Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

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.

Not a single new idea generated in the brainstorms had been built or launched. The best ideas — the solutions that teams actually executed — came from individual work.

[…] duration means something. But video game audiences haven’t incorporated it into their reading of video games, in the same way that we all have a cultural understanding of what time means in a film, even though pacing can carry every bit as much meaning.

The smallest thing you can build to test each hypothesis is your MVP. The MVP doesn’t need to be made of code: it can be an approximation of the end experience […].

The assumption in Lean UX is that the initial product designs will be wrong, so the team’s goal should be to find out what they got wrong as soon as possible.

[…] the MVP strategy has a clear objective prior to engaging with customers and seeks reassurance on that strategy […].

It’s only through having surplus demand that you can let go of mismatched clients without hesitating. And the ability to let go is critical to keeping your team happy.

But once an interaction designer has created a wireframe, it’s hard for many (we’re not saying all) visual designers to think outside the boundaries set by that wireframe and challenge the ideas it contains.

Human language is messy, littered with vagueness and ambiguity. With time, usage and meaning drifts. Humans misunderstand and re-interpret […] but a computer program will never puzzle over how to interpret a particularly complex line of code.