Author: Brian Dys

Strong execution lets you test and validate bits of strategy before they become company-changing decisions.

Execution > Strategy

Does anyone like the hiring interview? For job applicants, it’s a stressful experience. You meticulously prepare your resume and portfolio materials, arrange your schedule to accommodate interviews, are peppered with random questions or whiteboarding-design challenges, and face the collective judgment of strangers.

Hiring Interviews Are Terrible: Smart UX Teams Structure Them

This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience.

The Memex Method

If you waved a magic wand and made it so that everybody had equalish income today, that would clearly eliminate a lot of misery. But if you enforced equal incomes permanently, you’d create a lot of new problems.

Six Questions For Derek Thompson

Our society is inherently neurodiverse, meaning that there is a diversity amongst brains. Neurotypical brains, autism, ADHD, mental illness, dyslexia, Tourette’s… the list goes on. Therefore, accessibility and acceptance of neurodivergent people (being, divergent from the typical) is not only the future, it needs to be the present.

As an autistic jobseeker, please stop perpetuating neurotypical standards of professionalism.

But there’s a glimmer of hope in design systems at the forefront of scale and complexity. It’s a new way of managing the growing diversity of users and interfaces. It has the potential to not only keep up with the current pace of innovation, but to enable new levels of customization and specificity.

Functions and the future of design systems

After all, each of them both encountered and reproduced various kinds of social inequities, even as they strove not to, and many created problems that their designers did not foresee.

The metaverse is a new word for an old idea

During the months where it felt like I was constantly applying and getting rejected, I found that taking little breaks, like walking my dog or going out to eat with friends, really helped improve my mental health and overall enthusiasm for job searching.

I was rejected 357 times before landing my dream job. Here’s what I learned

Smart people respect simple language not because simple words are easy, but because expressing interesting ideas in small words takes a lot of work.

Why Simple Is Smart

Safety in numbers, or reliance on the authority of others, can give us the courage to commit to a decision that we might otherwise struggle with.

Social proof: is there always safety in numbers?

When you manage a team, you want to have a clear view of everyone’s skills. Not only to be able to fairly evaluate your collaborators, but also to be able to support their up skilling.

How to design Skill Grids for your product design team

Corporations discovered that you couldn’t pressure high-performing individual contributors in engineering or scientific roles to keep climbing a people management ladder if they didn’t want to.

It’s Time to Fight for a Dual Product Management Career Path

Think of the machines, then, as beasts. It’s not a new comparison, just the inversion of an old one. Rene Descartes compared the cries of a wounded dog to the sound of a malfunctioning machine; he called animals bêtes-machine.

Artificial Animals

As organizations, product complexity, and new feature launches have accelerated, so has the difficulty of maintaining cohesion and consistency. Digital designers need to adopt a systems mindset, finding ways to build scalable solutions to product problems.

Software Is Automating Design. What Does That Mean For Designers?

People make sacrifices to fit into what they are told will make them a “good person, “ and not all of those sacrifices are worth it, because they sometimes ask you to harm yourself more than you are helping someone else.

You Are Not a “Good Person”

If our fear of the chaos raging around us leads us to put our trust in machines so that we don’t have to trust one another, we relinquish the reciprocity that lets us advance our shared humanity, and those bleak assumptions about humans being immutably selfish turn into self-fulfilling prophecy.

Morals in the Machine

At the core, anxiety and feelings of overwhelm feed one another. The more overwhelmed you are, the more anxious you feel; the more anxious you are, the more overwhelmed you feel.

A systems model of anxiety-driven procrastination

Relevancy is an important attribute of information, determined by its context and the pre-existing knowledge of the information consumer. With relevancy, people are able to make information out of plain data. Adding context to a data set is the way information can be used by humans.

The Document Triangle

If you’re a designer or developer, it’s your job to push back on the notion of consistency when it begins to affect a user’s experience. Remember design is how it works, and work is not the same on every device.

Consistency Sin

One important component of hype is thus a set of promises of what the technology can achieve in the future for you dear reader. These might range from solving a particularly annoying problem to creating new markets, making you heaps of money, or even revolutionizing a whole field and changing society as a whole.

The five Levels of Hype

So much data had accumulated, he argued, and computers were already so much better than us at finding relationships within it, that our theories were being exposed for what they were – oversimplifications of reality.

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

As video conferences give an increased importance to the faces of the participants while hiding the rest of their body, measuring how individuals perceive the social traits of these faces is central to the impression formation.

Impression Formation From Video Conference Screenshots: The Role of Gaze, Camera Distance, and Angle

These are the kinds of relationships — fleeting but indicative of significant eras in life — whose memories older generations may have kept neatly enclosed in picture albums as they, quite separately, moved on to different stages of life.

Nostalgia for Nostalgia

The most important variable was the stories people told and the emotions they suddenly stumbled upon. And that was the only thing you couldn’t measure and couldn’t predict with foresight. That’s why the results don’t compute.

Does Not Compute

So, my prediction is that young adults in their twenties increasingly choose to spend a decade of their lives living between a set of rented or swapped spaces around the world, working remotely, and immersing themselves in communities and cultures.

10 Forecasts For The Near Future Of Tech

Zwicky’s strategy for solving problems and generating answers is simple. Take a problem, break it down into categories, add various values into each category, and link the values together to create unique combinations.

The Zwicky box: a powerful method for problem solving and creativity

Steve’s first pass is to eliminate images that fail to meet basic standards of technical merit. Shots that are over- or underexposed are rejected, as are out-of-focus images. Even when there are elements that Steve likes in the image, such as expression or composition, he rejects the shot if the technical aspects are not right.

How a National Geographic Photographer Selects the Best Images From a Shoot

When a single metric is used to determine success or failure, human beings are likely to try to optimize their behavior to improve that metric — sometimes with ridiculous or dangerous consequences. People manage the metric, rather than using the metric to help manage the underlying issue of interest.

Campbell’s Law: The Dark Side of Metric Fixation