Julie Zhuo discusses some characteristics of bad designers in 7 Reasons to No-Hire a Product Designer (Part I). This point stood out for me:

Look for hints of random decision making. Good designers do not do things randomly, or for the hell of it, or just because it seemed cool.

This ties in well with Rebekah Cox’s definition of Design in her Web2.0 Expo Presentation:

Design is a set of decisions about a product. It’s not an interface or an aesthetic, it’s not a brand or a color. Design is the actual decisions.

The thing is, if you don’t follow a rigorous design process that identifies user needs, explores different solutions, iterates collaboratively, etc., you’re still making decisions about the product. You’re still designing. But your sins of omission will result in implicit, subconscious decisions that have a high likelihood of being wrong. This is why what Julie calls intentionality in her post is so important. Design decisions should always be deliberate and defendable, not random and accidental.

The use of carousels in web design has become quite the controversial topic. Brad Frost takes it on very well in his post Carousels. He starts by explaining that in most cases, it’s not a good idea to use carousels, because of reasons like this:

From universities to giant retailers, large organizations endure their fair share of politics. And boy does that homepage look like a juicy piece of prime real estate to a roomful of stakeholders. It’s hard to navigate these mini turf wars, so tools like carousels are used as appeasers to keep everyone from beating the shit out of each other.

It’s far harder to have an honest content strategy conversation and determine what truly deserves to be on the homepage.

Brad goes further to give some good tips for improving the UX of carousels — if you really need to use them. For more, also check out Peep Laja’s roundup of thoughts and research on carousel usage at Don’t Use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels, Ignore the Fad.

Peter Matthaei wrote down some thoughts on failure, startups, and product development in ALL THE USE CASES. He makes some good points, like this one:

Every great company started by being great at solving just a single problem. Quite often, a very humble one. But they solved that one problem incredibly well, picked up momentum, and with large doses of relentless ambition, good timing, vision and luck kept on going.

Dropbox is, of course, the poster child for this line of thinking. One of my favorite Quora answers is still Michael Wolfe’s response to Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?:

“But,” you may ask, “so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!”

No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

I would add that I think the problem with most startups is not necessarily that they’re trying to solve too many problems; it’s that they’re trying to provide solutions to problems that don’t exist. I love this quote from Pragmatic Marketing in their post Who Needs Product Management?:

It is vastly easier to identify market problems and solve them with technology than it is to find buyers for
your existing technology.

My thesis continues to be that the single biggest cause of startup failure is focusing on finding buyers for cool technology, as opposed to identifying (and fully understanding) market problems first.

I can’t shake this feeling that this might be the year that quitting social networks goes mainstream. We’re not even through January, and already the posts are flooding in. Here’s Brent Simmons in Brave new network: Why I hope Apple never releases a smart watch:

I want to stay human, in other words. I want to like things in the thousand different ways there are to like things, rather than just click on a Like button. I want to say and think things that take more than 140 characters.

I want to not take a photograph, because no picture, no matter how beautifully filtered, can express what it’s like for one person to walk in the woods alone. I need to remember.

And here’s Keri Maijala in Why I’m not on Facebook:

I felt bad about myself after browsing Facebook.

I get that Facebook is like a reverse funhouse mirror that makes everything look better. It’s a sublimely distorted world filled with families and trips and drinks and straight white teeth. And I was just as guilty of perpetuating that myth, carefully choosing photos and crafting updates that supported how I wanted to be perceived: Happy, healthy, independent, adventurous, courageous, and with straight white teeth. Only half of those things are true. And ultimately, I found I felt depressed after browsing Facebook.

Or as Alex Charchar said on Twitter recently, we’re starting to get bored by our distractions. I think that’s a good thing, though. Boredom leads to creativity.

I know I just wrote about coffee, but this one is too good not to link to. In Coffee and the Art of Customer Happiness Mathias Meyer writes about the similarities between making coffee and developing software:

Baristas are geeks, just like we are. They love talking about the latest toys, about which espresso machine is better than the other, they compare paper filters with cloth, and they take detailed notes on the different aromas of coffee when they’re cupping it.

The craft of coffee making is quite fascinating, both from the perspective of precision and customer care.

Mathias discusses familiar topics like metrics, continuous delivery, and custom vs. off-the-shelf software, and what the art of coffee can teach us about each. Great article.

(link via @bb)

Original American Airlines logo designer Massimo Vignelli comments on the redesigned logo:

Styling is very much emotional. Good design isn’t—it’s good forever. It’s part of our environment and culture. There’s no need to change it. The logo doesn’t need change. The whole world knows it, and there’s a tremendous equity. It’s incredibly important for brand recognition. I will not be here to make a bet, but this [new logo] won’t last another 25 years.

Dustin Curtis on the redesign:

It is too bad that such a great, enduring identity was placed into such careless hands. […] After forty-six years, one of the finest corporate brands in history has been reduced to patriotic lipstick.

Paul Ford, last December, in The Emergence of Crowdsmashing Logos and Rebranding:

People don’t like their stories messed with. You expect a certain continuity, and when the opposite happens—Dylan going electric, season two of Friday Night Lights—you react out of proportion to external measures of the offense but very much in proportion to the internal anxiety and anger you might feel. […] It’s not just that some lines and colors have changed—possibilities have been taken away. No wonder people want to go to their windows and yell “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take gradient blends anymore.”

For the first time, the question “I wonder who else hates this?” has an immediate answer, and people who see the arc of their lives flattened by bad branding can find each other and grieve over the lost logotypes of youth.

I’m not saying I like the American Airlines rebrand. But boy, does the response once again show how the Internet is an incredible tool for collaborative outrage.

I desperately wanted to dismiss Sherry Turkle’s answer to the question What should we be worried about? as alarmist, but she makes a terribly convincing argument about the impact that technology has on kids and their development. After discussing the issues in detail, she concludes:

Thus my worry for kindergarten-tech: the shiny objects of the digital world encourage a sensibility of constant connection, constant distraction, and never-aloneness. And if you give them to the youngest children, they will encourage that sensibility from the earliest days. This is a way of thinking that goes counter to what we currently believe is good for children: a capacity for independent play, the importance of cultivating the imagination, essentially, developing a love of solitude because it will nurture creativity and relationship.

The essay echoes Nicholas Carr’s thoughts:

We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

But perhaps Stephen Hacket said it best — and most succinctly — in Why I Don’t Play Games on my iPhone:

Boredom isn’t a bad thing. But strangling it with Angry Birds probably is.

In his introduction to a very interesting user research case study on the MailChimp blog, Gregg Bernstein writes:

Here at MailChimp, we’re realists—as much as we love email and all the things you can do with it, we understand that building a campaign is a task, not a life event. You want to get in, get done, and get on with things. Duly noted.

The post goes on to explain how they managed to shave an average of 32 seconds off a core email campaign creation task at MailChimp. But it’s that opening sentence I’d like to dwell on for a bit.

I wish more companies understood this crucial point. As designers and product managers we obsess over every detail of our product, but it most likely makes up a minuscule part of our users’ days. Unless you work for Facebook or Twitter users don’t wake up wondering what new features you’ve released, how your conversion rate has changed over time, or what awards you’ve won. They care about getting a task done, and they care about nothing getting in their way — they care about getting on with their lives.

Yesterday The Onion published an article that is such a spot-on commentary on how we’re mostly ignoring this reality. From Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity:

Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on social media, bestow ratings, leave comments, and generally “join in on the discussion,” the nation’s Internet users demanded substantially less interactivity this week.

Speaking with reporters, web users expressed a near unanimous desire to visit a website and simply look at it, for once, without having every aspect of the user interface tailored to a set of demographic information culled from their previous browsing history.

Exactly. We’re in an environment where too often products and functionality are shaped by who we are and what’s technically possible, not by what user needs call for. XKCD called us on it years ago, but we’re just not listening:

The solution to this problem is to get out into the world and understand how our products and services fit into the lives of our users. How we can help them accomplish their tasks more effectively. Mark Hurst summed this up well in his post What is a career in user experience really about?:

Good user research isn’t a matter of learning the steps of some trendy methods, as though one were just following a cookbook. Instead, good UX work requires a genuine interest in observing, listening to, and learning from other people: primarily the customers themselves, but also the organization that owns the product. That observation, and that listening, must stem from a genuine human interest in people.

We can all do with a shot of humility about our products. We might think what we’re making is a gift to humankind that deserves proper respect — and we absolutely should be proud of our work. But a bit of human empathy will show us that most users have only a passing fly-by relationship with our products. That’s ok though. Understanding how our products fit into people’s lives realistically will help us to improve that fit and (hopefully) become indispensable to them. That’s our job as User Experience Designers.