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The best leaders take the shittiest jobs
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Stovetop cooking and task management
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Nothing Moves
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LEGO letterpress birds
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“The problem is when we think we’re talking about the same thing, but we’re not.”
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Mandy Brown’s Energy makes time
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“Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity.”
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Close the gap between product and engineering
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The radical Mr. Rogers
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Beautiful and Creative Murals by Ukrainian artist Vladimir Manzhos, a.k.a. WAONE
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“Both of these declines — the decline of the consumer experience and the decline of the market forecasts — are driving tech companies' retreat from what I'm calling their heroic phase. But neither are identical to it.”
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Aman Khanna’s Clever Clay Characters
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“Building in accessibility from day one means beginning with a design system that’s accessible by default. By making sure that every design component and code element is aligned to accessibility standards at the outset, companies can prevent access issues further down the road.”
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“Is it a problem that we don’t have one definition of “design system” that we as an industry can standardize on? No!”
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Eric Bailey's Sandcastles
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The Circuit Breaker S2 E12 | Listening
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The four-day work week: luxury or necessity?
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“Being a pessimist is an easy thing to fall back on, and I’m trying to be better about it. As we close the year out, I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings.”
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Sam wrote a book
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“As simplistic as it might seem, taking time to align our business and user outcomes is a key step to ensure we correctly define the problem we’re solving with design.”
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Enforcing constraints creates opportunities for creativity
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“Body and mind feel like they are bombarded by too much information: too much light, too much heat, too much dissonance with other peoples’ affinity for summer.”
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“We are expected to send our kids off into God knows what, to work our jobs and live our lives like nothing’s wrong, and to hold it all together for months and maybe now for years without ever seeing a way out. This is not okay. Nothing is okay.”
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We Dont Deserve Dogs
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“Even so, designing products that are both usable and accessible to most users requires that you go beyond the A level and focus on meeting AA or AAA contrast requirements.”
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How This Works
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“I’m learning that I am not lightning that strikes once. I am the hurricane that comes every single year, and you can expect to see me again soon.”
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“But in multiple cases now for me, that just eventually became exhausting.”
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“Beginning with the notion of respect or respectfulness, the debate becomes about how you stand as a designer as opposed to what you’re trying to do as a designer.”
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Figma Organization and Workflow
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“Could I be using a better writing app? Maybe. Would the end result be better? Maybe. Is it worth it? I say no.”
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“The point of skiing isn’t to get to the bottom. The point is how it feels on your way there.”
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“As a parent living through the pandemic, everything is a balance right now: spinning plates stacked high with a towering collection of impossible things.”
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“While more knowledge can change belief, it usually doesn’t. Belief is a cultural phenomenon, created in conjunction with the people around us.”
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“There are just so many pain points creating an unsatisfactory user journey. The child goes limp when you try to lift it. It goes stiff when you try to change the clothes. It poops after it gets into the bathtub, but before it reaches the toilet.”
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“If you care. If it’s generous and helpful and worth the journey.”
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Using patient interviews to prioritize features for a health tech product external
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Cross-Cultural Design
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“If you must do something, do something useful. That often means not doing, removing, minimizing, cleaning up.”
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“While an offhand remark may appear harmless, the less empathic our online interactions collectively become, the greater risk we all stand of becoming trolls.”
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So You Want to Talk About Race
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Without a doubt, today’s average jazz producer has heard more jazz than any jazz producer working in 1960.
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Playbook updates: New Rapid Product Validation Section and Designing Section Updates external
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New online Q&A: Being human in the absence of humans external
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Running design sprints and kickoffs remotely external
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“We simply don’t have the equipment, training, or messaging in place and we need to ramp up fast. No one does. That is why your choices today matter so much.”
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“But the fact is, the reality is all grey area. All of it. There are very few black and white answers and no solutions without second-order consequences.”
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Changes we've made to our process and work on thoughtbot.com and how Basecamp's Shape Up informed it external
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The Lost Cat
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It’s up to us to be mindful about where we are personally, and either work towards or optimize for what our own enough actually is.
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Using Jobs-to-be-Done to organize my closet
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The Writing Habit
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Ask Me Anything Office Hours with thoughtbot's Chief Design Officer external
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Designing Designer Skill Growth external
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New online workshop: Practical applications of Jobs-to-be-Done for designing successful digital products external
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Redesigning How We Hire Designers at thoughtbot external
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Context Switching and Tension Headaches
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“Design is supposed to fix the world, not break it. Yet some of us, possibly even most of us, work on products and at companies we feel conflicted about.”
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Wisdom in children's books
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When it comes to discussing the “ethics” or the morality of our industry, we need to understand our basic moral beliefs.
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“I compare it to seeing a family member naked,” she said. “Once you look around the elevator and see the zombies checking their phones, you can’t unsee it.”
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Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light: A Design Exercise for Getting Feedback From the Team external
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How Do You Learn?
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I imagine that in another decade or two we’ll look at 2010s-era device use something like we do now with cigarette smoking.
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Balancing work with the rest of life
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Remember It Now
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Much like a water slide with a section of pipe missing, a broken flow forcibly ejects a user, to great surprise and frustration.
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Obligatory Redesign Post
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Higher Level Problems
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Ways I've experimented with Design Sprints to make them more sustainable. external
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Our Favorite Events During Startup Week in Austin external
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Setting up my physical workspace
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The Importance of Exercise
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Drunk on Conversation
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Space to think
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The 80/20 rule of my tools
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News, keeping up to date and heading back to RSS
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Getting things done
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Six years
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Building Learning into our Process with Prototypes external
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Merck Developer Portal Case Study external
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Test-Driven Product Design external
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Blurred Lines external
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Things I learned by doing 3 talks in 3 days in Chicago
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How We Use Trello for Product Design and Development external
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Lets blow this fucker up, again
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Philly joins Boston and Montreal in hosting 2nd annual Baseball Hack Day external
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Launch when you aren’t ready
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DIY Design Sprints external
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Converting to Jobs Stories external
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The difference between perfection and iterating
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Increasing and decreasing my barrier for entry