The ISO on Usability
- The design is based upon an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments.
- Users are involved throughout design and development.
- The design is driven and refined by user-centred evaluation.
- The process is iterative.
- The design addresses the whole user experience.
- The design team includes multidisciplinary skills and perspectives.
Huh. Good for talking with clients.
Friends don’t let friends listen to tech podcasts
Adam Rogers, listened to 40 hours of tech-bro podcasts for Insider:
I could feel my intuitive map getting rewritten. Government is always bad, the market solves everything, clever investment is a real job even if you don’t produce anything except money. I should start a company, grow fast, get a big exit, buy a house in Atherton and spend my leisure time urging people not to go to college and fighting the construction of protected bike lanes and multifamily housing.
Americans go to Disney Land because they’ve all been punished but can visit a walkable functioning city, as a treat
— Dan Hon
Breaking up (with) the office
The real value innovation is in separating efficiency and socialization from one, single, centralized physical space. Decoupling space from what’s happening in it effectively changes the meaning of “office.” Instead of the “office,” there is a decentralized network of offices.
— Ana Andjelic
Reminds me of Mark Charmer’s Five Kinds of Space (which has disappeared from the internet).
What is a TikTok Video?
A TikTok video shouldn’t be thought of as one piece content, but as a series of inputs to be analyzed by the platform’s artificial intelligence — the caption, the hashtag, the length of the video, the audio, the filters used, the comments, the accounts the commenters follow, the accounts you follow, etc. All of it creates branches of recommendations to offer you.
— (Garbage day, Websites are just places to talk about TikTok)
What is designing?
John Chris Jones “comprehensive definition of design”:
thoughts and actions intended to change thoughts and actions
The article is a phenomenal example of what I’m going to call “business-dude lorem ipsum.” It is filler language that is used to roleplay “thought leadership” among those who have nothing to say: the MBA version of a grade-school book report that starts with a Webster’s Dictionary definition.
Maybe grids are not always helpful?
Why do designers always talk about grids? Simple answer: they work brilliantly in print design. But the moment you have a screen that can change size, throw your grid system out the window.
How to tell a story
Every designer should know how to tell a story 1.
The best way I know to get practice at communicating to a group of people is to tutor at university. You have to show up every week for 13 weeks and get a group of people to listen to you. It’s rare that you’ll have a relatively low stakes opportunity for so much practice.
Whether spoken or written, I believe that the only way to get good at telling stories is to tell them. You can’t learn by reading about it or thinking about it. You have to try, fail, think about why you failed, and then try something else. That is, you have to do something else very designerly — you have to iterate.
There’s plenty of advice out there on how to tell stories.
This long article from the NYT is a good repackaging of most of the common advice.
These four points from a post on Jenn Granneman’s blog are a good summary.
I find these short lists unhelpful, but the Granneman’s post has good examples.
- Grab their attention
- Set the mood
- Let them imagine
- Use casual, everyday words
Most of the time, in my role, I find myself telling stories in presentations. The best advice I know for doing great presentations comes from Giles Turnbull’s Doing Presentations.
I’m following Danah Abdulla’s Designerly Ways of Knowing↩︎
I'm @bjkraal@aus.social on Mastodon