Super Volatile

That’s quite unusual, most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.

So was the “Think Different” campaign an elaborate plot to get Samsungs of the world to chase exactly the wrong goals?

At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following: “Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t combine them into one thing to reduce their learning curve. We don’t merge them into one object because each of them are in use in fundamentally different ways at different times.

It seems that calling this designer rude was not enough and after the years he still didn't get what Gates was trying to tell him.

By clearing the interface of all unnecessary elements and using the content as the design core, the team has been able to distinguish this OS from more traditional UIs: the interface disappears, and the content itself becomes the interface. The interface shows the actual content and is not just the means to get to the content. Reducing the visuals on the phone promotes direct interaction with the content.

An overview of new design system from Microsoft. I don't know if it's going to fly, but wish it to succeed. That's why I'd be much happier if it was executed by Apple instead of Microsoft.

I think Jobs meant what he said to Fortune, and it’s an attempt to communicate the same core truth. But “Design is how it works” is a much better statement of Apple’s philosophy. Talk of a “product’s essence” (Isaacson’s words) or “the fundamental soul of a man-made creation” (Jobs’s) only serves to separate, conceptually, the art of design from the cold hard science of engineering. With just five words, “Design is how it works” expresses succinctly and accurately that engineering should and can be part of the art of design.

Gruber on the essential relationship between design and engineering according to Steve Jobs.

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.