Models and iterations Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs iterationprototypes
The fastest way to learn something is to do something An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com Suppose you have a problem to solve. What do you do? Well, you sit down and think real hard, and after extensive and careful planning you try the well thought out and rigorous solution that you have thought up. Right? No, wrong! Bad. The correct thing to do when you have a problem is: Think for a short amount of time. Make sure it is safe to try things. Try something you think will work. Observe the result. If you succeeded, yay you solved the problem! If it didn't work, think about what that means for the nature of the problem and try again. The Feynman Algorithm problemsprototypesfeedback
Game feel An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com How do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry. Follow the funFollow the brush prototypesmakinggames
The Fidelity Curve An Article by Ryan Singer m.signalvnoise.com How do we choose which level of fidelity is appropriate for a project? I think about it like this: The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing. I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing. Four levels of fidelityTime to build versus confidence gained prototypesinterfaces
Functional Prototyping. A Missed Opportunity in Web Design An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com Prototyping allows engineers in various industries to “fail fast, fail cheap”, “select the best from the pool”, and “bring in the reality”. prototypessoftware
How the Blog Broke the Web An Article by Amy Hoy stackingthebricks.com Homepages had a timeless qualityWhen Movable Type ate the blogosphereReverse chronology bias bloggingwww
Homepages had a timeless quality On the early web, there were thousands and thousands more personal homepages than weblogs. Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!) Chronological content was in the minority. indexes
When Movable Type ate the blogosphere Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want. But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost. Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization. It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production. constraintschoicetools
Reverse chronology bias Once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything. So they didn’t. And neither did thousands of their peers. It just simply wasn’t worth it. The inertia was too strong. The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. And the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before. There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. Navigation by shibboleth timequirks