On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software An Essay by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com Is it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts? Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket? Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice? Towards a crap decisionSo much knowledge not being applied notetakingbloggingsoftwarethinkingcommonplace
What do I need to read to be great at CSS? An Article by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com A rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day. bloggingcsscodelearningrss
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling An Article by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done. Have some personality. Minimalism is garbage. Metaphors are fantastic. Naming things is fantastic. Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS. The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind. Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features. A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome. The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development. Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know wwwworkuxcollections
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink An Article by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com Two relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another. Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive. The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork. On that of the highest authorityPersonal Information Management (PIM) productivitycollaborationinformation
The Best Interface is No Interface A Book by Golden Krishna www.nointerface.com "There's an app for that."Slap an interface on it!Aim higherThis is UXThe most seamless and wonderful way+4 More The answer to a brief is not necessarily a building
Slap an interface on it! How do you make a better car? How do you make a better fridge? How do you make a better trash can? How do you make a better restaurant? How do you make a better vending machine?
Aim higher “There’s one more thing you need to do: Aim higher the merely trying to recreate Silicon Valley. You should try to kick our butt instead.” — Guy Kawasaki
This is UX When you hire someone to generate UI, you won’t get new, innovative solutions. You’ll get more UI, not better UX. This is UI: Navigation, sub navigation, menus, drop-downs, buttons, links, windows, rounded corners, shadowing, error messages, alerts, updates, checkboxes, password fields, text inputs, radio selections, text areas, hover states, selection states, pressed states, tooltips, banner ads, embedded videos, swipe animations, scrolling, clicking, iconography, colors, lists, slideshows, alt text, badges, notifications, gradients, pop-ups, carousels, OK.cancel, etc. etc. etc. This is UX: People, happiness, solving problems, understanding needs, love, efficiency, entertainment, pleasure, delight, smiles, soul, warmth, personality, joy, satisfaction, gratification, elation, exhilaration, bliss, euphoria, convenience, enchantment, magic, productivity, effectiveness, etc. etc. etc. uxcollections
The most seamless and wonderful way I believe our job as designers is to give you what you need as quickly and elegantly as we can. Our job as designers is to take you away from technology. Our job as designers is to make you smile. To make a profit by providing you something that enhances your life in the most seamless and wonderful way possible. technologyux
The best interface Let’s end the confusion between UI and UX. Let’s stop slapping sirens on children’s toys. Let’s prioritize personal goals over addiction. Let’s get our lives and our health back in balance by interacting with the real world instead of staring into a light, checking new notifications. Let’s think beyond screens. The best result for any technology is to solve meaningful problems in impactful ways. The best design reduces work. The best computer is unseen. The best interaction is natural. The best interface is no interface.
Adapt Digital products can do so much more than have a fancy front end. Even if your company’s core product is an interface, not everything that comes after has to be an interface. If things were that rigid, Apple Computer, the personal computer company, would never become Apple Inc., the world’s largest consumer electronics company. If companies didn’t go after opportunities beyond what they do today, Netflix would still be mailing DVDs in red envelopes. Great thinkers adapt. Great companies offer their customers the best possible solutions, whether they have a graphical user interface or not.
Forgetting Inactivity could be another automatic trigger to erase any stored information. If they haven’t utilized the system in a long time, their food data could automatically clear. With so many services out there trying to grab out attention, knowing that a system collecting more general information will just forget everything it knows about you if you don’t use it for a long time might ease the resistance to trying out the new software in the first place.