Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

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.

It’s now minute 55 of the 60 minute meeting, you finally have time to ask the two questions you came here initially to discuss. Before you do, however, someone else raises their hand and asks a different question. This takes up the remaining time in the meeting.

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.

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.

“The longer the loop is, the harder it is for the player to understand the consequences of their actions”, he explains.

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).

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.

Those technologies may seem boring, but boring is fast. Boring is usable. Boring is resilient and fault tolerant. Boring is accessible.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Willing to admit when they’re wrong, and aren’t afraid to say “I don’t know”.