Category: Reading List

Without trust we don’t truly collaborate, we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.

The Connection Between Vulnerability and Trust in Teams

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”NLh54uTbftQ” photographer=”Andrea Tummons”]

Genuinely listening to their opinions and feedback allows you to expand your own point of view and try out new things you might not have tried on your own.

Why Giving and Receiving UX Design Feedback is Crucial

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”6VhPY27jdps” photographer=”Nathan Dumlao”]

To be without curiosity is to believe that you already know everything, or even worse, that you know all you want to know. It is a blunting of human experience.

Curiouser and Curiouser

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”BLW_KQ0Rkn0″ photographer=”Kanashi”]

There is something powerful about this notion of possibility spaces, both from a theory standpoint, and as a way of seeing. It causes you to approach challenges in a different way. You don’t need to be creative. The creative breakthrough already exists out there in the space of possibility. It’s just waiting to be discovered.

Possibility space

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Iy7QyzOs1bo” photographer=”Sangharsh Lohakare”]

Slow down. When people are tired, stressed, and loaded, it is very hard for them to listen, acknowledge, and respect. If we’re pushed to the limit, we get snappy. Perhaps, in concrete terms, you can promote sane working hours and have regular unstructured time.

Of Course Psychological Safety…But How?

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”nQtuv9JTzYs” photographer=”John Wilson”]

People who can be productive everywhere have significantly greater personal and organizational resources than those who can’t be productive anywhere.

The Future Of Work: Productive Anywhere

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”xgyYheXFBMw” photographer=”Surface”]

A grand-tour question at the beginning of an interview is like setting the scene for a story: we have a preview of the landscape that we can use to build upon throughout the interview.

6 Mistakes When Crafting Interview Questions

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Lks7vei-eAg” photographer=”charlesdeluvio”]

Many concepts can be explained concisely, in simple language, and we should all strive for clarity. But the aphorism is a mistake, for a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention.

Long Distance Thinking

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”CzW0SOWAq60″ photographer=”Clay Banks”]

Emotional reasoning is a form of distorted cognition that can lead to an unwarranted negative opinion of your ability or character. By generating negative thoughts, a downward spiral of anxiety can cause a self-fulfilling prophecy of worsening performance.

The danger of emotional reasoning and using our emotions as proof

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”35193HMwxmM” photographer=”Amin RK”]

You need to be cautious about learning by trial-and-error because errors at the beginning can set long-ranging reactions in motion. Establish trust early or expect suspicion for a long time.

The art of hosting good online conversations

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”smgTvepind4″ photographer=”Chris Montgomery”]

Google has designed and is implementing these new criteria specifically to improve the speed, interactivity, and layout of your Web site’s pages. This algorithm update is neither arbitrary nor capricious. In building it, Google has actually prioritized the user experience across the online community.

Optimizing a Web Site for Google’s New UX Criteria

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Fi-GJaLRGKc” photographer=”Pankaj Patel”]

A businessperson entering into a new partnership, for example, would be wise to step back and take a wide-angle look at the organization he wishes to work with. Then, he should pinpoint the person or people he can help — and make sure to do so.

The gentle science of persuasion, part two: Reciprocity

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”3oWop6MFYfc” photographer=”Clay Banks”]

A design playbook operates on the premise that members of a team cycle out every few years, but the need for a solid design system is lasting. Operationalising processes ensures that new members can dive into the deep end right away, and with minimum hiccups.

How (and why) to create a design playbook

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”sWlDOWk0Jp8″ photographer=”Ross Sneddon”]

For the first time, designers have a color system that truly reflects what users see, taking into account a range of variables to ensure appropriate color contrast, accessibility standards, and consistent lightness/colorfulness across hues.

The Science of Color & Design

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”iMdsjoiftZo” photographer=”Sharon Pittaway”]

Most mental upside comes from the thrill of anticipation – actual experiences tend to fall flat, and your mind quickly moves on to anticipating the next event. That’s how dopamine works.

Now You Get It

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”W8V3G-Nk8FE” photographer=”Jonathan Petersson”]

You can build institutions and values that make us more likely to trust each other. Religions are capable of bringing people into a larger grouping and insisting that we treat them as fellow human beings.

Why Humans Wage War

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”OwqLxCvoVxI” photographer=”Hasan Almasi”]

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

Execution > Strategy

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”N4QTBfNQ8Nk” photographer=”x )”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”7aakZdIl4vg” photographer=”Maranda Vandergriff”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”333oj7zFsdg” photographer=”lilartsy”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Jr8byYZmTTU” photographer=”Annie Spratt”]

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.

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”kCrrUx7US04″ photographer=”Adrien Converse”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Zp17mKnM5BU” photographer=”Kevin Chin”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”CcVznamQ4pw” photographer=”Patrick Robert Doyle”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”MYbhN8KaaEc” photographer=”Hunters Race”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”y02jEX_B0O0″ photographer=”Aaron Burden”]

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?

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”xb2DaEeX8jk” photographer=”Nicholas Kusuma”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Lks7vei-eAg” photographer=”Charles Deluvio”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”BmDaLayzhc0″ photographer=”Jilbert Ebrahimi”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”QZ2EQuPpQJs” photographer=”Philipp Pilz”]

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?

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”LPWl2pEVGKc” photographer=”Balázs Kétyi”]

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”

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”1TWMxTq_BR4″ photographer=”Raphael Renter”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”OgvqXGL7XO4″ photographer=”Hal Gatewood”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”rX12B5uX7QM” photographer=”Stormseeker”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”vtbgoLMPeG4″ photographer=”Anton Maksimov 5642.su”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”Exj9-cn1Wso” photographer=”Maria Teneva”]

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

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”PuJPk_5jzqE” photographer=”Karsten Winegeart”]