Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

[…] The designers are the pegboard though. They set up where everything has a space and how it is going to work together.

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.

Not making it clear from the start that I have a process, and clients taking control of the design process […].

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?

[…] Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

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?

[…] 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.

[…] 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.

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.

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.

The more context we have for the situation, the better I can design a solution.

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.

Disagree and commit is a management technique for handling conflict. There are two parts to it. First, expecting and demanding teammates to voice their disgreement. Second, no matter their point of view, once a decision has been made, everyone commits to its success.

Artifacts can force clarity of the complexities of the wicked problem space.

Continually look for opportunities to test the direction you are going in. If people disagree, test. If you aren’t sure about your approach, check it.

Always having at least two people look over the code also curtails ideas of “my” code and “your” code. It’s our code.

Remember that there is an appropriate time for different types of feedback. Cheerlead early, and critique more thoroughly later.

Be comfortable letting things go, and remember that your teammates are smart people with expertise.

Underlying these concerns is the predominant business model for platforms on the Web—user-targeted advertising. Advertising based business models encourage the consolidation and the hoarding of user views and data, driving platforms to become ever larger.

“One of the things we’ve realized is that it’s hard to separate motivation from sustained attention,” he says. “If we’re not looking at motivation, then we’re really missing the boat in terms of attention.”

“There are no right or wrong answers. Since I didn’t design this, you won’t hurt my feelings or flatter me. In fact, frank, candid feedback is the most helpful.”

In the React era, we have embraced the extremely useful approach of modular, component-based development […]. But I think it’s equally important to acknowledge that CSS is not 100% modular, nor should it be.

You can think of willpower like a battery that starts the morning charged but loses a sip with every decision (a phenomenon called “decision fatigue”). As Facilitator, you’ve got to make sure that charge lasts till 5 p.m.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 […].

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.

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.

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

[…] 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.

The biggest lie in software is Phase Two.

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.

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.