Andrea Buran 5.0

  • When we unbundle a physical retail store, for example, the pleasant nuances of shopping in person and interacting with other people falls through the cracks. […] And while such feelings could be dismissed as mere misremembering of the inconveniences of the past, they also reflect the loss of something that was too subtle to preserve.

    Drew Austin, Bundling and Unbundling, Real Life.
    255 jotted on 4 Dec 2019, 10:30.
  • I routinely skip past pages that are mostly big pictures with short captions. If you’re showcasing professional photography or artwork that’s fine, but for most things, I’m looking for well-written copy with images to complement or expand on the text. A well-chosen image can certainly improve a web page, but it’s the written word that draws me in.

    254 jotted on 5 Nov 2019, 10:30.
  • “The longer the loop is, the harder it is for the player to understand the consequences of their actions”, he explains.

    James Batchelor, Learn, reset, repeat: The intricacy of time loop games, GamesIndustry.biz.
    253 jotted on 23 Oct 2019, 11:20.
  • Although writing code once sounds like a great bargain, the associated overhead made the cost of this approach outweigh the benefits (which turned out to be smaller than expected anyway).

    252 jotted on 24 Sep 2019, 12:45.
  • The exploration needs to happen anyway. Asking for visible progress will only push it underground. It’s better to empower the team to explictly say “I’m still figuring out how to start” so they don’t have to hide or disguise this legitimate work.

    Ryan Singer, Hand Over Responsibility, Shape Up.
    251 jotted on 24 Sep 2019, 12:40.
  • Those technologies may seem boring, but boring is fast. Boring is usable. Boring is resilient and fault tolerant. Boring is accessible.

    Jeremy Wagner, Make it Boring, Jeremy Wagner’s Site.
    250 jotted on 13 Sep 2019, 11:45.
  • Are you arbitrarily setting targets to create an artificial sense of “urgency” or “accountability”? Or are you trying to create a supportive environment that is truly helpful for a person getting to where they need to be?

    Claire Lew, How to motivate employees? Don’t., Signal v. Noise.
    249 jotted on 13 Sep 2019, 11:30.
  • Bluetooth headphones are likely the future. But I still have more love for a set of standard headphone with a regular cable and headphone jack that has been working reliably for decades.

    Bastian Allgeier, Simplicity (II), Bastian Allgeier’s Site.
    248 jotted on 13 Sep 2019, 11:20.
  • The basic idea is that verbal communication in a group setting only allows for one line of conversation at a time. You have a speaker, and a bunch of listeners. By not relying on speaking, a “Silent Meeting” can instead offer multiple conversation threads simultaneously, allowing for a greater volume of feedback to be received in a shorter period of time.

    Noah Levin, Design critiques at Figma, Figma.
    247 jotted on 10 Sep 2019, 12:00.
  • There’s no absolute definition of “the best” solution. The best is relative to your constraints. Without a time limit, there’s always a better version. The ultimate meal might be a ten course dinner. But when you’re hungry and in a hurry, a hot dog is perfect.

    Ryan Singer, Principles of Shaping, Shape Up.
    246 jotted on 24 Jul 2019, 12:20.
  • When the scope isn’t variable, the team can’t reconsider a design decision that is turning out to cost more than it’s worth.

    Ryan Singer, Principles of Shaping, Shape Up.
    245 jotted on 23 Jul 2019, 11:10.
  • Willing to admit when they’re wrong, and aren’t afraid to say “I don’t know”.

    cutenode, 1x Engineer, 1x Engineer.
    244 jotted on 23 Jul 2019, 00:00.
  • Translation is not a science; it is an art. One must take liberties with the text to capture the essence of the words, in an attempt to recreate the feeling of the original for a very different audience with a very different cultural background.

    243 jotted on 20 Jul 2019, 00:00.
  • All AR experiences have, at their core, some notion of planes and anchors. Planes are flat surfaces on which content sits, and anchors are spatial markers relative to which content distance is measured.

    242 jotted on 19 Jul 2019, 11:40.
  • Then it hit me—a content object is defined by two things: (1) its format (the properties it exposes), and (2) where it is located relative to other content.

    Deane Barker, The Content Tree, Gadgetopia.
    241 jotted on 17 Jul 2019, 14:05.
  • The first step was to understand how consultants used and interacted with this data in its native web-based form. The different ways that users consumed the data determined the design of its mobile counterpart.

    Joe Caron, Designing a complex table for mobile consumption (nom), UX Collective’s Medium.
    240 jotted on 12 Jun 2019, 11:55.
  • Humans inherit convictions mimetically from each other—we learn what to value by imitating our peers. As my desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in and around the physics department. The more time I spent there, the greater my desire to excel.

    Brian Timar, Mimetic traps, Brian Timar’s Site.
    239 jotted on 27 May 2019, 11:25.
  • Some of the most worst missteps have involved training data that is faulty or simply used with no recognition of the serious biases that influenced its collection and analysis.

    Stefania Druga, Spotlight: Let’s ask more of AI, Internet Health Report 2019.
    238 jotted on 23 May 2019, 11:25.
  • Once you’ve identified your key output metrics, build out the constellation by breaking those outputs down into their input metrics. Drill down until you’ve got a set of actionable input metrics that you can impact directly, and then build your experiments to move those.

    Brian Balfour, Shaun Clowes, Casey Winters, Don’t Let Your North Star Metric Deceive You, Reforge.
    237 jotted on 22 May 2019, 12:10.
  • If you feel like you’re getting hung up on components too early at an exploratory stage of your project, worry about them later—don’t let it hinder the fluidity of your design process.

    236 jotted on 21 May 2019, 12:00.
  • Siesta naps, rich in NREM sleep, result in a significant increase in alertness that will be highly appreciated by people in creative professions. By various measures that boost may be as high as 50%!

    Piotr Wozniak, Good sleep, good learning, good life, Super Memo.
    235 jotted on 23 Apr 2019, 14:20.
  • Programming by nature is functional, reusable, extensible, and version controlled. Modern design systems aim to accomplish much of the same and more, and therefore can take direction from how programming already functions.

    234 jotted on 17 Apr 2019, 12:50.
  • Unfortunately, at some point we start to fear failure, but that fear is just holding us back. Failure is really the learning process. Every loss at chess, every falling down when we’re learning a backflip… those are lessons.

    Leo Babauta, The 4 Keys to Learning Anything, zen habits.
    233 jotted on 11 Apr 2019, 12:20.
  • The good side of having a learning plan is focus. I’m not searching for information and I have a plan to follow. All the hard work of planning and research is done.

    Anton Ball, Planning to Learn, Medium.
    232 jotted on 10 Apr 2019, 12:15.
  • On the other hand, telling someone to never give up is terrible advice. Successful people give up all the time. If something is not working, smart people don’t repeat it endlessly. They revise. They adjust. They pivot. They quit.

    231 jotted on 10 Apr 2019, 12:05.
  • Confined by the limited space on a page, we are often tempted to force all the data we have into a slot that’s way too small. Although this saves valuable space on the page, it has consequences […].

    Sarah Leo, Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few, The Economist’s Medium.
    230 jotted on 1 Apr 2019, 12:15.
  • We have three states for new features. Now, next, and probably never. Whatever we’re working on now is the most valuable thing we can think of. Whatever’s next is the next most valuable thing.

    Ben Rady, Powers of Two, Radyology.
    229 jotted on 29 Mar 2019, 15:30.
  • Like proto-personas, a proto-journey can help bootstrap empathy and team alignment.

    Jamie Caloras, Proto-journey: A Lean UX Customer Journey Map, UX Collective’s Medium.
    228 jotted on 22 Mar 2019, 11:10.
  • He wasn’t a bad person (he was a lovely person, in fact.) But having him as a boss showed me exactly the kind of boss I didn’t want to become. I took his template of leadership and whittled my own—a relief carving in opposition to his.

    Claire Lew, The Anti-Mentor, Signal v. Noise.
    227 jotted on 19 Mar 2019, 11:00.
  • De Bono’s “hat” represents a certain way of perceiving reality. Different people are used to “wearing” one favorite “hat” most of the time, which limits creativity and breeds stereotypes.

    Slava Shestopalov, Organizing Brainstorming Workshops: A Designer’s Guide, Smashing Magazine.
    226 jotted on 4 Mar 2019, 11:10.
  • The benefits are strong. You understand the big architectural choices before sinking money into building them. You empower designers by giving them space to explore multiple options and do rapid iterations. This leads to huge progress, quickly.

    Will Myddelton, Three types of user research, Will Myddelton’s Site.
    225 jotted on 26 Feb 2019, 11:10.
  • So it’s often better to encourage the behavior you want, than discourage the behavior you don’t. Instead of punishing a player that is too slow, reward a player that finishes the level quickly.

    Game Maker’s Toolkit, How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves, YouTube.
    224 jotted on 20 Feb 2019, 10:55.
  • There’s an extremely successful Netflix documentation about decluttering your house—this is directly applicable to software as well. The main essence is that if we did not use something for e.g. three months, it’s not worth keeping it.

    Anselm Hannemann, “It must be free”, Anselm Hannemann’s Site.
    223 jotted on 14 Feb 2019, 10:55.
  • But I think there’s a lot of value in actively questioning the need for complexity. Sometimes the smarter way to build things is to try and take some pieces away, rather than add more to it.

    Max Böck, On Simplicity, Max Böck’s Site.
    222 jotted on 14 Feb 2019, 10:50.
  • Critically missing from the core scrum team, and necessary for the integration of UX design, is a full-time designer on the team. The only way the tactics in #3 can happen in parallel collaboration with developers, product managers, and scrum masters is if there is a full-time designer on the team.

    221 jotted on 13 Feb 2019, 11:20.
  • Jeff P advocates for 2 types of work, not 2 teams. The type of work the team is doing fluctuates over time. In some parts of the initiative more discovery is needed. In others, more delivery is needed.

    220 jotted on 13 Feb 2019, 11:15.
  • This meant analyzing search trends in order to generate key phrases—everything from “What time is the convention” and “Watch Trump’s speech live” to “How to pick up women”—and assigning those key phrases to a staff of SEO writers, who then reverse-engineered stories around them.

    Adrianne Jeffries, Mic’s Drop, The Outline.
    219 jotted on 7 Feb 2019, 18:25.
  • Facebook is such a big distributor of traffic that no news operation can afford to ignore it, but it is not a neutral distributor. It’s a bit like if the paperboy went rogue, decided to put a gun to the temple of a newspaper editor and barked that unless he gets a cut of the sales he’ll pull the trigger.

    218 jotted on 4 Feb 2019, 18:10.
  • In other words, clickbait, personalized to my psychological profile, as determined chiefly by an analysis of my online behavior. Anyone who has followed the recommendation engine on YouTube knows that after delivering one or two innocuous videos, the “Up Next” cue serves up increasingly extreme content. The algorithms push us to become caricatures of ourselves. They don’t merely predict our behavior; they shape it.

    Douglas Rushkoff, Thinking Outside the Black Box, Medium.
    217 jotted on 4 Feb 2019, 13:10.
  • Facebook et al. became the primary sources of news and the primary destroyers of news. And they refused to deal with it because their business is predicated on the fallacy that technology is neutral—Silicon Valley’s version of “guns don’t kill people”.

    Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, It’s the End of News as We Know It (and Facebook Is Feeling Fine), Mother Jones.
    216 jotted on 2 Feb 2019, 22:00.
  • As you can see, an important rule of thumb is to personalize around the main content, not the entire page. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the risk of getting the audience wrong, effects on search indexing, and what’s known as the infinite content problem, i.e., can you realistically create content for every single audience on every single component? (Hint: no.)

    Colin Eagan, UX in the Age of Personalization, A List Apart.
    215 jotted on 24 Jan 2019, 00:50.
  • In order to successfully model content, we must create content environments that stand up to the pressures of production.

    Devin Asaro, Liam King, A Guide to Content Production Planning, p. 23, GatherContent, n.d..
    214 jotted on 22 Jan 2019, 13:30.
  • Another exercise is asking the question, “What is the evil version of this feature?” Ask it during the ideation phase. Ask it as part of acceptance criteria. Heck, ask it over lunch. I honestly don’t care when, so long as the question is actually raised.

    Eric Bailey, Be the Villain, 24 ways.
    213 jotted on 22 Jan 2019, 10:55.
  • Error rates climb with hours worked and especially with loss of sleep. Eventually the odds catch up with you, and catastrophe occurs. When schedules are tight and budgets are big, is this a risk you can really afford to take?

    212 jotted on 22 Jan 2019, 10:50.
  • So, people tend to underestimate two crucial things about content: how much content they need, and how long content takes to write.

    Sophie Dennis, Content Production Planning, 24 ways.
    211 jotted on 21 Jan 2019, 12:40.
  • The starting point is realizing that working long hours makes you a much less productive employee, to the point that your total output will actually decrease […].

    210 jotted on 21 Jan 2019, 11:05.
  • If there is a should, there is a way to get out of it. It is an excuse for missing commitment. Real change starts with the burden that I am indeed responsible for the change. If I only believe that I should do it, is not important enough for me. If it would be I would do it. If it would be important for all of us, we would all do it together.

    Tobias Tom, Should we?, Tobias Tom’s Site.
    209 jotted on 21 Jan 2019, 11:00.
  • […] we look at best practices, analyze the competition, and then, often, we take a copycat approach to building our product. We think that if it’s working for them, it’s got to work for us too. The problem? It frequently doesn’t—at least not the way we think it will.

    208 jotted on 14 Jan 2019, 22:25.

I work as a Senior Product Designer at Skippet, remotely.

If you feel like having a chat, write to me at .