Hey there! Brian Dys here — I’m a visual and visceral person at heart. Ever since my mom lent me her old film camera, I fell in love with photography. All of my creative musings were exemplified by my second brain, the computer. This journey is a topsy-turvy ride of creative pursuits — from electronic music to UX design.
I enjoy every dull and wild moments of it — yes, this life of mine that I share with a woman named Jaycelle and a boy named Bryce. Take a peek into my kaleidoscope!
We can visualize the relationship between challenge and skill with the experience fluctuation model. If the activity is too hard, you’ll feel anxious. If the activity is too easy, you’ll feel relaxed or bored. To truly feel in flow, you need to perceive a high challenge and match it with high skill.
Learning a project’s subject matter is especially challenging for UX research consultants, who work on projects with various clients, in different industries and domains. Often, when a project begins, you won’t have much time to learn the subject matter. It’s understandable that clients are sometimes skeptical that a consultant can come in and understand their business in a short time.
Learning Complex Subject Matter
To borrow a metaphor I heard in a slightly different context one time: Utility-class frameworks are like bumper bowling for styling. Use the classes and it’ll work out fine. You might not get a strike, but you won’t get a gutter ball either.
If we’re gonna criticize utility-class frameworks, let’s be fair about it
When we treat “the beginning” as something sacred, we give it more power than it deserves. The beginning can start in the middle, or even at the end.
Where do I even begin?
Seizing the middle is a chess strategy embodying the value of forward thinking. It involves using pieces to commandeer the middle of the board. A player can then restrict their opponent’s movements by controlling the maximal number of pieces in the game.
Seizing The Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
For hybrid presence to be seamless, though, a number of questions remain. Who’s at home, but available? If you’re in a remote conversation, how can you include people in the physical office? Conversely, if you start a water cooler chat in the office, how can you include remote teammates? Crucially, how do we create presence while still respecting privacy?
Research suggests that the more ideas we generate, the more creative they become. Focusing on one thing at a time too early in the creative process defeats the purpose of the exploration phase. Networked thinking requires to keep many open loops to connect ideas across various work streams. Only when you have spent enough time identifying patterns and connecting ideas together should you pick one work stream to focus on.
Should we really focus on one thing at a time?
Psychological safety, loosely understood as “group trust”, is the best-studied social dynamic of effective teams. Coined by Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School, this phenomenon has been extensively studied by Google, which found it to be the key factor in team productivity, as it creates an environment in which teammates can speak their minds without fear of backlash.
Hybrid Anxiety and Hybrid Optimism: The Near Future of Work
We looked at this as an important and unsolved problem. We asked ourselves: could we use technology to create the feeling of being together with someone, just like they’re actually there?
Project Starline: Feel like you’re there, together
You might expect that a judge’s decision would have something to do with how serious the crime was or how much time had been served already, or how many times a prisoner had gone to jail before. But these researchers found something else that had a huge effect on a judge’s ruling: lunch.
How Information Graphics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots
Whenever you’re provided with a set of data, when solving for a problem in an interface, you’ve got to consider the audience. What do the users need from the data? How do you organize the information in a way that facilitates findability? How do you search for the item and where does it reside to enable browsing?
The information architecture of sand
This all changes once we are using taxonomies for inference. Feeding data tagged from a taxonomy as input for AI or ML presupposes a certain (that is: strictly standards-compliant) rigidity of the structure. Algorithms rely on rigorously structured input to produce good output, and less-strictly-structured input will provide poor output if we, as part of the input file, tell the system that dog food is a dog.
Taxonomy Theory and Practice
What is of interest is the use of three to draw similarity and semantically link the items. Haikus presented in English also use three-line stanzas, and there is the rule of thirds in photography, just to point out two other examples. There seems to be something elemental in using a tripartite structure to convey meaning.
Triples, Triads, and Semantics
Whether it’s savings or investing, getting the goalpost to stop moving – or at least move slower than your income grows – is the only way to both be happy with what you have and ensure you don’t push beyond the limits of what you can handle.
Are you easily distracted? Can you successfully work in pajama pants? Will your dog actually allow you to get work done? Does working from the couch result in good work, or do you need a designated work spot? For some, working from home requires setting boundaries to ensure the work gets done. For others, working from home requires setting a start and stop times to ensure you don’t overwork yourself.
Our WFH Best Practices
Inflated praise in particular may backfire and lower a child’s self-esteem. Professor Eddie Brummelman from the University of Amsterdam conducted a study to explore the relationship between inflated praise from parents and their children’s self-esteem.
The Praise Paradox: when well-intended words backfire
Instead of challenging teams to stretch their thinking to address deeper and subtler user needs, product design practices have become increasingly less insight-driven.
I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today disturbs me
Customers of these businesses are going to see the increased costs associated with these higher wages passed along to them in the form of higher prices for goods and services.
It can’t be transitory
Having a unique, empathetic communication style with your clients can certainly set you apart from the pack and encourage a past client to recommend you to others.
Why You Should Treat Your Client as a Friend
And further more, one practice was absent in UX: visual design. As I said, UX most closely was born from information architecture. Information architects developed the underlying structure, navigation, and flow of a website, while a visual designer/web designer created the visual layer over that underlying structure.
My take on the journey of UX
But experiencing risk makes you recognize that some stuff is out of your control, which is accurate feedback that helps you adjust your strategy. Experiencing luck doesn’t. It generates the opposite feedback: A false feeling that you are in control, because you did something and then got the outcome you wanted.
Ironies of Luck
People gauge their wellbeing relative to those around them. It’s the path of least resistance to determining what life owes you and what you should expect.
Getting the Goalpost to Stop Moving
Firstly, it helps us remember that people actually mean lots of different things when they talk about information, and we can be clear about what we mean in each instance.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they’re proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don’t. And if they have deep domain expertise, that’s probably the source of it.
Crazy New Ideas
So maybe the ultimate lesson is the reminder that not every problem needs to be approached as a blank slate. Humanity has developed some wisdom and insight on a few topics. Before we reinvent the wheel, it’s worth looking back to leverage what we’ve already figured out.
Better Thinking & Incentives: Lessons From Shakespeare
DesignOps refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.
The Impact of DesignOps at ServiceNow
Requiring users to click through so many levels to get to specific content usually doesn’t work well. Users easily become lost, distracted, or simply decide it’s too much work and give up.
Flat vs. Deep Website Hierarchies
Not all decisions are binary. Sometimes, reversing the frame leaves out potential ways of considering your options. To understand how people successfully negotiate questions (i.e. figure out what they really want to ask), Taylor studied reference interviews — that’s right, he watched actual reference librarians help people in the library.
From the Canon: Robert Taylor’s Levels of Information Need
Not all decisions are binary. Sometimes, reversing the frame leaves out potential ways of considering your options. In addition to simply reversing the frame, consider additional, more complex alternatives.
The framing effect: how the way information is framed impacts our decisions
To return to my previous silly example, a ketchup bottle in my fridge is evidence that I have ketchup. When seen in sequence with other bottles, it might be evidence that we have too much ketchup and need to stop buying it or that we have plenty of condiments for hot dogs.
Evidence and Antelopes: Buckland’s “Information as Thing”
Yes, we’re going through a phase where design was largely seen as a contributor to production, as, to non-designers, that was the evident value of the practice. But I am also seeing more and more companies hiring “super senior IC” designers, as they recognize they’ve lost the positive influence that design can have on strategy, on holistic and coherent experiences.
Those people tasked with designing the behavior of digital systems must imagine how humans will act on and react to the behaviors that we create, and they will base their actions and reactions on cognition-for-non-deterministic-behavior. The word for that is interaction, and we design it.
The difference between
While UX work has on the whole shifted the world toward a more positive tech/human relationship, and therefore countless more possibilities, almost no individual effort has had significant enough influence to improve people’s lives.
Waking up from the dream of UX
If you can remember where your grandparents kept their telephone, can you remember what else was on the table? How about everything on your bedside table right now? As the scale gets smaller, it gets harder to remember. That shift is your brain shifting which kind of memory and reasoning it uses.
Understanding Architectural Scale: Tabletops and landscapes
Most importantly with container queries, we can set typography contextually! This for me is the most needed feature in design system implementations and why I constantly wish we had container queries.
Container Queries are actually coming
If your tolerance is zero – if you are allergic to differences in opinion, personal incentives, emotions, inefficiencies, miscommunication and such – your odds of succeeding in anything that requires other people rounds to zero.
The Optimal Amount of Hassle
Now every time an outrageous patent application gets publicized like this, the Big Tech company hastens to get their PR out front: “Oh, {nervous chuckle}, those patent applications are just for FUN. We don’t mean them SERIOUSLY. It’s just a silly idea we’d NEVER pursue.”
Is your phone listening to you? A response to the “toothpaste” thread
At its core, Sketch’s conceptual model is based on the notion that one user is working on one file at any given time and that file is stored locally. This file-centered paradigm is the traditional way of working with personal computers.
Changes to Sketch’s Conceptual Model
The best way to avoid decision fatigue is by mindfully directing your mental energy towards choices that matter, and minimizing low-stakes energy-consuming decisions.
Some signs of decision fatigue include impulsivity, procrastination, indecision, and decision avoidance. As often with the mind, recognizing the signs and applying simple coping strategies can do wonders to improve the way we think. How exactly does decision fatigue impact the way we make choices, and is there anything we can do about it?
Decision fatigue: how a burden of choices leads to irrational trade-offs
Employees want the best of both worlds: over 70 percent of workers want flexible remote work options to continue, while over 65 percent are craving more in-person time with their teams. To prepare, 66 percent of business decision makers are considering redesigning physical spaces to better accommodate hybrid work environments. The data is clear: extreme flexibility and hybrid work will define the post-pandemic workplace.
The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready?
Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible.
Left-Side Vertical Navigation on Desktop: Scalable, Responsive, and Easy to Scan
Nonetheless, the concept of the Pygmalion effect—expectations influencing performance and becoming self-fulfilling prophecies—is widespread. Many people have stories of achieving something just because someone had especially high expectations of them.
The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right
