Situationally Reflective Design
Over the last few months of attempting to observe my behavior while designing things, this is what I see myself doing. It’s holding many incomplete threads as potentially useful in the future. It’s weaving them together. It’s untangling them later. It’s weaving them together again in a different way.
Systems Exhaustion and Playing Whack-A-Mole
The more I study systems literature and attempt to apply what I learn, the more I encounter people (including me, multiple times) concentrating on levels of systems that are out of their direct or indirect influence.
Too Much Structure?
It's important to demonstrate that adding too much structure can introduce whole new activities and efforts. And sometimes, that new work defeats the purpose of the original task.
In Pursuit of the Common Good
A short, fun book written by Paul Newman and A.E. Hotchner telling their story of starting Newman’s Own and building it into an enormous, profitable, and beloved food company while donating more than $600 million to children along the way.
A Reflective Conversation with a Situation
Every profession is confronting a dilemma of rigor or relevance. On the “high ground” the problems are trivial. In “the swamp” below you can work on the important social and technological problems of the age, but you don’t know how to be rigorous in any way that you can name.
Is Everyone a Professional Designer?
The goal shouldn’t be to have all design decisions be made by people with the word “designer” in their title. The goal is to make sure every design choice is made with rigor. With skin in the game.
Hey, Designers! Stop Fighting for Users.
Fighting for users is a wonderful sentiment, but not what we should be doing. More accurately, we should be matching and reconciling mental models. We should be improving the ways the business and its users understand and interact with each other.
The Problem with Problems
Don’t talk about problems (or solutions). Instead, talk about progress. Only then can we be precise without dictating implementation details.
Writing a Good Objective
Working with abstract concepts doesn’t make us more strategic. It doesn’t mean we understand the big picture. It doesn’t mean we’re doing something more valuable.
Product Design Skills in Plain English
In short, I’d like to get specific about the fundamental skills involved in product design, a few brief examples of the type of work that can be done for each skill, and how they’re mapped to common product design roles.
Learning to Observe
With the right background, an observer can find so much more value in their observations. But when the background of the observer is different than the intended audience, an observation can become a huge liability.
Ignorance
The ideas in Ignorance by Stuart Firestein, surprisingly, reiterate s and clarify many principles of designing and building great web products. The ideas aligned well enough that I kept thinking I was reading a startup book. Now that I think of it, it’s one of the best startup books I’ve read in a long time.
Wireframes — A Good Communication Tool, a Poor Design Tool
Wireframes have been a crucial part of just about every project I’ve worked on. I’ve spent countless hours explaining to clients the central importance of wireframes as a tool for good design. I’ve come to realize that I was wrong.
Match the Tool to the Problem
One designer will claim that you shouldn’t do anything without sketching it out while another claims that doing anything less than full-on HTML prototypes is a waste of time.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork — and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions?