Shawn Wang
100 Bytes of CSS to look great everywhere
An Article by Shawn Wanghtml { max-width: 60ch; padding: 1.5rem; margin: auto; line-height: 1.5rem; font-size: 24x; }
Metrics have a strange hold on the imagination
A Fragment by Shawn WangOnce in place, metrics have a strange hold on the imagination: I've seriously had a CTO carelessly reject my genuine idea out of hand because "it doesn't help OKRs", the same OKRs we previously agreed should not describe all that we do.
I agree with Amir Shevat that we should "do the right things over the easy to measure things."
The Genius of Apple's Name
An Article by Shawn WangIt's easy to have strong opinions about stuff only developers see since user validation is just asking people like yourself. It's much harder to name something consumer facing. Here are some useful rules I gleaned from Apple:
- Two syllables max
- Familiar English word - literal 5 year olds can spell and pronounce it right
- Starts with A - useful for alphabetical sort. Amazon did this too
- Name leads to easy logo/swag/branding ideas
- Evoke aspirational qualities - knowledge, health, nature
Don't Rush to Simplicity
An Article by Shawn WangYou've probably heard this story before:
A businessman finds a fisherman, who is living an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.
He laughs and tells the fisherman how to get rich instead.
The fisherman asks him what he will do after he gets rich.
He replies that he would retire to an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.There's supposed to be a deep life lesson in there, but it's always felt insincere to me.
To me it is better to have reached the heights of a career, or suffered an epic defeat, even if I do end up in the same place as everyone else in the end.
To me simplicity is made more beautiful when understood through a long personal struggle with complexity. When I can dance with it, having turned a mighty nemesis into an old friend, and teach others to do the same.
Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
80/20 is the new Half-Ass
An Article by Shawn WangThe Pareto Principle is making you lazy.
Let me be more precise: The Pareto distribution is a useful model of power law effects in real life. But people are using it poorly, primarily as an excuse to be lazy.
...People forget that the devil is in the details. The first 20% everyone knows to say on Twitter. The remaining 80% is the ugly, nasty, hacky, unglamorous shit nobody talks about unless you've got time to sweat the details.
The vanishing designer
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 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.
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.
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).