August short No. 2: Glass An Article by Riccardo Mori morrick.me Glass looks and feels perfectly tailored to my photo sharing needs and expectations. For me it’s even better than pre-Facebook Instagram in the sense that it pushes me to select and share what I think are good photos (same as it happens with Flickr), rather than making me obsess with getting ‘the Instagram shot’ at all costs every day or multiple times in a day. It doesn’t cheapen photography like Instagram has done for years. That’s why I hope Glass’s founders/developers will resist feature creep. Resist user objections like: I don’t think Glass is offering that much for the subscription price they’re asking. There are a lot of people who will gladly pay for having a cleaner, simpler, focused experience. featuressimplicityproductsphotography
It's all just geek talk A Fragment by Riccardo Mori morrick.me I’m finding that many people not only have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface, but more and more often when I bring up the subject, they seem to consider it a somewhat secondary aspect, something that’s only good for ‘geek talk’. The same kind of amused reaction laymen have to wine or coffee connoisseurs when they describe flavours and characteristics using specific lingo. Something that makes sense only to wine or coffee geeks but has little to no meaning or impact for the regular person. The problem is that if an increasing number of people start viewing user interface design as an afterthought, or something that isn’t fundamental to the design of a product or experience — it’s all just ‘geek talk’ — then there is a reduced incentive to care about it on the part of the maker of the product. interfacesuxtaste
The vanishing designer An Article by Chuánqí Sun uxdesign.cc Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony. The same, the same, the sameDesign as an engineering problemThe heat death of designDesign with courage uxmonotonycraft
The same, the same, the same Look around us. Every business is an app and every app feels the same, because every designer has the same resume, follows the same process, graduates from the same program, uses the same tool, scrolls the same Dribbble feed, reads the same Medium articles, expects the same career outcome, lives in the same ideology bubble.
Design as an engineering problem The Silicon Valley giants, testifying with their runaway success, claimed to have “solved” design as an engineering problem. The solution substituted the human essence of design — intuition, ingenuity, and taste— with the tangibles, measurables, and deliverables. Companies say they are “design-driven”, but designers are actually driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU. We rigorously run tests, studies, experiments as if innovative ideas are hidden in spreadsheets, waiting to be extracted by data scientists. intuitiontastemetrics
The heat death of design Losing the design diversity means falling into a singular narrative of how design must be done, which grants unfair and self-reinforcing advantage to the mainstream while discouraging, stifling, or even punishing the idiosyncratic designers who bring unorthodox but remarkably innovative processes to the table. The true opportunity cost is the diverse future that humanity can no longer access. A future without diversity is fundamentally stagnant: imagine designs so standardized that you can’t tell them apart. While every design is guaranteed to be good, none will be great. New designs are marginally better than previous ones with the rate of improvement eventually approaching zero. We have reached the heat death of design. diversity
Design with courage Make a bold decision (that is controversial). Make a mistake (as a result of a bold decision). Challenge “conventional wisdom”. Challenge authority (that preaches conventional wisdom). Challenge hierarchy (that perpetuates conventional wisdom). Ignore the committee (and the need to converge). Decide who your clients are (and aren’t). Ignore clients that aren’t (especially those who pay the most). Cultivate clients if none exists (instead of compromising your design). Be a generalist (and ignore your job title). Be a specialist (who specializes in being a generalist). Design things from scratch (and build them yourself from scratch). Design things that no one wants (yet). Design freely (and think freely). The boldest decisions design