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.

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.

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.

There are some wonderful and surprising stories in Ian Urbina’s The Secret Life of Passwords:

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

I now use 1Password to create unique passwords for each service, but the article did take me back to the one password story I do have. Back in college, when it was time to select a password I could remember easily, I remember leaning back in my chair and giving it some serious thought.

I had just seen Patch Adams and top of mind for me was part of a poem the character recited that really stuck with me (full version here):

I know it’s ridiculously syrupy, but I apparently used to be a romantic. Huh.

Anyway, my default password became two words from the poem, smashed together. Even though I don’t use the password any more I just can’t get myself to tell you which words, though. I guess some of this story needs to remain mine alone.

I’ve been thinking about being recently. Being online, being at home, being at work, being in public, being in private. This year my family and I made some gigantic changes in our lives that I won’t bore you with, except to say that constant change and discomfort gave me a renewed appreciation for human frailty. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that, for the first time, I feel like I truly understand these words by Thomas Kempis:

A true understanding and humble estimate of oneself is the highest and most valuable of all lessons. To take no account of oneself, but always to think well and highly of others is the highest wisdom and perfection. Should you see another person openly doing evil, or carrying out a wicked purpose, do not on that account consider yourself better than him, for you cannot tell how long you will remain in a state of grace.

We are all frail; consider none more frail than yourself.

All of this helped me figure some things out about being that I haven’t been particularly certain about before. Things like who I want to be and what I want to do with my life. The answers to those questions are probably irrelevant for what I want to write about here, so I won’t dwell on that. What I will do is share a few things I’ve become fairly sure of over the last few months (while I remain open to data-driven mind-changing next year, like any decent designer would).

So here are some things I learned in 2014:

Smaller networks are better

During some of the darker months of the year I retracted from Facebook and found some solace in the 5 or so active friends I have on Path (go ahead, laugh it up…). On Twitter I doubled down on what I’ve always done: being a link monkey, there for your daily dose of UX and product management links. There’s certainly comfort in that ritual and the feedback that comes from it. But it does get pretty empty after a while.

When things started to improve I gave Facebook a try again. I once again expanded my network. And suddenly it just felt really really loud and crowded and filled with people like me who are just looking for positive reinforcement and I didn’t like the way that made me feel.

So I went back to small. I’m still active on Path. On Twitter I share more personal things in addition to links I really like. It pisses some people off, but it feels more real. I also started writing a newsletter and I’m really enjoying the personal nature of that medium.

All of this to say that we’ll do well to remember that the web is people all the way down. And that smaller networks mean more meaningful relationships.

Who we amplify is who we are

Every day we choose whose voices we amplify online, and those choices make us who we are. After Ferguson happened I felt like I didn’t have a right to say anything about it. But what I could do is amplify the voices of those who did have something important to say. So that’s what I did. I retweeted articles and calls for help. I eventually did write something, and I still feel uncomfortable about it, but in the end I felt like I had to.

The things we say are important. They make us. Not to get all preachy, but Matthew sums it up pretty well:

But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart.

So I’m not always getting this right, but I want to amplify good things and people who say important things. Who we amplify is who we are. So let’s choose wisely.

Learning and sharing is what makes us a community

After much reflection I realized that to become a better designer and be a good web citizen there are only a few basic things you have to do:

1. Read about a new thing.
2. Practice new thing until it works for you.
3. Write about what you learned while practicing the new thing.
4. Repeat ad infinitum.

That’s it. That’s what community is: learn from others, practice until you get it, and teach others the new things you learned. We should really do more of that.

Being a small fish in a big pond is ok

I don’t know how to write this without sounding weird so I’ll just go ahead and put it out there and hope it comes out right.

When I lived in South Africa I thought what I wanted was to become an author and conference speaker. It was a bit easier there because there aren’t as many UX people as there are elsewhere in the world. And when I decided to move back to the US several people didn’t understand. “You’ll be a small fish in a big pond,” they said. “I know,” I would answer, “isn’t that awesome?”

The fact is that where I am right now is a much better fit, and I recognize the importance of being content in the situation we’re in. I do a job I love at a company with an awesome culture. Every once in a while I share things. My book didn’t become a bestseller, but the people who read it seem to enjoy it, and that makes me happy. I spend time with my family, and I tweet some jokes and links every once in a while.

I don’t get invited to speak at conferences, and I don’t have a major book deal coming. But I still enjoy writing, and I enjoy being with the people I hang out with — online and in person. After the year I’ve had, that is all I could ever ask for.

It was hard, but I’m thankful for 2014 and the meaningful lessons that came out of it.

Now let’s get it behind us and move on, shall we?

Marysol Elorriaga discusses the challenges of implementing Lean methodologies in large companies in Getting buy-in while moving at rocket speed. One of the guiding principles is to “Release early and show results”:

To make the stakeholders feel like they are getting something equally valuable out of taking the “Lean approach”, deliver the MVP early and show results. Ensure that all features to be released can be measured and there is a proper feedback gathering mechanism in place. Ease the concerns of working under the Lean philosophy with weekly dashboards, including customer feedback, learnings from user validation/testing and analytics. Ultimately, having big data and skilled professionals to transform customer feedback and analytics into business insights is a pre-requisite for improvement and innovation.

From the same blog, Elizabeth White gives some advice on embedding a Lean team in a large company in Building the Right Culture in a Lab Environment. It’s especially important to understand that “We are Lean Enterprise – not Lean Start-up”:

Our room is lean but we are surrounded by a waterfall. While we are fully supported by TELUS, and most internal teams want to roll out what we are doing, we are a big company, depending on some serious backend systems. And while I can go on about our fantastic experience and the merits of working in a lean environment, it is important to note, waterfall shouldn’t become taboo either. There will be projects where waterfall methodology makes perfect sense, there are some – much like ours, where a hybrid approach is best and there will be some, where lean, in its purest form, is the correct path.

If you’re thinking of trying a Lean approach in a large company, there’s some great advice in these two articles.

Marty Cagan wrote one of his characteristically great posts in Product vs. IT Mindset. In one particularly harsh section he describes what happens when the people who make decisions about a product are far removed from those who make the product:

In IT mindset companies, accountability frankly is a farce. The people actually working on a project typically have no real say in what they are building, and sometimes even in how it’s built, and even when it’s due. In theory, the leadership team could try to hold the requesting stakeholders accountable for the results, but if they do they immediately hear complaints that they didn’t get what they actually wanted, and because of delays and costs, critical things had to get cut, and so it’s certainly not their fault. So management writes it off as yet another failed technology initiative. In contrast, in a product organization, we are measured by results.

I’ve always felt that this is the biggest challenge to companies as they grow. The further away those who make decisions are from those who build the product, the harder it is to remain customer-focused in the long term.

Peter Morville’s Creating a Cultural Fit: Using ethnography with users and stakeholders is one of the most useful UX articles I’ve read in a while. He talks about the importance of understanding the cultures of both users and companies to create good products. He concludes:

In short, the right design is one that fits the company and its customers. A mismatch on either side results in fatal error. We must use ethnography with our users and stakeholders to search for a bi-cultural fit. This is tricky since culture is mostly invisible. That’s why we should start with a map.

This is a must-read.