying to yourself.
The key is that the “green path” isn’t set out as a predictable trajectory. It is hacked out of the jungle as you go. You know you are going, are confident you can get there, but aren’t sure of exactly what issues will be encountered along the way.
When we lock ourselves into planning to build a set of features (ehem, Roadmaps), we rarely stop to question if those features are the right things to build to reach our goals.
[…] Angry Alice only sees feedback from extremists, so she doesn’t receive more nuanced signals that might actually cause her to reflect on her behavior. If no reasonable people give feedback, only the unreasonable people are left. From Alice’s perspective, the only people who disagree with her are jerks.
Bruce Leslie: […] he said in most traditional kind of set up superhero comic books, you have to think of the hero as the antagonist and the villain is the protagonist because it‘s the hero who‘s trying to defend the status quo while the villains trying to come in and rock the boat so to speak.
When society cannot enforce prosocial human behavior, the antisocial primate may come back into power. And thus the troll is created.
Melanie Mitchell: And this is something that comes up again and again in natural language processing systems, is that they don’t have the kind of knowledge about the world that we humans have and so they make mistakes.
Roman Mars: So if you ever see someone wandering around Stratford, carrying a pug and looking confused at their phone, don’t worry. They’re probably just chasing a ghost geotag on the hunt for the most Instagrammable wall in the world.
By using testing to avoid design by committee and focus stakeholders on the right assessment criteria, it almost guarantees a better design in the end.
This kind of invisible, hidden labor, outsourced or crowdsourced, hidden behind interfaces and camouflaged within algorithmic processes is now commonplace, particularly in the process of tagging and labeling thousands of hours of digital archives for the sake of feeding the neural networks.
Because the format of job stories includes contextual details, they are portable. In other words, a job story should make sense without having to know the larger JTBD landscape or job map. As a result, job stories have a more “plug-and-play” versatility that is often required for Agile designs and development teams.
Product managers should have an equivalent peer for engineering. Product managers should be accountable for the prioritization of work. Engineering managers should be accountable for the engineers’ execution, which includes being able to negotiate speed and quality tradeoffs with the product manager.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.
If you’re struggling to come out with something new […], change the way you’re doing things and you’ll end up with a different result. Not only that, but have the courage to do so. I say courage, not confidence. Confidence comes from doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. It takes courage to change that.
We had this realization that basically, we had added a dimension, so the simplest strategy was take out a dimension, but take out different dimensions in some way.
Howard Scott Warshaw: E.T. commits the ultimate video game sin: to disorient the user. And you have to understand the difference between frustration and disorientation, right? Frustration in a video game is essential. Right? A video game must frustrate a user, but you should never disorient them.
Howard Scott Warshaw: I thought, you know, what I need to do is turn sleep into an asset. I would work until I ran into a problem. And then I would go to sleep.
But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.
The wider trend is known as the “privatisation of auditory space”, says Dr Tom Rice, a lecturer in sonic anthropology at Exeter University. “It’s often said in sound studies that we don’t have earlids. We don’t have any control over what drips into our ears and collects in them. Earphones are the closest we have to that.”
Whether or not you immediately know its history, run away from any typeface that purports to represent an entire culture.
There’s this idea that output randomness essentially becomes input randomness for the next turn, because you’ll be dealing with the consequences of whatever just happened.
Modern society loves multi-tasking. The myth of multi-tasking is that being busy is synonymous with being better. The exact opposite is true. Having fewer priorities leads to better work. […] The reason is simple. You can’t be great at one task if you’re constantly dividing your time ten different ways.
When you don’t want to do something, you often build it up in your mind to be worse than it really is. But once you get started, you get to realistically appraise how long and hard the task is going to be.
A design manager’s energy is better spent overseeing the decisions behind the work setup and managing the teams themselves, unblocking members and bridging gaps across teams, not managing or owning the design output and strategy.
Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone. This includes people who’s couldn’t make it, or future employees who join years from now.