Speculative Developers
I totally agree with the sentiment in David Sparks’s note Speculative Developers where he compares developers who ‘barf’ out volumes of bad apps versus developers who lovingly craft a single great app. They are, however, completely wrong. Their chance of hitting it big with two (or twenty) crappy apps instead of one good one is about the same as their chance of retiring with their lotto winnings. Infinitesimally small. If you want to develop apps, take your time and make something awesome.
Design needs an Advocate
Felicity Evans, writing in the Smashing Magazine article When A Thousand Words Is Worth A Picture writes: Design is itself a process of deduction. It involves a number of decisions, both conscious and unconscious. During this process, the designer dismisses some ideas as unworkable and pursues others in order to arrive at a solution. But this process is completely opaque to the client. The client likely views the design not as the outcome of an in-depth process, but as a response to the brief, merely a visual representation of the constraints and considerations set before the designer.
Structure First. Content Always.
Mark Boulton makes good points in Structure First. Content Always. Let’s stop siloing content, shall we? We did it for a while when we were designing a largely brochureware, templated web. Now, we’re trying to move that silo from one end of the process to the other. Let’s focus on structure to begin with, and think about content all the time. There is a symbiotic relationship between content and design. One cannot thrive without the other.
Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
Lovely article by Jason Cohen, worth a read, called Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway makes a great point on how the original idea for something usually evolves into something completely different, and success comes from embracing that evolution. “My idea isn’t good enough yet” explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He’s waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed out before taking the leap.
Cheap iPhones, Wealthy Workers, Pick One?
Randy Murray presents a different view in An Observer From Shenzhen—Thoughts on Apple’s Recent Bad Press. Do workers in Foxconn factories who build products for Apple, Dell, HP, and others, work long hours at tedious tasks? Yes they do. Do they work for a fraction of what a worker in the US, Japan, or even Korea would? Yes they do. Are they being enslaved? Clearly, they are not. I suspect that a lot of the heat from the recent press comes from a lack of understanding about Chinese culture, their rapid change from manual agrarian life to high-tech manufacturing, and the significant differences and scales of our economies.
News Logic
Paddy Harrington, writing in Wanna Figure Out If Your Product Is Any Good? Think Like A News Editor At its heart, news logic is about value creation and the primacy of the design output instead of a story that traditionally gets applied after the fact. Where in the old days (i.e., five years ago), you designed something and then told a story about it in the hopes that it was a story worth telling, more and more of tomorrow’s design projects will have a story worth telling built into their hearts right from the get-go.
The paradox of choice
People desire more choices, yet are unable to choose when the selection is greater, that is the paradox of choice. Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University, conducted an interesting study in 1995. She set up a display of 24 samples of jam for customers to taste, and every few hours, she switched to a 6 sample set. The results were astonishing: 60% of customers stopped to try the jams when the selection was large versus 40% when small; and 30% of those that stopped when the selection was small purchased a jam, versus 3% when the selection was large.
Childlike Wonder
Ever watch a child with an iPad? They seem to get it immediately, they prod and tap and swipe and rotate and in no time at all seem comfortable with it. Ever watch an adult with an iPad? They hold it, and stare at it, and, well, stare some more, and maybe wave a finger near it, but hesitate to touch. And after all that staring and hesitating, they remain uncomfortable with it.
Fragility of Free
A great article by Ben Brooks called Fragility of Free, well worth a read: The fragility of free is a catchy term that describes what happens when the free money runs out. Or — perhaps more accurately — when the investors/founders/venture capitalists run out of cash, or patience, or both. Because at some point Twitter and all other companies have to make the move from ‘charity’ to ‘business’ — or, put another way, they have to make the move from spending tons of money to making slightly more money than they spend.
Test Driven Development Really Works
In 2008, Nachiappan Nagappan, E. Michael Maximilien, Thirumalesh Bhat, and Laurie Williams wrote a paper called “Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams“ (PDF link). The abstract: Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development practice that has been used sporadically for decades. With this practice, a software engineer cycles minute-by-minute between writing failing unit tests and writing implementation code to pass those tests. Test-driven development has recently re-emerged as a critical enabling practice of agile software development methodologies.