Oh man, Some 2015 Predictions on The Awl is so good. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but if I have to:

No human, for the entirety of 2015, will be convinced of anything but his own rightness by any “explainer” site. They will become extremely popular, fully stocked with “Perfect Response” and “Reasons Why” posts that are first and foremost affirming to the reader, and secondarily intended to demonstrate the rightness and virtue of the sharer. One high-growth post-type in 2015: “You’re Right, But For Even Better Reasons Than You Think.”

I’m not a big fan of these types of articles, but I did like Mark Kawano’s point about what makes Apple a successful design organization in 4 Myths About Apple Design, From An Ex-Apple Designer:

It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better … much more than any individual designer or design team.

If everyone cares about design, the usual mantra that “UX is 50% design, 50% politics” turns into a much more manageable ratio.

As is often the case with these things, I just noticed two articles that make very similar points about the quantified self movement. In Quantify Thyself LM Sacasas makes the point that we don’t know what we don’t measure:

Not only do we tend to pay more attention to what we can measure, we begin to care more about what can measure. Perhaps that is because measurement affords us a degree of ostensible control over whatever it is that we are able to measure. It makes self-improvement tangible and manageable, but it does so, in part, by a reduction of the self to those dimensions that register on whatever tool or device we happen to be using to take our measure.

In a similar vein, Anne Helen Petersen has a great piece on Buzzfeed called Big Mother Is Watching You: The Track-Everything Revolution Is Here Whether You Want It Or Not. Here’s the kicker:

But there’s something to be said for the allure and beauty of the mysteries not only of our confusing, previously unknowable bodies, but the intricacies of life. For the daily banalities of tuning the thermostat, or of knowing you had a good night’s sleep because you feel good, not because an app indicated as much. For the pleasure of running without knowing how fast or how long or how many calories but simply because your body could and did move, and that even without a digital trace, a GPS footprint, or way to leverage evidence thereof against friends and co-workers — it nonetheless felt something like being alive.

Last year I accidentally became an expert on interviewing. I didn’t want to, but hey, we do what we need to do. I just published some things I learned in the process on A List Apart, in an article called How to Interview. Here’s one piece of advice on how to get companies to email you back…

Send separate, personal emails to each of the likely hiring managers you found. Make it really, really short. Don’t go on about how awesome you are—you’ll get a chance to do that later. Tell them you like their company, you like the role, you’re interested in talking. Link to stuff you’ve done: your LinkedIn profile, your portfolio, articles/books you’ve written, etc. Then ask them if they’d be willing to have a call, or forward your information on to the right person. The point is to not burden people. If they see a long email, the chances are high that they will delete it. But if they see a short email that’s respectful of their time and gives them the information they need to make a quick decision—that’s a different story.

I just finished Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better and really enjoyed it. So much of what we read about technology these days is doom and gloom that I wanted to spend time on something a little more positive. And turns out, there’s much to be positive about.

There are many stand-out moments in the book. One is the exploration of ambient awareness — how social media often makes our in-person connections stronger because we know so much about each other’s minutia that we can skip the small talk and jump straight to the important stuff when we see each other. But the part I want to elaborate on a little bit here is what historical events tell us about the important criteria to meet for collective thinking to be successful.

Clive points out four important aspects of successful online collaboration:

1. Collective thinking requires a focused problem to solve. One disastrous story Clive tells is when the LA Times create a wiki page on the Iraq War and encouraged people to edit it. No focused outcome = a rapid decline into the bottom half of the internet. But give people a common problem to solve — like “Which tent hospitals in Cairo need help, and what do they need?”, and people start to shine together.
2. Collective problem solving requires a mix of contributors. Specifically, it needs to have really big central contributors, and then a lot of people making small contributions to push the solution forward. As Clive puts it, “these hard-core and lightweight contributors form a symbiotic whole,” coming up with the best solution in the fastest possible way.
3. Collective thinking requires a culture of “good faith collaboration”. Contributors need to struggle constantly to remain polite to each other. And it is a struggle, but a necessary one. As Anil Dash once said, if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.
4. To be really smart an online group can’t have too much contact with each other. This sounds counterintuitive, but the evidence supporting the point is pretty overwhelming. Clive goes over a few examples that shows that “traditional brainstorming simply doesn’t work as well as thinking alone, then pooling results.” This also explains why Design Studio is such an effective way to solve design problems. So one of the secrets of online collaboration is that it “inherently fits the model of people working together intimately but remotely,” as Clive puts it.

There’s much more to say about the book, but I think I’ll stop here and just encourage you again to read it. You’ll agree with a lot of it, disagree with some of it, and think about all of it for days after finishing it. That’s all we could ever ask of a book.

I wrote a story about jazz, coffee, and liner notes, and hopefully managed to turn it into something with a logical conclusion. But feel free to judge for yourself by reading Taking back the music:

We like things fast and disposable — I get that. I mean, no one even knew what the word “ephemeral” meant until Snapchat came along. But moving quickly from one thing to the next will just never be as satisfying as really spending time with something or someone, with no escape from the person or the artist’s intentions and successes and failures. We can all do with a little bit more of that.

Bill Selman wrote a great post on the importance of research triangulation. If you have trouble making the case for qualitative research in a company smitten with “big data”, show them Why Do We Conduct Qualitative User Research? (emphasis mine):

There is no one research method that satisfies answering all of our questions. If the questions we are asking about user behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are based solely on assumptions formed in our homophilic bubble, we will not generate accurate insights about our users no matter how large the dataset. In other words, we only know what we know and can only ask questions framed about what we know. If we are measuring, we can only measure what we know to ask. Quantitative user research needs qualitative user research methods in order to know what we should be measuring and to provide examples, theories, and explanations. Likewise, qualitative research needs quantitative research to measure and validate our work as well as to uncover larger patterns we cannot see.

Paul Ford knocks it out of the park again in What I learned about hatred from my tiny daughter, an essay about collective anger on the internet:

When you aggregate enough people and get them to talk about design they become, basically, a single giant toddler.