Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

Actually, sometimes a cancelled project is something you should be proud of. Regardless of the talent of the team, if you can’t reach a compelling first playable, it’s time to kill the project and move on.

Understanding what you can afford to build—how much runway you have and how long you really want to work on a single project—is crucial to making it to the finish line.

[…] First, data is just information and alone does not represent objective reality. Next, whatever data you have is never, ever complete, and finally, getting more data does not necessarily mean more clarity.

Create harmony in your environment by sticking to a coherent shape language. You can then create focal points by using dissonance, which is the breaking up of the environment’s shape language.

Don’t fall into the trap of assuming your players will find gathering collectibles as interesting as you find placing them. While alternating the pace of your action is good, having your player travel for long stretches, no matter how much beautiful art she looks at, is just boring.

Underlying your need to micromanage is a fear of failure. By magnifying the risk of failure, your employees engage in “learned helplessness” where they start believing that the only way they can perform is if you micromanage them.

You can’t leave home to rebuild that feeling again somewhere else. You dilute that feeling. It’s what Voldemort did with his soul: he split it up into parts, and it could never be whole again.

The form — in its many manifestations — provides a gateway for user submission.

[…] and what we’re left with for the most part is a polished UI that can’t quite stand toe-to-toe with the world it’s framing.

Start early. […] Talk preparation will expand to fill all available time. […] It will take a lot of time to do your talk, way more than you think.

One method that I use for characterizing the relative size of development tasks is a variation of the tee-shirt sizing method. Each task is given a relative size corresponding to five tee-shirt sizes […] XS: Half day or less S: Half day to one day M: Two to three days L: One week XL: One to two weeks.

Even in my tiny design practice, every decision I make is shaped by my biases; every decision I make is capable of harm. And it’s so, so easy to forget this […] I occasionally forget to ask myself who’ll be impacted by my work and, most importantly, to ask how I can mitigate that harm.

[…] people that have names that websites and computers don’t seem to like—for example, we spoke to a guy named William Test, and a woman named Katie Test, both of whom can’t seem to keep a hotel or airplane booking because the name “test” is flagged by internal systems.

[…] and writing three things that are most important and really should happen that day on a Post-It Note, then sticking it to the back of my phone.

La gatta frettolosa fece i gattini ciechi.

Today, we are all cyborgs. This is not to say that we implant ourselves with technology but that we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.

Use multiples of 8 to define dimensions, padding, and margin of both block and inline elements.

All frameworks are opinionated. This is not an issue if you don’t have a strong opinion or if yours is the same as the frameworks. But sometimes you do have strong opinions.

And if you think about that even further, this “cycle of redesign” makes design less valuable. In other words, if design is only valuable when new, it isn’t very valuable in the first place.

If your app gets too complex, think about unbundling. Look at what Facebook did with Messenger. They broke out functionality around key actions and put it in their own separate app.

Thanks for your email. I’m very interested indeed. I have nothing against an interview. However, there is one condition: I have to be interviewed by the person I will be working for. By my future direct manager.

I think copywork is subject to diminishing returns—so, no, you don’t have to copy perfectly. But (and this is important) you can’t copy it worse than the original. You have to achieve something that you view as equal or better, even if the details don’t totally line up.

To be effective, I believe designers should be spending around 50–60% of their time on a single (but big and impactful) project in order to really focus on it. With too many projects, you’ll be rushing your process, and likely making incremental progress in 50 different directions.

But I also didn’t have too much time. I couldn’t afford to overthink things or get caught up in urgent but less important issues, the way I often did on normal workdays. And the people I needed to help me—engineers and product managers—were also focused on the project.

If you can’t stick with your idea long enough to do some research and run some experiments, why should anyone else?

Being able to stop someone and say “hey, what does that mean?” is a super important skill.

[…] we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.

“They sure do look nicer to old people like you and me, but frankly do they actually add any magical semantic value to a given text? Not really.”

However, after the Trespasser experience it has become clear that just as there are no successful anarchic world governments there can not be any successful development teams without management.

Q: Trespasser is unfortunately known for not bringing in the sales it deserved. If you could change one thing about the production what would you do differently?

A: I would have assigned the 25-year-old Seamus a strong producer, who would have bullied him to restrict the scope of innovation to something manageable.

Gall’s Fundamental Theorem of Systems is that new systems mean new problems. I think the same can safely be said of code—more code, more problems. Do it without a new system if you can.

I want you to know that no matter how invested, how entrenched, how indispensible you might feel within the tech industry, it chews people up and spits them out every day.

I prefer the fixed-gutter approach instead. One of the things I learned from typography was the importance of ensuring whitespace remain consistent. This leads me to believe that gutters, which are whitespaces that separate columns of content, should be kept the same.

You can’t get comfortable if you want to work with JavaScript but you don’t have to know everything.

[…] be careful with humor because it may not always be appropriate to use in your error message; it really depends on the severity of the error.

[…] and I have never really understood that. You know, to me that’s not what success is about. To me the success is about making great watches, really great watches.

Web animation can be so much more than just decoration, but only if we make it part of our design process. It can’t be a meaningful addition to the user experience if you don’t include it in the early conversations that define that experience.

For existing projects that already use animation, you can start with a motion audit to find all the instances and ways you’re currently using animation.

If you’re embarking on a new feature primarily because you’ve seen a competitor release something similar, then you probably haven’t thoroughly considered or even identified the problem you’re trying to solve.

[…] certain pieces too easily fall into favor and repeated use. They quickly become fix tropes of a specific mood or environment, so much so that eventually there is no room for mobility and experimentation.

[…] You’ll be asked to design things counter to goals. You’ll be asked to design according to whims. All those things will fail. And those failures will be on you. As a designer it’s on you to do the job to the best of your ability. Learn how to protect yourself by saying no.

[…] You are really good at what you do, and if you stay in the weeds on everything, you’ll keep things going perfectly, for a while. But eventually two things will happen. One, you will burn out. And two, you will eventually start to seriously piss off your team.

Why do products sometimes label things as my stuff, and sometimes label things as your stuff?

Refactoring is a second chance that most industries don’t get.

[…] and I realized that we’d stumbled onto one of the biggest problems in our entire company: we had no idea how to define the role we’re trying to hire for and grow our developers toward.

A re-invigorated broken employee is a corporation’s most powerful force.

Don’t make your (often shy) natural leaders ask for a promotion—just do it. The icing on the cake for you—as their manager—is the loyalty you’ll receive in return.

The problem is that if animation (and therefore the spatial structure of an interface) is an afterthought, it’s all too easy to create contradictory behaviors.