May 2012
43 posts
“Eventually we’ll run out of abstractions, and this euphemism treadmill...”
– » 23 May 2012, baked by Cennydd Bowles @ The Pastry Box Project
“it’s imperative that we embrace that cardboard spaceship designer in all of us...”
– 3 Ways To Design Toys That Boost Kids’ Creativity | Co.Design: business innovation design
“Programming is a broadly applicable life skill. Even if you’re not in front of a...”
– Facebook Engineer Turns 5-Year-Olds Into Hackers | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
“They’re people, Aronowitz explains, who already have a product mindset. They’re...”
– Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s Design Director, On Crafting A Design-Led Organization | Co.Design: business innovation design
Five Tips on How to be a Great UX Consultant
Know Your Role
This is harder than it seems, because it changes from one client to the next. With some clients, your role may include just improving and enhancing existing documentation. For other clients, you might provide thought-leadership as you help to define the product, including conducting research that is far and beyond what is normally considered user experience.
Remember, you are the solution to the client’s needs, even if it’s outside of your core skillset.
Baseball is a great analogy: either you’re a high-priced free agent or you’re the callup filling in during the pennant stretch. Knowing where you bat in the lineup greatly helps you judge how you should interact with the client.
Whatever that role is, act accordingly. Fill in that role and fit in with the team as much as possible. The more they like you, the longer they’ll keep you around.
“Do-it-yourself mass production is exciting, but comes with risks. Yarrington...”
– Still Love Board Games? Game Salute Can Help You Make One. | Wired Design | Wired.com
“Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter...”
– Rands In Repose: Please Learn to Write
“Adaptive design is an elegant solution to the thorny technical problem of having...”
– What’s next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed? | VentureBeat
Productivity: How can I increase my productivity...
I try to minimize startup and switching costs, in other words, the time it takes to get started working on the side project. This way, even if I only have a few minutes to work on it before I turn in for the night, I can still do something useful. Also, I try to make each opportunity count. These are hard to come by and so it is good not to waste any single minute.
This boils down to me doing some or all of the following:
Keeping as much state persistent across sessions as possible. I leave all my editors, browser windows, etc exactly the way they are so I can pick up and resume where I left off. This means I usually never shut down my computer, preferring to put it to sleep or standby where possible.
Having a quick and painless to-do list. I used to do this in a text file but I've recently started to use Evernote for this. Then, when secondary tasks crop up that are not central to what I'm doing right now, I'll put them on the list and work on them later.
Biting off only what can be chewed. Related to above, I make sure I tackle only what seems reasonably possible within the time I have. If I took on too big a task and didn't manage to finish, and only got back to it a few days later, I would have forgotten by then some of the reasons why I did things in a certain way. This would cost me time that is spent rethinking and refactoring my design unnecessarily.
Prioritizing tasks according to what is important (or interesting if I'm not feeling particularly inspired). This goes in line with making each opportunity count. In downtime, I would transfer some of the tasks in the lightweight list into something more persistent for issue tracking and prioritizing. I found Trac with a Git or Mercurial plugin to be pretty useful for this purpose, and it helps me to keep focused with the big picture in mind.
Having near-term milestones. These are helpful to stay motivated and gives you some pressure to keep on-track with your goals. I think it's easiest to just have a single feature in mind and a fixed date that you want it finished, and use that to inform your decision making.
Some of the above are also pretty applicable to regular work, so it's good for general productivity if they become habits. Good luck with your endeavors!
“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought...”
– Jonah Lehrer on How Creativity Works | Brain Pickings
Captain Commander →
Sweet retro game with nods to (amongst others) Bruce Lee
WatchRubicon Main Titles (by Jeremy Cox)
“But, thanks to legal action in the US, FreeHand may have a future.”
– Creative Review - Freehand: the software that wouldn’t die
“I understand story better [now]. When I was doing the original in 1992, I wanted...”
– Michael Mann looks back on The Last of the Mohicans 20 years later
Refining Your Design In Adobe Fireworks →
“When I was a journeyman, I was a maximilist. I tried to use the whole language....”
– How I Work: Yahoo!’s Doug Crockford On JavaScript | Smashing Coding
“At the end of the day, I never have and still don’t care that much for...”
– Project Management for SEO (2012 Edition!) | SEOmoz
“But - and this is a big but - we hadn’t factored in one seemingly small...”
– mills of ustwo™ on designing apps
“The problem about being a writer is that the kind of energy you use for writing...”
– Doris Lessing
“When I say “simple”, what I mean is: A product reduced to its purest form of...”
– Simplicity Isn’t Simple - FINCH
“A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US...”
– Cyber culture: Don’t want your data to be mined by the web giants? Time to talk like an Egyptian - Features - Gadgets & Tech - The Independent
“My advice for anyone starting out fresh with responsive web design is to keep it...”
– Responsive Web Design Resources For Absolute Beginners | Janna Hagan
Download Google’s Web Fonts →
Top work from Joe Maller
WatchDave Trott on the Art of Persuasion - and “creativity going out of our business”.
“I think Nielsen’s point, as heavy-handed as it might come across, is...”
– Nielsen vs Clark – they’re both wrong | Opinion | .net magazine
April 2012
81 posts
“At least I have never heard of an employer here cutting an interview short as...”
– What your Klout score really means and why it doesn’t matter | The Wall Blog
“And what do we, the book-buying public, want? Cheaper prices, as ever, but...”
– Something Is Rotten In The State Of E-Book Publishing | Fast Company
“It is six years since the Pulitzer prizes for journalism dipped a toe in the...”
– Huffington Post’s Pulitzer prize win marks a turning point for journalism | Media | The Guardian
This is Real Art →
Loads of awesome work here. Hours wasted looking through it.