Posts from April 2016

Sara and I are guests on the most recent Shop Talk Show, espiode #212, where we talked with Chris and Dave about Design for Real Life, Google Mic Drop, and more.  We had a good time with it, and hope you will too.

In a moment of slight coincidence, the episode was released almost exactly a year after my first appearance on Shop Talk (espisode #161), where I covered similar topics.  At that point, Sara and I were still researching and tossing ideas for the book back and forth.  Now here we are, a year later, with the book out.  It’s a little wild to contemplate, honestly.  It was a lot of work in a pretty short time frame… but so very much worth it.

• Talking Shop was published on Wednesday, April 20th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Design and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m honored to be included in Issue 5 of The Manual, doubly so because it may well be the last issue of The Manual, triply so because I spoke at the very first Build Conference, the event that gave birth to The Manual.

I have two pieces, as is traditional for The Manual: an article titled “We Are What We Build”, and a short, untitled ‘life lesson’ about a whiny 12-year-old me and my grandfather’s quiet wisdom.

A quote from “We Are What We Build”:

The challenge now is in how those fragments of our lives are treated. This is as much a social question as a technological problem, but the two are not separable. What Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and every other at-scale social network does now — everything they make possible or impossible, everything they make easier or harder — will shape what we think of as normal in a decade or two.

Past readers may recognize this sentiment (as well as the title) from my talk at XOXO 2015, which was heavily intertwined with the article for The Manual.  One led to the other, in fact.  I proposed the talk, which Andy B. accepted, and then Andy M. asked me if I’d write it for The Manual.  So I did.

I was glad to write both, and I hope you enjoy them… and more importantly, I hope they provoke some reflection.

• In The Manual: “We Are What We Build” was published on Tuesday, April 19th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Design and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Sara and I wrote an article for UX Booth, “Compassionate UX”, and it was published last week.  Two quotes (out of a ~1,750-word article):

When we get laser-focused on positive outcomes, we often fail to notice how things might go terribly wrong. But whether you’re working on something as complex as artificial intelligence or as simple as a line of microcopy, you’ll create the best products when you intentionally set aside your goals of “delight” or “engagement,” and make time to think critically about where your product might break.

It’s easy to see this as an uncomfortable restriction on the creative process, and that’s actually a pretty accurate description. Of course thinking about users’ varied identities and emotional states creates limiting factors. But that’s what design is: it is a creative solution to a set of constraints.

Read the whole thing over at UX Booth.

• New Article: “Compassionate UX” was published on Monday, April 18th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Design and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.