quote archives
“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
“Oh right, the flaming chainsaw animation. I’d love to take that off the site, really I would, but I just think it’s so neat, and besides it aligns with our brand message of innovation here at Acme.”VP of Marketing (presumably caricatured), quoted by Mark Hurst at Good Experience. Very funny supposed transcript of a customer meeting gone awry (or… is that really just the way things usually are?)
“Tweet happens.”Overheard in scrum this morning, in discussing whether Twitter would be a good way to keep an extended team in the loop.
“Unless websites are redesigned for the special circumstances of mobile use, the mobile Web will remain a mirage.”Jakob Nielsen in his latest Alertbox on mobile usability. No news here… which is actually part of the news.
Many findings in the most recent study—which I thought looked pretty darn thorough and well-balanced, from diary studies with users’ own phones to more controlled lab tests—suggest that in some ways we are no better off on the mobile web than we were a decade ago. (Unless you have a pretty large-screened mobile device, such as an iPhone.)
This made me think of Cameron’s advice in Mobile Web Design, that two of the best strategies are “do nothing” (if you are targetting smart phone and especially larger devices such as the iPhone that have a decent chance at rendering the site as-is) and mobile-optimized sites (if you care about anybody else).
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”Steve Jobs, as quoted in the Good Experience article, A small, gentle question that could change your life, a great article on choosing to do stuff that actually matters.
“happytohelp @ dropsend . com”I like DropSend’s support email address…
They’re not just Help, they’re Happy to Help!
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill.Theodore Levitt, quoted in The Innovator’s Solution, sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma, both recommended to me by John as I’m in the early stages of defining what a proposed product should do.
They want a quarter-inch hole.”
Timely reminder that customers “hire a product to do a job,” not to fill a slot on their shelf reserved for an artificial product category. (Of course they don’t really just want a hole; they want to build something, drain something, see through something, etc. We need to get down to real intents and desired outcomes, or we’ll never understand what we should build to meet real needs.)
“Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life—Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition … If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate — Just enough is more.”Milton Glaser
Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001
“Less tan is always a good thing.”RMF®
“There is bad taste and then there is this. What was going through the designer’s mind? ‘I’ll scale it a little bit. Hmmm, maybe just a little more. More. More. I have so much power. I’m drunk in scaling power. More. More. Scale it more. Don’t stop. Do it. Okay, that’s enough.’”Brand New commentary on the new Microsoft Bing logo
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”~ Steve Jobs
“How important is the voice of the customer? Very. But discerning the difference between what customers are able to say and what they want, and then acting on those unspoken desires, demands that companies learn to go well beyond listening.”Dorothy Leonard, speaking of the importance of focusing on observation and desired outcomes rather than specific customer-proposed solutions, in “The Limitations of Listening,” Harvard Business Review, January 2002.
“Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful.”Also from the same article by Matthew May.
What, in your experience, fits this definition?