Andrea Buran 5.0

  • I love how David Allen says that you can do anything you want but you can’t do everything you want. And that is an extremely liberating mindset.

    Shawn Blanc, Regret vs Celebration, Shawn Blanc’s Site.
    207 jotted on 14 Jan 2019, 22:10.
  • Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

    Peter Welch, Programming Sucks, Still Drinking.
    206 jotted on 7 Jan 2019, 11:05.
  • Metrics are a horrible way to understand customer intent. Great way: customer interviews.

    But: we bias our people, when we ask them. Even if we try not to.

    Reason: we believe our own bullshit.

    Andreas Klinger, Metrics for early stage startups, SlideShare.
    205 jotted on 4 Jan 2019, 15:50.
  • Being the one poor soul remote in a co-located team is hard… you have “5x” the process needs… People will continuously forget to involve you in discussions or decisions, you will be the person not knowing what is happening why—you will suffer.

    Andreas Klinger, Managing Remote Teams—A Crash Course, Andreas Klinger’s Site.
    204 jotted on 3 Jan 2019, 15:50.
  • Like many modern workers, I find that only a small percentage of my job is now actually doing my job. The rest is performing a million acts of unpaid micro-labor that can easily add up to a full-time job in itself. Tweeting and sharing and schmoozing and blogging.

    Ruth Whippman, Everything Is for Sale Now. Even Us., The New York Times.
    203 jotted on 2 Jan 2019, 10:55.
  • When companies just build it, just ship it, iterate on it, and build and ship again, this means that customers are seeing a variety of versions. They are seeing the work in progress and watching the sausage being made. This is often a frustrating and confusing experience requiring customers to keep relearning a system that’s evolving.

    202 jotted on 27 Dec 2018, 11:15.
  • One of the most common questions I get from people is why I use [some older technique or tool] over [some newer technique or tool] […]. The technologies, tools, and techniques don’t matter. The answer is always the same.

    Because it does what I need and I already know how to use it.

    Chris Ferdinandi, [Go Makes Things] This and that, [Go Makes Things].
    201 jotted on 19 Dec 2018, 01:40.
  • Don’t commit to features. Features are solutions to problems, but they’re seldom the only solution. Instead, commit to solving the underlying problem; if the “not-quite-perfect” result (fewer new features, or none at all) solves the problem, you’ve still succeeded.

    Matthew Ström, We’ll Fix It Later, Matthew Ström’s Site.
    200 jotted on 14 Dec 2018, 12:00.
  • I Google how to do things—sometimes really basic things—every single day.

    Chris Ferdinandi, Prototypes and production , Go Make Things.
    199 jotted on 12 Dec 2018, 11:20.
  • When a prototype is successful, works great, and tests well, there’s a real temptation to use the prototype code as the basis for the final product. Don’t do this! […] Build prototypes to test ideas, designs, interactions, and interfaces …and then throw the code away.

    Jeremy Keith, Prototypes and production , adaction.
    198 jotted on 12 Dec 2018, 11:05.
  • Perhaps if accessibility was considered at the very start of the project, the process of creating, editing and moving blocks would be a lot simpler and thus, not a cognitive overload. The problem now is that accessibility is a fix rather than a core feature.

    197 jotted on 11 Dec 2018, 11:00.
  • […] He and Steve Jobs would often disagree about things, but the way he eventually won Steve over was through dogged persistence in bringing up the topics he cared, not through saying things loudly or dramatically.

    196 jotted on 9 Dec 2018, 15:30.
  • Analogical thinking lends itself to incremental product iterations rather than groundbreaking advancements because it promotes a habit of following the footsteps of history.

    Teresa Man, Mental models in product design, HeyDesigner.
    195 jotted on 29 Nov 2018, 11:15.
  • So, I nearly didn’t apply to become a sonar operator since I failed the proxy requirement “has perfect score on generic hearing test”. However, the real requirement was “can learn to classify boats by their sound under water”, and it turns out I was pretty good at that!

    194 jotted on 28 Nov 2018, 19:15.
  • A good rule of thumb is: if a problem seems simple to you, you probably don’t fully understand it. You certainly might, but you probably don’t, and therefore, you should treat your critiques as investigations or explorations and not conclusions.

    Mike Davidson, How To Give Helpful Product Design Feedback, Mike Industries.
    193 jotted on 30 Oct 2018, 11:15.
  • Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for growth […]. Once I made that realization, I finally started making continued growth my goal, rather than winning.

    192 jotted on 29 Oct 2018, 19:30.
  • Trust is not a renewable resource.

    Matthew Green, Why I’m done with Chrome, A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.
    191 jotted on 26 Oct 2018, 11:05.
  • The café and the space are great, but something’s missing—something you can barely remember now…. Oh, right! It’s you. You are missing. This amazing space that everyone in the community holds so dear is for everyone but you.

    190 jotted on 20 Oct 2018, 20:25.
  • There are certainly many caveats to the above idea of setting a goal around a single metric. A notable one is that you may need to have a counter-metric to help balance short term and long-term trade-offs.

    Julie Zhuo, How do you set metrics?, Medium.
    189 jotted on 18 Oct 2018, 11:25.
  • One of the biggest culprits of unclear user flow is basing the user experience on your company’s understanding of the problem. Companies have their own internal terminology and organizational structures to address these problems internally. Users likely won’t understand any of this and shouldn’t require a glossary of industry terms or internal structures in order to use your website or app.

    Brandon Gregory, Designing for Cognitive Differences, A List Apart.
    188 jotted on 18 Oct 2018, 11:20.
  • Unnecessary motion […] are nothing but a barrier for these users. If the motion is actually accomplishing something, you have to ask if what you’re drawing attention to is worth sacrificing other content on the page in return.

    Brandon Gregory, Designing for Cognitive Differences, A List Apart.
    187 jotted on 18 Oct 2018, 11:20.
  • […] because essentially, it is a character saying: “Whatever you do, don’t do that”. It tells the audience to associate a certain value with a certain action: crossing the streams = bad.

    Michael Tucker, How Ghostbusters Became Ghostbusters, Lessons from the Screenplay on YouTube.
    186 jotted on 17 Oct 2018, 11:00.
  • That means that complexity in design can lead to complexity in code.

    Jonathan Snook, The Codification of Design, Jonathan Snook’s Site.
    185 jotted on 10 Oct 2018, 10:20.
  • One of the first things you learn as a UX designer is to not let ego drive your decisions regarding design; one of the hardest thing to do as a UX designer is to pass on that knowledge to your client.

    184 jotted on 8 Oct 2018, 12:45.
  • When you travel for extended periods of time, you lose your social circle, your sense of belonging, and the everyday routines that keep you grounded and healthy.

    You also quickly discover that meeting new people is easy, but making new friends—real friends—is hard, especially if you’re starting from zero.

    183 jotted on 8 Oct 2018, 12:10.
  • If you succeed, if you ship your code, if you release your product, will you be happy? Will all your time and effort be worth it?

    And you realize the answer is “no”. And suddenly your work is worthless, your goals are meaningless. You just can’t force yourself to work on something that doesn’t matter.

    Itamar Turner-Trauring, Avoiding burnout: lessons learned from a 19th century philosopher, Code Without Rules.
    182 jotted on 8 Oct 2018, 12:10.
  • The grid example is of two-dimensional layout. Layout in rows and columns at the same time. The Flexbox example is one-dimensional layout.

    Rachel Andrew, Use Cases For Flexbox, Designer News.
    181 jotted on 5 Oct 2018, 12:10.
  • The point is that qualitative and quantitative research serve different purposes. Qualitative is mostly useful for creating hypotheses, while quantitative is great for verifying your hypotheses and solutions.

    Pol Kuijken, How effective are modern UX design methods?, Designer News.
    180 jotted on 4 Oct 2018, 12:10.
  • The earliest decisions of the digital product design process are, at best, based on guesswork. Until a product is in the hands of actual users, everything is theoretical.

    Alexandru Giuseppe Ispas, Ditch MVPs, Adopt Minimum Viable Prototypes (MVPr), Toptal.
    179 jotted on 2 Oct 2018, 11:45.
  • You have needs and your family has needs and the bills have to be paid. There’s dignity in taking care of those things, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have any creative aspect to your life whatsoever. Set your alarm a half hour early every day and work on that book or that new business idea.

    Elizabeth Gilbert, Dana Rousmaniere, No One Is Too Busy to Be Creative, Harward Business Review.
    178 jotted on 12 Sep 2018, 11:50.
  • I think people perceive the process of creation from the outside to be instantaneous and free and wonderful. In fact, it is work.

    Casey O’Donnel, Developer’s Dilemma, p. 40, The MIT Press, 2014.
    177 jotted on 5 Sep 2018, 17:20.
  • To paint a picture, Jobs-to-be-Done, or JTBD for short, follows the idea that customers purchase products or services to get jobs done, not for the products or services themselves.

    Tomasz Tunguz, Jobs-to-be-Done, take two, Zenkit Blog.
    176 jotted on 19 Aug 2018, 17:00.
  • I can’t recall an example of groundbreaking work coming from an environment of stress, anxiety, and fear of failure.

    Julie Zhuo, Good Pressure, Bad Pressure, Medium.
    175 jotted on 16 Aug 2018, 18:10.
  • If you’re here to help others, be patient and welcoming.

    Stack Overflow’s Team, Code of Conduct, Stack Overflow.
    174 jotted on 16 Aug 2018, 18:05.
  • […] Nintendo said, “pay us a royalty not on sales, but on manufacturing.” Nintendo said, “we will decide what games we’ll allow you to publish,” ostensibly to prevent another crash like that of 1983, but in reality to quash any innovation but their own. Iwata-san said he has the heart of the gamer, and my question is what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from?

    Greg Costikyan, GDC rant heard ’round the world, GameSpot.
    173 jotted on 16 Aug 2018, 17:55.
  • The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize […] that when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it’s not just them you’re hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them?

    ea_spouse, EA: The Human Story, ea_spouse’s LiveJournal.
    172 jotted on 16 Aug 2018, 17:35.
  • […] The designers are the pegboard though. They set up where everything has a space and how it is going to work together.

    Casey O’Donnel, Developer’s Dilemma, p. 17, The MIT Press, 2014.
    171 jotted on 16 Aug 2018, 17:20.
  • There is this huge library, this huge vocabulary of actions built up over the years that people you know don’t really do, but which happened so often in TV and movies that they’re familiar enough to an audience that they become, well, passable for human motivations.

    The Nerdwriter, The Epidemic of Passable Movies, The Nerdwriter’s YouTube Channel.
    170 jotted on 13 Aug 2018, 01:00.
  • Not making it clear from the start that I have a process, and clients taking control of the design process […].

    169 jotted on 9 Aug 2018, 11:50.
  • As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal?

    Brad Frost, Death to Bullshit, Death to Bullshit.
    168 jotted on 8 Aug 2018, 11:50.
  • […] Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

    Stanford Web Credibility Research, Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility, Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
    167 jotted on 6 Aug 2018, 12:00.
  • With all that at play, how can any tool give us a truly accurate picture of unused CSS, to the point that actually removing that CSS isn’t just as dangerous as leaving it alone?

    Chris Coyier, Unused, CSS-Tricks.
    166 jotted on 31 Jul 2018, 18:55.
  • […] Then management decided that it would “look better” if we went to circular desks where several of us would be sitting with our backs to the hallway, so everyone walking past would be looking at our screen as they passed. It took a minor rebellion that lasted several weeks before management backed down from that horrendous idea.

    165 jotted on 31 Jul 2018, 18:50.
  • […] if you’re investing time and budget to make a prototype and put it in front of people, you’ll want to do some preliminary research first. Only then will you have an informed hypothesis worth testing.

    164 jotted on 31 Jul 2018, 12:35.
  • Above all, when designing a web page we should design the body text first, usually before anything else in the layout. It’s the most common element and its appearance will have an evident effect on the rest of the composition.

    Christian Miller, Your Body Text Is Too Small, Marvel App Blog.
    163 jotted on 27 Jul 2018, 18:15.
  • We initially tried to create these components as symbols in Sketch, which resulted in a mess. Even now, our Sketch files are sometimes challenging to maintain.

    Karri Saarinen, Building a Visual Language, AirBnB Design.
    162 jotted on 27 Jul 2018, 17:45.
  • The more context we have for the situation, the better I can design a solution.

    Alan Klement, 5 Tips For Writing A Job Story, JTBD.
    161 jotted on 20 Jul 2018, 01:40.
  • If someone wanted to segment them by market or customer, these segments couldn’t be more separate. Yet, if you thought of them in situational segments, you’d find these segments to be tangent—maybe even the same.

    160 jotted on 20 Jul 2018, 01:20.

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

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