
đź‘‹ Oi, mga repapips, Brian Dys here! I love music, photography, and creative stuff like UX design and art. This is a place where I collect my thoughts and works. Apart all these, I’m Jaycelle’s better half and Bryce’s dad. 🥰
Spent this Friday afternoon combing my work inbox — taking notes and flagging important emails that I will take on at the start of 2021. Most of my work that involves team management are already churned in Figma. In other words, I don’t worry about forgetting everything behind because I’ve already managed to extract the important elements.
This is the practice that I want to embed consistently in my life — extract and carry on. It’s like the following metaphors or mental models:
The lack of this practice would render, in my mind, a very messy backlog of things that, as time goes by, makes it even harder to make sense of because it became a giant tidal wave of mumbo jumbo — a real counterproductive practice. Forgetting them won’t simply do because experiences are a treasure trove of lessons. So the smart thing to do is to extract and carry on.
An important aspect of extract and carry on highly depends on the frequency of doing it. Imagine a correlation between time and memory relevance and reliability.
Our memories simply work that way — as time goes by, we tend to not remember things the same way. From a different perspective, we tend to forget. The saying, out of sight, out of mind captures its essence best.
As memories fade away, the way we retrieve or remember them, and the way we interpret them also change — even with the aid of digital documents. It might help you see and remember literal evidence of how many balloons were there in your fifth birthday but memories are different from ephemeral experience. That’s why if it’s not in the now, it’s not wholly what you experienced but a memory of your experience.
For how long until you will feel that your backlog is already a giant tidal wave? Don’t let it reach that point. If you could wrap up your life weekly or monthly, then that’s more manageable than wrapping it up once a year.
Looking back a year long when you’ve got a weekly or monthly chunk of the important stuff would be easier, and could actually be an enjoyable activity without the arduous stuff of remembering and extracting.
Pushing this idea to the extreme, I ask myself if I could save only thirty-six photos of a particular month, which could these photos be? It could mean forgetting about the rest of the photos that didn’t make the cut. That could also solve the problem of digital storage, but that’s a different story.
You get the idea — extract and carry on aims for a hangup-free and richer life.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Is this humility or hubris? Do we place too little value in human intelligence — or do we overrate it, assuming we are so smart that we can create things smarter still?
Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White
If we define productive as a way of optimizing the outcome of you spending resources on something, then I think it’s more so the complete productivity obsession across the board of your life.
Henrik Werdelin
The design team at PayMaya had the opportunity to have a two-day workshop with Elizabeth Baylor—a senior UX researcher at Google.
Day 1 topics covered the following:
We assume that others think like we do but that is only an assumptions. Here is where research comes in handy—to test our assumptions.
Two keywords in UX: effective and delightful. People’s experiences in using a product or service must be effective (doesn’t waste time while achieving their goals) and delightful (makes them feel good while doing it).
In UX Research, the effectiveness and delightfulness of solutions must be backed by insights and data. Success metrics is measured.
1. Discover What’s the problem? | 2. Explore Conceptualize on the possible solutions |
4. Iterate Polish the solution | 3. Design Implement solution based on a concept that works |
When you’ve invested time in discovery and exploration and the solutions failed during implementation, it is easier to look into the implementation phase for improvements rather than attributing the failure due to a bad concept.
During the design and iteration phase, you’re already testing for usability and polishing the solution.
During the Discovery and Exploration phases, it is better to test for usefulness, then during the Design and Iteration, the usefulness and usability. Test them separately in order to easily attribute where the problem lies
1. Discover Usefulness | 2. Explore Usefulness |
4. Iterate Usefulness and usability | 3. Design Usefulness and usability |
Imagine an ice cream dropped and melting on the group—generally inedible and it’s a problem when the goal is ice cream consumption.
Can users successfully reach their goals while using the product or service?
Six to eight users (anyone) could be recruited to test the product—enough to uncover 85% of usability problems.
Imagine your favorite ice cream flavor—each person has his/her own. Flavor, in this example, is a preference.
In testing for usefulness, sampling matters. Recruit who’s in scope and know who’s out of scope. Identify your primary and secondary target users.
Test your assumptions.
Put pain points to a test.
Avoid self-centered design.
You are not the user.
Your solution is only as good as your understanding of the problem.
Research’s effectiveness lies in the right sample and the right method.
The last week of November was Jaycelle’s birthday week so we were focused on preparations and celebrations. I didn’t really get to read a lot of stuff this week (in fact, I only got one).
Yes, we need to go into communities. But we should be looking to find the creative people in those communities who are already addressing their problems. People who live in the community don’t need anthropologists and design researchers to figure out their needs. They know the problems and they often have creative ideas. Moreover, they present practical solutions because they understand the culture, the capabilities, and the resources of the community.
Don Norman