Robin Rendle:

We have learned to scan UIs like robots because the folks who designed them don’t care for the words as much as they cared for the fonts or the colors.

AGI is coming because we failed at HCI.

I’d forgotten what it feels like [to] make pull requests and break things and not ask for forgiveness because the UI can be better, it must be better. There’s a momentum to this sort of work that I crave deep down in my bones because it doesn’t rely on meetings or six months of quarterly planning or going up the chain of

Decision making is what slows down most teams. The endless slide decks, the pitch to leadership, the lack of trust in what they’re building. They’ll go round and round in big circles trying to convince everyone in the entire company that this is the right thing to do.

Yup. Been there

the hard work should never be the bureaucracy

Nailed it

a blog should be embarrassing!

Ha, yes agree! But why?

That’s like half the point of a blog, to be wrong about things ruthlessly, over and over again, to stumble in front of a crowd of strangers and hope that they at least smile at your attempt.

Last month I redesigned my website, so it’s about time to do it again.

Yup. Sounds about right.

The problem is that it’s real hard to argue against shitty design and product decisions. If junk data rules your organization then it’s almost useless fighting; when you see your customers as links in a spreadsheet or tiny dots in a graph then every terrible design decision under the sun can be justified. Heck, in most cases junk design isn’t permitted but preferred.

(If the numbers are the most important thing, then your website will suffer the consequences.)

Robin on point!

The products I adore the most are the ones I want to return to because they respect me as a person,

I see AI as a prison. Slamming AI into products like everyone’s doing right now is mostly an excuse not to think critically about hard problems…

AI is a prison because it traps us, it tricks us. It’s far too easy to forget that what’s happening under the hood is a bunch of similar words being slapped into each other over and over again and then hoping for the best. It’s a charade of intelligence that we mistake for actual intelligence. But alas, Artificial Intelligence sounds much more impressive than Artificial Guessing in a slide deck.

Slapping stuff together and hoping for the best, tell me that doesn’t describe us humans quite succinctly — the created modeling its creator.

by chasing trends we would never be the ones to set them.

If you do what everyone else is doing, how will you do what no one else has done?

What’s really concerning is when everyone is consumed with the technology-first and the problem-last.

I’m certain now that if you want to build something great you have to see through the tech.

I can tell you right now: I don’t follow a blog because of its design or tech stack.

if you want to build anything substantial, if you truly want to build a great product, then the technology has to come last.

most product orgs suck and churn out garbage projects because they waste so much time thinking in terms of junk data and half baked user inputs to inform their decisions.

(Show me what your org measures and I’ll show ya the crappy product that comes out the other side.)

Lol also this:

NPS scores—the NFTs of product management—

When it comes to measuring:

everyone in the field believing that they’ve built a science when they’ve really built a cult.

Honestly hard not to copy paste this whole article:

This numerical value sure is bullshit but it’s not even helpful bullshit because these numbers never explain why things suck.

(Just look at the product and it will tell you why it sucks.)

Boom! This phrase will stick in my head for years I think:

the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will.

I feel a lot like Robin:

I don’t care what the data shows me and I’m not sure I ever will. You can show me charts and spreadsheets all day long and I will not care. Tell me what your gut says after relentless experience of the product every day. This is the only way to see the world clearly.

I just love this piece so much

You can only build a great product if you care more for the vibes than for the data.

it’s easy to see how everyone else mistakes the bureaucracy around the work for the work itself.

I believe in a cadence for teams to share and demonstrate progress with each other, gather feedback, and progressively iterate. But today’s standard “sprint”? I’ll sign the “I don’t believe in sprints” creed.

That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better. The next most important thing, the thing right around the corner, is all that matters…Discard everything else. Focus!

For better or worse, this is how I run a lot of my life. If it’s not important enough to rise to the level of my ability to remember it, it’s not important.

Great post on design systems. Sometimes you need to make a concession and create something that doesn’t exist and isn’t standardized just so people can get stuff done.

Because this is the true challenge of design systems work: the difference between correct-ness and useful-ness. We could document everything—every disabled button hover state and every possible combination of components—within Figma. We could name them precisely as we do in the front-end. That’s correct-ness. I see a ton of design systems within Figma that are desperately trying to be correct. But if we want our design system to be useful to our team then we need to cut things out. We really don’t need everything in Figma, only what will speed us up as designers.

The fact is:

Stuff changes too much to ever expect 100% correctness within Figma.

What your users want will likely tend towards being useful vs. being correct. It’s classic product design. You want to make what’s correct—what’s logically self consistent. People who use it don’t care, they just want to get stuff done and use a tool to help them.

the thing that lasts longest with our websites is probably the part that we spend the least time thinking about—the markup…

This is the second law of thermodynamics made clear on the web: the entropy of any isolated system always increases and, at some point or another, all that’s left of a website is the markup.

The hard truth is this; your Figma docs should be treated like a sketch on the back of a napkin. It should be somewhat accurate but it’s a tool that reflects the front-end, but: it ain’t your design system.

If the data or the back-end requires you to do something, it doesn't mean that's how users should think about a problem. It's a common mistake in UI design...complexity on the back-end doesn't mean you should show that complexity on the front-end....

It's hard doing that though because first you have to understand the back-end. Then you have to unlearn it.

Like Robin, I struggle with this as well. There’s forever a tension between how the system works, how the end user thinks about the task they want to accomplish, and what timeline you have to bridge the gap between the two.

Having that utopian vision of the world is important though. And being optimistic about making enormous change is important, too. But I’m learning that the truly wise folks hold that vision in their minds whilst making tiny incremental progress in that direction every single day

This reminded me of my experience learning to play the piano. You want to start out playing the incredible pieces written for piano—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”, Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”—but you quickly realize you can’t. So instead you practice over and over and over. Every day. And every day you practice, you can barely notice any improvement from when you started that day. But as time goes by, you notice drastic improvements week over week, month over month, year over year. Tiny, incremental, accumulative progress towards a goal is a powerful thing.

When someone says “hey, this design doesn’t make sense” it’s so very difficult for that not spiral into “wow, I’m a terrible person huh!”

I feel this. Less so now than when I was younger, but still. And not even just in design critique, just life critique. But even knowing that it’s a constructive critique doesn’t always help with processing it. As Robin says, “I know design critiques aren’t about me, so why do they still hurt?”

First up, the difficulty of CSS reminds me of the difficulty of book design... When designing a book we have to treat the InDesign file as a sort of best guess, it’s not until we print the dang thing that we begin to see all the problems...

So the best thing to remember when designing a book is the same as when designing a website: the screen is a lie.

What we’re seeing on screen and what the final product will become are two very different things. We need to constantly remind ourselves that there are invisible edge cases, problems that in this context, on this screen, are made utterly invisible to us.

“the screen is a lie”—I loved this phrase when I read it. Perhaps everything in this article will be apparent to anyone who’s been working on the web for years, but it’s definitely not apparent for people who haven’t (i.e. “stakeholders”). I’ve already found myself trying to distill the essence of this article into my introductory statements to stakeholders before presenting design mocks, like “ok, remember everyone, that what you’re going to see is actually a lie. It does not represent the final product, nor does it represent the finality of the product. There are problems and edge cases that are entirely invisible to us in these mocks. This is just a glimpse of a very particular, targeted solution.”

Oh, and I liked this snippet about the web being messy. Once you embrace the messiness, it’s no longer a pain point. In fact, it’s actually a strength you enjoy capitalizing on.

I think everyone hates CSS for forcing them to be empathetic but also because the web is so messy—despite that being the single best thing about it.