quotes Robert Hoekman Jr gained notoriety recently for his vituperative post about Whitney Hess. Whatever you think about that post, he followed it up with an excellent post encouraging the UX design community to “>Question Everything. Here are some choice cuts:
Apple didn’t make the page simple. They made it clear. Despite all the hype that we must make things dead simple, and dumb them down, simplicity is not the goal, clarity is.
[T]he best teams — the teams earning the most provable success most consistently — were teams that had no process. They had a bunch of tools, tricks, and techniques. They had generalists, and maybe a specialist or two. And on any given project, they hand-picked the tools they would use to solve the problem and they improvised.
For the good of your profession, your work, your clients, and most of all, your users:
1. Ask why. Ask for an explanation. A justification. Ask this over and over and over until there are no answers left to uncover.
2. Ask for evidence.
3. Ask if there’s a better way.
Question Everything by Robert Hoekman, Jr
11 Jul 2011
quotes A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
Thomas Goetz, Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
06 Jul 2011
quotes The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Technology Provides an Alternative to Love by Jonathan Franzen
I admire Derek Powazek’s optimistic manifesto, but love (and can’t help siding with) Jonathan Franzen’s pessimism.
14 Jun 2011