I ♥ working side by side with the developer to make a design happen vs handing off easily misinterpreted documentation. #leanux

morebetterabe  /  5 days ago  /  0 notes

Much of private-sector ethnography is as banal as it is ironic. In its bland quest to “understand the consumer,” it reduces culture to mere consumerism and thereby fails to achieve its own stated goal of understanding. This cynical veneer of cultural research disregards the truly transformative effect of “going native,” which is the first step to deriving both deep insight and innovation.

morebetterabe  /  1 week ago  /  0 notes

The successful web companies of 2011 and beyond are just simply better looking. I don’t mean that on a surface level regarding their precious gradients and logos. I mean, quite literally, visual experiences are starting to become the gold standard of web success.

morebetterabe  /  2 weeks ago  /  0 notes

Real teaching is not about transferring “the material”, as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn’t genuinely think that way?

morebetterabe  /  1 month ago  /  1 note

The lesson is this: Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, but make sure you throw out the bathwater. What’s the bathwater? It’s the features that don’t work well or that barely anyone uses. It’s the part of the design that’s confusing, frustrating, or simply extraneous. It’s the stuff that customers don’t like, adds too much complexity to the product, and causes maintenance problems and customer-support pain…

morebetterabe  /  1 month ago  /  0 notes

When you are designing, how much time do you spend in your own head, applying your own perspective, and how much time do you spend in someone else’s mindset? Next time you’re designing, try to spend more of the time outside of your own perspective. Make this into a practice. Say things about how you would encounter the design with an “I,” but this “I” is the “I” of another human being.

morebetterabe  /  2 months ago  /  0 notes