quote archives
“Do not pray for tasks equal to your abilities, but pray for abilities equal to your tasks. Then the performance of your tasks will be no miracle, but you will be the miracle.”Love this quote from President Thomas S. Monson. Applies at work, at Church, and at home.
““Good” beats “Innovative” nearly every time. An obsession with innovation leads executives down the wrong path. Just trying to be good would be a smarter focus.”Former colleague Scott Berkun in a recent Business Week article. Before objecting, read the whole article; innovation will happen, but not if that is the primary goal. The primary goal should be to produce Something Good. If innovation is required to get there—great! But if there are tried and true solutions, all the better.
“I have to admit something strange: I’m amused by poorly designed websites. The worse the better. Much like some people “love to hate” movie villains, I get a peculiar satisfaction from finding myself completely lost in an ill-conceived, over-designed, steaming pile of a website. ... I think I have to enjoy it on some level, given my role as a customer experience consultant; otherwise work would be pretty difficult (see also: doctors who can’t stand the sight of blood).”Mark Hurst, noting accurately that customer experience is harder than it looks.
“The world needs more UX. Without the knitting that UX performs for organizations and their customers, we’ll likely end up with continued wanton proliferation of technology rather than the thoughtful, iterative progress and leaps of innovation that good UX practice nurtures.”This one hits home for me today. From Chris Baum in the latest Boxes and Arrows email newsletter. (I looked for a specific link on their site for a specific web page to cite, but couldn’t find one.)
“When you treat estimates as promises instead of guesses, you bind your worth as a worker to it. If you do not meet your own deadline, you are a failure. And since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with scanty or no tests.”David Heinemeier Hansson, It’s not a promise, it’s a guess
“I used to think that, as a designer and a somewhat creative person, it was my calling to bring form to things I saw in my mind. In the creative act of making things, people would understand my thoughts and feelings through the work, in perfect translation. We would shape things with our hands based on notions of utility and delight, and provide them to others for repeated physical (and mental) consumption and use. If well-crafted, it would fulfill a clear human need.From The Blind Man and the Cheeseburger, by David Sherwin
“Now, I feel quite different. The act of form-giving is not a means to a clear end. Our senses continually map and remap in reaction to the elements that order our physical world, harmonizing those perceptions with the world we construct in our minds. Neither is more precise than the other, or ‘real’ in any standard sense of the word. Physical form and thought of form, messy, human interplay: yin and yang.”
“Web accessibility is designing the Web so that people can use it, specifically people with disabilities. In our Introduction to Web Accessibility, we say: Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web.”Excerpt from a must-read interview with accessibility evangelist and W3C/WAI member, Shawn Henry (@shawn_slh).
“Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.”Jakob Nielsen, effectively treading the fine line between easing fears of Big Usability and talking people out of hiring his firm. From a good article on striking the right balance on usability.
“It’s not about the quality of the sketching, but the variety and exploration of the idea that matters.”Leah Buley, quoted by Jared Spool in a new article on exploring design options and making decisions about them. Good article and very applicable to my current project, where we are starting to develop a set of layout alternatives and visual design options for an online catalog. Especially liked the point about purposely looking at extremes to help sharpen your thinking.
“Today the most progressive companies are challenging designers to create ideas at the outset, rather than enlisting them to make an already developed idea more attractive. The old role is tactical; it builds on what exists and moves it one step further. The new one is strategic; it pulls ‘design’ out of the studio and unleashes its disruptive, game-changing potential. It’s no accident that designers can now be found in the boardrooms of some of the world’s most innovative companies.”From a recent article in Metropolis Magazine by Tim Brown. Please read it.
“I don’t believe that a bohemian HTML5 interpretation is similar-to-but-better than strict XHTML for exactly the same reason that I don’t believe that an optional ordering of amino acids in my DNA chain will somehow not affect my personality.”From “Wired Earp” in a comment at HTML5 Doctor, a resource that Nic pointed out to us at a recent training session. Funny quote that I mostly understand on the topic of loosened standards for required tags, closing of tags, etc. in HTML5.
Great session, by the way, Nic.
“Too many CIOs get lost in the thicket of what platforms are hot today, what buzzwords are ascendant, what tool got the reviews here, or there, and never take time to sit down with a user and observe, and listen, and talk.”From Mark Hurst on Good Experience. Helpful quote as I prepare to host a training session on conducting customer interviews next week. Good dialog illustrating why it’s important for management to buy in to user-centered principles.
“CSS is the weakest link in the web developers toolbox. The problem goes deeper than CSS’s lack of variables. Unlike the “function” in programming, CSS has no fundamental building block.”Chris Eppstein, the author of Compass writes up a solid argument for the need of abstraction in stylesheets. I’ve been toying around with Compass and the Sass language over the past few weeks and things look very promising.
“More energy. Less friction.”Nick Usborne’s summary of how to improve conversion of browsers into buyers. From Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction, a great article that still wears well, 3 years later. The trouble is getting the marketing wing of your organization to buy into it…
“High multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.”From research reported in The Mediocre Multitasker, in the NY Times, via Facebook friend, Susan Dray.
Researchers said, “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
I find this 100% true in my own life. I do my best work when I can shut out everything else but the task at hand. Now… what was I doing?
“There’s a common misconception that visual design’s role is only to provide a pleasing veneer on the page. In fact, visual design’s big role is to boost overall communication.”From Jared Spool’s recent article on the interplay between good visual design, IA, and content design. He also argues that to really succeed, it is better to have people who are strong in all three areas, not just specialists who are good at just one of them. I think I agree.
“Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time.”Another notable quote from Nielsen’s message on Twitter postings, noting that compared to email advertising, which continues to generate clicks for several days, Twitter “shows a drastically steeper decay function: lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none.” This means, among other things, that Tweets are impacted far more negatively than email by differences in timezone…
“It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.”Excerpt from a manifesto written by Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published June 13, 1943, in the New York Times.
Via The Footnotes of Mad Men.
“The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.”Christopher Detzi writes about The Content Conundrum, a very nice and well thought out article covering a problem every web designer must face
“IxD Protip: Practice awareness of details. An invaluable skill best honed on a public park bench.”Eris Stassi, via Twitter