Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Designer: We’re exploring the ideas around personalization. Me: I think you’re still finding your hypothesis. Are you saying that this additional factoid info in this mode will optimize this decision? Are you saying that users prefer a more organic format over a standardized format?

I’ve once told recruiters that if a company uses Teams and Sharepoint, that’s a deal breaker.

I’m currently sick. Thought I was getting better but today I can’t talk, like I have no voice. Whatever this thing is, it’s nasty.

Be kind to your keyboard

These days I get a bit obsessed about finding the perfect first sentence. This is one I thought of yesterday: “There are days in childhood you remember for no reason at all, small ordinary days that remain after everything else is forgotten.”

A lot of times, you can’t identify what leading means in the process. On hindsight, perhaps you can, but in the process, everything is just clearer with that person around.

When you’re working on automation, you have to make sure that each step of the automation food chain is repeatable so you have to set goals for small sample size - such as 80% acceptable for a sample of X to start.

Yesterday I recommended to a leader the way I’d scope the first bite of a very large redesign. The reason for that frame of scope is based on business priority, the boundary of that business, definition of parity features, clear JTBD and benchmarks.

Instead of telling the team I need you to do these things for me, I told them, “I reviewed the prototype and these things will impact the outcome of the research.” Research is a great way to focus the R&D effort.

Wow. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was so good. I became a Jacob Elordi fan after this.

I had a conversation with my Eng mngr today about the scope of the MVP. The first proof needs to be X. We needed to prove that this was possible. It was our first good bet and covers a large segment. You just can’t boil the ocean all at once. You gotta solve one problem at a time.

We had an event for team mates who are having babies, and we had to sign this board and impart wisdom or send them best wishes. So I wrote, “Good luck with AI!”

We spread our father’s ashes at sea last Sunday. We didn’t expect the ashes to bloom like a cloud and glow under the water. If there was a soul it might look like that. And the flowers we threw over board float away like a long goodbye, leaving us adrift.

This is not my usual content but people know they shouldn’t take on a 50 year mortgage right? It’s a trap, a life time subscription to debt. If you buy a house at 35, it’ll take you til 85 years old to pay it off. You’ll be paying just the interest for a looong time.

I tried CapCut for the first time yesterday. Holy crap. That thing is a whole lot more powerful than iMovie. iMovie hasn’t been updated in like 10 years.

I find a lot of people complain about leadership don’t do x, y, z. But a lot of times people don’t lead from their own position. To think and act decisively is a kind of leadership.

Somebody asked me if I partner with Design Technologists, and I said no. I got Engineering to partner with me to build prototypes for R&D. This is much more beneficial bc they would internalize all the whys, nuance and trade offs of the UX. They would know why we kill off dumb ideas.

I shared a chapter I wrote with my brother who is also a writer and he sent me this…

No [your job here] isn’t dead. However, from my purview, only the staff level folks are getting hired. That’s what I’m seeing.

Designing the details and variance of components is UI but exploring the nuance and possibilities of divergence in the mental model and behavior is UX.

A design technologist said he’s excited to work with me to understand lean experimentation, bc it’s different reading about it vs actually doing it. Totally agree. The discussion about the design of the experiment w/team members is more valuable than the experiment itself. And you need cycles of it.

Me to my family: “We’re spreading dad’s ashes into the ocean this weekend. You guys better give me music recommendations or else it’s going to be that Celine Dion’s Titanic song.”

I gave someone advice on the storytelling of their case study. I told them that they needed to introduce the problem clearer in layman’s terms and how it manifested in the consumer experience downstream at the start. No one has the context of the company’s operations right off the bat.

When I review design concepts, I look for the hypothesis on the behavior. Some designers can’t articulate the hypothesis but their explorations show this. And then there are some people who just move things around. There is always a hypothesis whether it’s optimization or differentiation.

You can tell the quality of someone’s thinking by the questions they ask. If you can ask clear questions, then you can pursue clear possibilities that generate better questions. It is the art of inquiry. You can fill pages of questions that get you nowhere. This is why people need templates prompts.

I’ve been writing obsessively on a personal project. It’s hard to separate that part of my brain with the creative side of my work. But I find that knowing when the emotional timbre of the story or the experience feels right is something that takes time to develop.

The election results warms my cold, dead heart.

I love it when my friends land new jobs as leaders. It just means there’s new possibilities should I need an escape.

There’s a way of seeing that you get when you work on Search that is invaluable. That is you see the structure, the metadata and variability of a thing. Rich media also has structure not just in how you describe it, but in its make up. The inherent structure informs what you can do with it.

Some inventions are things that were stumbled upon on the way to something else. That’s the nature of R&D. You encounter things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Features are about, “What can we ship?” R&D is about “What can possibly exist?” That process can create new categories.

PM: I’m fully on board with this prototype. It’s awesome. Me: I’m happy that you’re my biggest fan. But that’s like my mom saying I’m good. I’m skeptical. It has to test well.

Companies often want to scale their best people and often in the process kill them off. I’m one of those people who don’t believe you can teach others to innovate, meaning that you can’t replicate people who can materially invent, create with true ingenuity to disrupt the status quo.

I heard this woman on TikTok say that she hot glued her ornaments on the tree, and Saran-wrapped the whole tree every year to put it away and I’m seriously considering that.

I’ve always considered my experience leading teams to build a Search platform from scratch, one of the most valuable experiences of my career. It gave me a platform view on how data products powered by algorithms are built and scaled. It also made me much more empathetic to an eng perspective.

Regardless of all the noise about vibe coding, I think there are actually different kinds of designers needed: 1. Solution designers (Deterministic/known constraints) 2. Design Systems Designers 3. Service Designers/Value Chain Architects 4. Frontier Designers (Design as inquiry) 5. Brand Designers

If you’re applying to a service design job, make sure you show the service design in your portfolio, not just beautiful pixel pushing. That is all.

Best portfolio I saw this week was on Google slides. Masterful storytelling, clear visualization of a highly complex system & workflows, and the final execution of the experience was crisp. We have a similar Human-in-the-loop operation so I understood the complexity.

The best account I saw on TikTok was this guy who bought a crab and some prawns at an Asian food store and tried to raise them as pets. Not all this AI bullshit.

It never ceases to amaze me what prototyping 3D experiences reveals. You can never fully understand spatial experiences without dog-fooding the interaction and movement. There was an insight I had about a behavior and to see the team exclaim delight seeing it come to life is an amazing feeling.

There’s a difference between shaping what the emergence tech can do and should do vs receiving the constraints downstream.

Designers understand systems thinking in terms of patterns and scaling. But systems thinking in terms of experiences with automation is about understanding the ecosystem, the ranges of inputs and outputs.

UX for AI is cannot be designed or derived by traditional design methods. Because traditional design methods cannot identify the variable ranges of behaviors, nuance and outcome. The principles still apply but the explorations and lean experimentation must be a cross functional effort.

I received this “karma” from a team mate this week. It beautifully encapsulates how I work that I saved it for my portfolio. Her comment about “playing with the medium” here is about me figuring out ways to play with Gaussian Splats, a method to scan environments into 3D models.

I have this principle about “need.” I try not to need anything. I am with someone bc I want to be, not bc I need to be. When I have a job, I try to continually explore other options or have sufficient FU money, so that I don’t have to need the job. I can walk away anytime.

I saw this post on LI where a designer recommends not running comparative research bc the result is muddy where users will prefer some things from both versions. This is due to poor design of the proof - he didn’t narrow the thing he wants to test. Unfortunately this how a lot of design teams think.

What you get from experience is the integrative brain. For me, it’s R&D, science, and experience. So people tend to hire me for very specific problems. IME, UX for non-deterministic problems requires an integrative brain.

A lot of design managers wouldn’t even know where to start with emergent tech. That’s bc they haven’t any experience with that level of ambiguity. So they try to apply the design framework into a much more massive R&D problem. It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Kinda awesome when you work on a proof of concept and someone is like, “Looks like patents need to be filed.”

Designing for probabilistic models.