Some people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy, I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t. You did shit work.
Why your application should automate what can be automated and focus only on things that help users achieve their real goals.
This screenshot of Windows Explorer from Windows 8 has been already ridiculed by everybody and his dog. It's looking like Apple and Microsoft, both having 30 years of experience in interface design, reached radically different conclusions.
Reading the article clearly shows that Microsoft's design is driven by data. Apple, on the other hand, seems to employ designers.
Having the role of “Product Designer” or having a CEO who says they’re going to “focus on product design now” never made much sense to me. Aren’t you hiring smart people who use your product? Don’t you trust your employees? Doesn’t everyone at your company want to make your product better? Doesn’t that make everyone product designers all of the time?
Insight into development and design culture at github.
So where do you actually find all those designers? A couple years ago the answer would have been a lot longer, but these days you can pretty much sum it up in one word: Dribbble.
A guide for finding designers, written by a designer. Conclusion: thanks to Dribble the market has been very much commoditized.
Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.
Explanation why Apple's power cords are failing so often. Yes, it has happened to me too.
I’m not posting the full reply, but essentially he..
- Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages.
- Asked me to point my fields of expertise from a list of 30 skills.
I do code a lot of Ruby, serious JavaScript and CSS, but I replied marking everything as “I’m a product designer”, hoping they would ask about that.
That was followed by a phone call, where I had a 45 minutes talk about HTML and CSS details, and discussing the fastest algorithm to determine if a given string is a subset of another one. At no point of the conversation were product design skills or experience mentioned.
How Google hiring process undermines company's ability to design better products.
In part, women today are facing a storm of conflicting expectations. Women feel that they have to achieve in the workplace, they have to look fabulous, preferably thin as a model, and probably go under the knife for their first nip and tuck before they’re 30. Oh, and besides this they’re supposed to be perfect mothers and wives. They’re obliged to pull all this off simultaneously. What craziness is that?
Female designer discovers with shock that there's a price to pay for emancipation.
Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.
Lots of interesting observations on Nokia culture from a former employee.
But my favourite is quoted above: it perfectly explains most of the conflicts between designers and developers I've witnessed (or participated in), ever.
Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.
Axiological concerns aside, distinctive brands are not born accidentally.
Apple does not sell computers, they sell consumer appliances. But what they really sell is an experience: consistency and ease-of-use, and working right out of the box, combined with solid and thoughtful industrial design and user interface.
In case you didn't notice.
