Jots is a collection of bits from inspiring pieces.

Building a façade may be uncomfortable for you and your team. To prototype your solution, you’ll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation.

Jot 148 : Jake Knapp in Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, p. 168, Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Jotted on the 25th of Jun 2018, at 12:10.

Indeed, many designers and developers I speak with would rather dance naked in public than admit to posting a site built with hand-coded, progressively enhanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript they understand and wrote themselves.

Jot 147 : Jeffrey Zeldman in The Cult of the Complex, from A List Apart.
Jotted on the 20th of Jun 2018, at 12:10.

How about we just call “dark patterns” what they truly are—bad design and bad ethics. It’s dishonest and it’s short sighted.

Jot 146 : Anton Stén in Designer Ethics & The Moral Implications of our Apps, from Anton Stén’s Site.
Jotted on the 19th of Jun 2018, at 11:55.

Protect the talents of your team by making firm agreements in advance about approach, method, and ideas. Ground rules help others to play the game and help guard against foul play.

Jotted on the 15th of Jun 2018, at 14:40.

If your company is at the hostility stage, you can forget about promoting user experience. People have to want to change before there’s any chance of helping them do so. Once the company’s been sufficiently hurt by its Neanderthal attitudes, management will be ready to consider usability and enter the next stage.

Jot 144 : Jakob Nielsen in Corporate UX Maturity: Stages 1-4, from Nielsen Norman Group’s Site.
Jotted on the 30th of May 2018, at 11:45.

I’m not confident that average people could have so little time in their schedule to spare that a minute to call for an appointment. Instead Google could actually be aiming this product at people that simply don’t want to talk to another person […].

Jot 143 : Anton Stén in AI Ethics—A New Skill for UX-Designers, from Anton Stén’s Site.
Jotted on the 29th of May 2018, at 12:00.

I always find it helps to do some exploratory research prior to running stakeholder workshops. This ensures you go into the room with a baseline understanding of the organization its users and some common pain points.

Jot 142 : Kyle Cassid in More Than Pixels: Selling Design Discovery, from Smashing Magazine.
Jotted on the 28th of May 2018, at 11:40.

A salesperson with little understanding of technical implementation, or of the teams delivering the work, sells the client a fantastic vision, on a knowingly impossible timeline, scope and budget. In doing so, they not only sell the project but also sell their own people, upon whose shoulders the problem will sit, down the river in the process.

Jotted on the 23rd of May 2018, at 10:30.

Remember that users rarely need “features.” What they need is to attain some kind of goal.

Jot 140 : Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden in Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, p. 881/3889, O’Reilly Media, 2017.
Jotted on the 16th of May 2018, at 11:45.

[…] we’ve managed to improve the performance for those stuck on old technology while also opening the possibility of using the latest standards on browsers that support them.

Jotted on the 16th of May 2018, at 11:30.

The biggest lie in software is Phase Two.

Jot 138 : Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden in Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, p. 144/3889, O’Reilly Media, 2017.
Jotted on the 14th of May 2018, at 11:55.

Sprints on the other hand are a lot better for making major pivots which really require you to go broad before you converge to a few ideas worth trying out.

Jotted on the 14th of May 2018, at 11:50.

In a sprint, decisions are made by one person: the Decider. […] With the Decider in the room making all the calls, the winning solutions stay opinionated.

Jot 136 : Jake Knapp in Stop Brainstorming and Start Sprinting, from Medium.
Jotted on the 14th of May 2018, at 11:45.

Not a single new idea generated in the brainstorms had been built or launched. The best ideas — the solutions that teams actually executed — came from individual work.

Jot 135 : Jake Knapp in Stop Brainstorming and Start Sprinting, from Medium.
Jotted on the 14th of May 2018, at 11:40.

[…] duration means something. But video game audiences haven’t incorporated it into their reading of video games, in the same way that we all have a cultural understanding of what time means in a film, even though pacing can carry every bit as much meaning.

Jotted on the 12th of May 2018, at 21:10.

The smallest thing you can build to test each hypothesis is your MVP. The MVP doesn’t need to be made of code: it can be an approximation of the end experience […].

Jot 133 : Josh Seiden, Jeff Gothelf in The 3 foundations of Lean UX, from O’Reilly.
Jotted on the 11th of May 2018, at 16:10.

The assumption in Lean UX is that the initial product designs will be wrong, so the team’s goal should be to find out what they got wrong as soon as possible.

Jot 132 : Josh Seiden, Jeff Gothelf in The 3 foundations of Lean UX, from O’Reilly.
Jotted on the 11th of May 2018, at 15:55.

[…] the MVP strategy has a clear objective prior to engaging with customers and seeks reassurance on that strategy […].

Jot 131 : Interaction Design Foundation in Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Design—Balancing Risk to Gain Reward, from Interaction Design Foundation.
Jotted on the 11th of May 2018, at 12:15.

It’s only through having surplus demand that you can let go of mismatched clients without hesitating. And the ability to let go is critical to keeping your team happy.

Jot 130 : Julian Shapiro in Running an Agency, from Julian Shapiro’s Blog.
Jotted on the 8th of May 2018, at 11:35.

But once an interaction designer has created a wireframe, it’s hard for many (we’re not saying all) visual designers to think outside the boundaries set by that wireframe and challenge the ideas it contains.

Jot 129 : Heleen van Nues, Lennart Overkamp in Priority Guides: A Content-First Alternative to Wireframes, from A List Apart.
Jotted on the 7th of May 2018, at 12:00.

Human language is messy, littered with vagueness and ambiguity. With time, usage and meaning drifts. Humans misunderstand and re-interpret […] but a computer program will never puzzle over how to interpret a particularly complex line of code.

Jot 128 : Dan Roth in Subjects and Predicates in Language and Logic, from Grammar Pedagogy for Writing Teachers.
Jotted on the 7th of May 2018, at 11:00.

Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

Jot 127 : Dave Akin in Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design, from Dave Akin’s Site.
Jotted on the 5th of May 2018, at 02:40.

Too few connections and complex ideas can’t spread. Too many connections and complex ideas get crushed by groupthink.

Jot 126 : Nicky Case in The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds, from Crowds.
Jotted on the 4th of May 2018, at 00:30.

But, users have learned to accommodate to Google not the other way around. We know what kinds of things we can type into Google and what we can’t and we keep our searches to things that Google is likely to help with.

Jot 125 : Roger Schank in The fraudulent claims made by IBM about Watson and AI, from Roger Schank’s Site.
Jotted on the 2nd of May 2018, at 11:45.

Start simply. Code defensively. User-test the heck out of it. Recognize the chaos. Embrace it. And build resilient web experiences that will work no matter what the internet throws at them.

Jot 124 : Aaron Gustafson in The Illusion of Control in Web Design, from A List Apart.
Jotted on the 27th of Apr 2018, at 17:40.

Game designer Naomi Clark suggests that this is a third type of game, a game of labor, in which players are rewarded for performing routine tasks, rather than for their skill or for their luck.

Jot 122 : Jesper Juul in The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, p. 74, The MIT Press, 2013.
Jotted on the 27th of Apr 2018, at 14:00.

[…] My mind spills out questions like, “Is this Tuesday better than the week before?” And “Ooh looks like there’s a link to my website from smashingmagazine.com, that oughta be great for SEO right?” Those seem fair and worthwhile, right?

…until I had a revelation

Those all-important numbers don’t really matter at all.

Jot 123 : Anton Sten in Vanity Metrics, from Anton Sten’s Site.
Jotted on the 27th of Apr 2018, at 11:45.

This is what games do: they promise us that we can repair a personal inadequacy—an inadequacy that they produce in us in the first place.

Jot 121 : Jesper Juul in The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, p. 7, The MIT Press, 2013.
Jotted on the 24th of Apr 2018, at 14:00.

Research—broad, foundational knowledge-gaining to decide what to spike or give the ability to estimate—indicator: don’t know a potential solution.

Jot 120 : Chris Sterling in Research, Spikes, Tracer Bullets, Oh My!, from Getting Agile.
Jotted on the 10th of Apr 2018, at 11:30.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Jot 119 : Wikipedians in Hanlon’s razor, from Wikipedia.
Jotted on the 27th of Mar 2018, at 12:25.

If your work is not final yet, if you are testing it, you should not convert your elements into symbols, or use nested symbols.

Jot 118 : Jorge Saco in Symbolception — A Cautionary Tale on Sketch Symbols, from Runtime Revolution.
Jotted on the 16th of Mar 2018, at 11:15.

There is no reason for DRY to be goal in itself. DRY is a tool, to achieve some real goal, like smaller file sizes, better maintainability, etc. But I don’t see any real benefits to use it just for the sake of it.

Jotted on the 7th of Mar 2018, at 11:15.

[…] as long as I work on a team with a lot of other remotes, everything will be fine. Working as the only remote on a team of people who are all in person seems like hard mode […].

Jot 116 : Julia Evans in Working Remotely, 4 Years In, from Julia Evans’ Site.
Jotted on the 20th of Feb 2018, at 11:15.

These days every Google product seems to assume that your internet connection is always on, that you’re close enough to the nearest Google server that your brain won’t notice the speed-of-light delay, and that you have practically unlimited bandwidth. These assumptions are barely true in Mountain View, let alone in most of the rest of the world.

Jot 115 : Jamey Sharp in How Not to Replace Email, from non-O(n) musings.
Jotted on the 19th of Feb 2018, at 11:15.

It’s a shame to see a ton of hard work go into static designs only to see all that thinking, detail, and nuance get washed away when it’s translated into code.

Jot 114 : Brad Frost in Your Sketch Library Is Not a Design System Redux, from Brad Frost’s Blog.
Jotted on the 18th of Feb 2018, at 17:40.

Once upon a time I opened a new tab in Firefox on my Android phone to find out that besides a list of my most visited pages to choose from, there also was a list of things “suggested by Pocket”. What the hell was Pocket, why was it suggesting me things and, more importantly, how the hell did it get into my Firefox?

Jotted on the 16th of Feb 2018, at 22:20.

What would you do, or how should the project be run to ensure that kind of failure?

Jot 112 : Taylor Smith in Premortem: Prevent Failures by Recognizing Patterns, from Taylor Smith’s Site.
Jotted on the 15th of Feb 2018, at 11:05.

To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and don’t be afraid to say “No” or “Why?”; there really are more bad ideas than good ones […].

Jot 111 : Rusty Russell in MAINTAINERS: Remove rom Module & Paravirt Maintenance, from Kernel.org git Repositories.
Jotted on the 15th of Feb 2018, at 11:00.

[…] significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.

Jot 110 : Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger in Why Explore Space?, from Letters of Note.
Jotted on the 13th of Feb 2018, at 23:15.

Rather than beginning a fruitless search for such divine proportions to serve a gross simplification of the world, we will instead focus on a more concrete history of how technology long has inspired designers to use geometric constraints to ease the burden of their work.

Jot 109 : Rune Madsen in A short history of geometric composition, from Programming Design Systems.
Jotted on the 13th of Feb 2018, at 10:55.

The more choices technology gives us in nearly every domain of our lives (information, events, places to go, friends, dating, jobs) — the more we assume that our phone is always the most empowering and useful menu to pick from. Is it?

Jotted on the 12th of Feb 2018, at 11:15.

The precision is introduced by the engineer, where it rightfully belongs. After all, our designs are completely useless until they are built—what exists in the users’ hands is the final design, and nothing less.

Jot 107 : Daniel Eden in The Burden of Precision, from Daniel Eden’s Site.
Jotted on the 29th of Jan 2018, at 11:05.

Herein lies the problem: our current tools encourage me to design the finished product first. They beg me to mess with rounded corners, colors, typefaces and stroke styles. But it’s only when I’m working within a strict design system that I ever need to declare those things.

Jot 106 : Robin Rendle in Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems, from CSS-Tricks.
Jotted on the 29th of Jan 2018, at 11:00.

As a Designer becomes more Senior, they also become more realistic and business-minded, or so the idea goes. These “Senior Designers” understand that a company is a company, and that the money paying your salary has to come from somewhere.

Jot 105 : Joel Califa in Subverted Design , from Joel Califa’s Site.
Jotted on the 17th of Jan 2018, at 11:00.

[…] Google’s not going to be selling many ads next to search results that turn them up. So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure.

Jot 104 : Tim Bray in Google Memory Loss, from Tim Bray’s Site.
Jotted on the 16th of Jan 2018, at 15:00.

It’s also worth recognizing how these decisions aren’t, in almost any case, unalloyed pushes for “the future of the web.” They reflect business priorities, just like any other technical prioritization.

Jot 103 : Chris Krycho in Chrome is Not the Standard, from Chris Krycho’s Site.
Jotted on the 12th of Jan 2018, at 11:00.

Machines are not intelligent, but they already excel at simulating intelligence. They are really good at making us believe that they understand, that they know us, that they comprehend, that they play chess.

Jot 102 : iA in Who Serves Whom?, from iA’s Site.
Jotted on the 5th of Jan 2018, at 11:15.

This is bonkers, isn’t it? Google is creating data out of data.

Jot 101 : Justin O’Beirne in Google Maps’s Moat, from Justin O’Beirne’s Site.
Jotted on the 20th of Dec 2017, at 11:15.