Thread by @PavelASamsonov

It's time for an article purge. Going to read all my open articles and, if they are good, pass them on to you.

(moving my in-progress article purge thread to here because Twitter will not let me untag the authors from subsequent tweets and I have been spamming them by accident)

I think I can stop the notification spam by making each reply directly to the main tweet.

Here is the original thread:

https://twitter.com/PavelASamsonov/status/1193361687291801600

@jarango finds a way to tackle organizational silos with design: by gathering stakeholders from the entire org and leveraging their individual areas of expertise to collaborate on a design artifact, instead of pursuing separate, competing objectives.
jarango.com/2019/08/15/how…

@odannyboy's list of introductory psych texts for designers wanting to power up their practice beyond pure craft. Quite a few books and not all are cheap - but the holidays are coming up and I won't say no if you want to send me a few of these, folks.
medium.com/@odannyboy/my-…

@odannyboy And a list for non-design books at large, rather than just psych books.
medium.com/@odannyboy/non…

When you have very little time with users, @joenatoli suggests asking them to walk you through a particular workflow, rather than mentioning any feature or software. This will let the user focus on what matters to them & uncover invisible process problems.
givegoodux.com/ask-users-time…

I think I've shared these articles by @cwodtke before, but they were in the tabs, so they count. Five important strategies for modeling complex systems, and five specific habits that make design thinking powerful.
medium.com/@cwodtke/five-…
medium.com/@cwodtke/five-…

@kromaticxyz does a quick run-down of four categories of research/experiment methods, and when you might want to use them. Really good content for people just getting started with user research.
medium.com/@Kromatic/what…

A half-hour talk by @johannakoll about concrete ways that systems thinking can help product managers. If you first model the existing system, you can predict the impacts that various changes (to the flow of information, rules, or goals) will have.
mindtheproduct.com/system-thinkin…

Changing tack a little bit - a two-parter from @KeirstenBrager on negotiating salaries effectively (don't name the first number, but if you must, then make sure you've done research beforehand, and make it a big one)
keirstenbrager.tech/salarytips-par…
keirstenbrager.tech/salarytips-par…

@Minette_78 gives a quick introduction for thinking like a content designer, in the very unlikely* case that your team doesn't already have one. Especially useful for teams where content can "fall through the cracks" and everyone needs this skill to fix it
uxdesign.cc/how-to-think-l…

Did you know there are Official US Government Design Methods? Well, there are: methods.18f.gov

Each brief Method card also links to a longer article. They are a little old (this @uxstrategy piece is from 2014) but still very relevant.
searchenginewatch.com/2014/03/27/tas…

@austingovella analyzes what people actually mean when they say "big design up front" and why the problems ascribed to it are actually problems with your org.

This article captures a lot of themes I talk about constantly, and I highly recommend it.
agux.co/blog/whats-wro…

The worst way to get UX mentorship is to ask a designer to mentor you, says @jessicaivins. The best way is to seek out people you admire and get to know them. Then you can ask them questions about their work and challenges, and learn from the answers.
blog.prototypr.io/how-to-find-a-…

In order to ensure continuous delivery of valuable software, @neil_killick recommends slicing user stories in the problem space, and thus developing multiple independently valuable deliverables that each address part of the desired top-level capability.
neilkillick.com/blog/the-essen…

UIE's guide to the four ways to present designs: walkthrough (to generate a list of issues), review (to determine if the issues were resolved), demo (showing the end-to-end experience uninterrupted) & critique (design team-centric focus on process & craft)
playbook.uie.com/blog/four-appr…

A convincing argument by @jessitron that we should move from "shared values" (implies: the team is only people like me) to "mutual purpose and methods" (implies: we are different people who share a goal and help each other find the best way to achieve it).
medium.com/@jessitron/mut…

@jmspool describes a brief but powerful ritual: reading out the short-form creative brief (project objectives, key personas, scenarios, and principles) to focus design discussions and carry unified purpose from the kickoff through to completion.
medium.com/@jmspool/the-m…

Design must balance the needs of the user, the business, and the system.

If you have not already read this article by @mulegirl then you must read it right now, without even finishing this sentence! If you have already read it, go read it again.
medium.com/mule-design/a-…

Do you know what Design Ops is? Are you sure? @daveixd explains why DevOps is awesome and what designers can learn from it in order to operationalize your design org and make it work efficiently with the rest of the company.
medium.com/designer-hango…

The success of designers doesn't hinge on making good designs, argues @karlfast - rather, designers must know how to integrate their practice into the org's processes and goals, transform both the org & their practice in response to changing environments.
ratsnest.io/the-fundamenta…

Like any artifact, the most important thing about a user story is the conversation that created it.
"The output of the practice is not the card, it is the shared understanding. The card serves as a reminder to somebody able to tell that story."
ideas.riverglide.com/the-card-is-no…

Showing up with a bunch of research like a wizard handing out a quest doesn't work. @myddelton shares a few ways ways to plan, research, analyze, and communicate as a team, while leaving certain parts to be done by trained researchers alone.
myddelton.co.uk/blog/user-rese…

"Everyone is a designer" has nothing on "design or be designed." @mialoira outlines how we can either be unconsciously shaped by technologies and norms around us, or understand which of our activities have high impact and weed out the rest.
medium.com/design-or-be-d…

At this time, I have cut down the number of open Chrome tabs to 98. Brave will come after this.

@mcpaccard's article might be the most important one in the thread. It's about design, but also about the apocalypse. About one person's journey, but also about society's; about growth and letting go. I think @MrAlanCooper and @monteiro would enjoy it.
medium.com/common-futures…

This one's for managers: when evaluating your reports, be a leader, not a critic.
management.curiouscatblog.net/2008/04/22/dem…

An overview of what models are and why they're important for good design, from @DubberlyDesign. Like other design artifacts, the diagram of the model is worthless - the important part is how it informs thinking, seeing, and discussions.
dubberly.com/articles/model…

Bipolar Emotional Response Testing - an approach to quantifying subjective factors, with a key caveat: "As you are capturing subjective feedback, what is of most importance is how designs differ, rather than necessarily where they fall in the scale."
uxforthemasses.com/bert/

Great tips from @johncutlefish on how to pivot from a feature factory to an outcome-focused product team. Frame your features as bets to expose risks, write a "precap" to explore what success might look like, and keep track using an always-on dashboard.
amplitude.com/blog/focus-pro…

User research is not a stage. @NNgroup provides a cheat sheet for which methods you can use depending on where you are in the product development life cycle.
nngroup.com/articles/ux-re…

If design is the rendering of intent, then AI is the opposite - concealing intent inside a black box. @mattedgar talks about why designers need to fix systems rather than allow machines to be trained on broken ones for the sake of automation.
medium.com/@mattedgar/ai-…

Product managers should focus less on herding engineers and more on the skills that can land you a leadership role in a healthy product org: building context and defining problems.
Ask yourself: "If the team controlled their budget, would they employ me?"
medium.com/@johnpcutler/l…

@gerrymcgovern teaches us how to find the Top Tasks that users perform in our products, so that we can prioritize them in our product development and visual hierarchy above tiny tasks that gum up the works.
medium.com/@gerrymcgovern…