Adam Silver:

The best file upload pattern is the one where you don’t even have to take a photo, let alone upload one.

It’s hard work to do so little.

It takes a lot of effort to produce such an effortless interaction.

It often involves:

• coordinating across departments
• getting organisational agreement
• hooking up the backend

“Hey Claude, let’s add a file upload field” won’t get you there.

I’ve watched hundreds of people interact with forms and seen many of them struggle. But not once was that down to the use of a conventional text field.

It’s almost like we should choose boring technology UI.

[A/B testing is] seen as a cheap solution to doing hard work. I believe it’s not the panacea that everyone thinks it is.

A great summary of a twitter thread from Jared Spool on A/B testing. Resonates loudly with my experience.

Is it my job to be realistic and empathetic to constraints, or to be the persistent voice of the user who makes stuff better at the cost of momentum...? As with most things, it depends.

An honest look, I felt, at the reality of being a designer.

We have to learn to push for the impossible while navigating and respecting the constraints of the people and organisations we work with.

There’s actually a lot of good stuff in here. It got the gears in my brain spinning on the possibilities for doing things “the old way” (I already wrote about some of that). But I wanted to save this particular quote about “unprogressive non-enhancement”.

You take some structured content, which follows the vertical flow of the document in a way that everyone understands.

Which people traverse easily by either dragging their scroll bar with their mouse, or operating the keyboard using the up and down keys, or using the spacebar.

Or if they're using a touch device, simply flicking backwards and forwards in that easy way that we've all become used to. What you do is you take that, and you fucking well leave it alone.