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@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
@PavelASamsonov
Sep 1, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
I still believe that "when is a door not a door†" is still the best joke in the English language.

†when it's a jar
Russian also has a great door joke (dating back to the 1761 play The Minor). The titular character suggests the door to his room is an adjective because it is "adjunct to its place" whereas a different door in the cellar is a noun because it stands on its own. Правдин. Дверь, например, к...
In a weird case of the Mandela Effect, I remember the joke backwards: Mitrofan calls the unattached door an adjective because it leans against the wall, while the installed door does not and therefore must be a noun.
Fun‡ fact: the reason that English lets nouns be used as adjectives (for example: "country mouse" or "fallout shelter") is because it originally classified all adjectives as a kind of noun.

‡ opinions vary on whether this fact is fun

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More from @PavelASamsonov

@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
Mar 21, 2023
The best way I've been able to explain "primary user benefit" to colleagues: after articulating the problem, look at how you describe the solution and ask "*how* does it help?"

Often, they realize that their problem definition is not actually crisp enough to answer that question
2 most common patterns:
- the problem is that customers don't have this feature, but now they will (not a real problem)
- the solution is that customers will no longer have the problem because AI/ML (not a real solution)
One of the key functions of a designer is to imagine multiple solutions. But you *need* to have an understanding of the problem & most important benefit before designing ways to deliver that benefit, never mind comparing the effectiveness of those ways against one another.
Read 5 tweets
@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
Feb 1, 2023
Don't confuse metrics with goals.
The worst mistake in this genre is picking metrics before you've identified your goals. It's a similar mistake to picking your tools before you know what you want to do with them.
When you have a goal, you can pick metrics and tools that focus your thinking, and if they're not getting you closer to the goal, you can switch them out.

But when you don't have a goal, all metrics and tools constrain your thinking - and you can't see the lack of progress.
Read 5 tweets
@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
Jan 1, 2023
Why is it that "design should work more closely with X function" narratives are always about conceding to X's limits rather than improving X's ability to support design?
Product, eng, sales, etc "requirements" are not laws of physics. And yet rather than help these people create better "requirements" the discourse always turns back to how to satisfy them (usually at the detriment of design's own incentives)
I suspect that it's because design as a practice has a very limited conception of *what it wants*

"Improve the life of the user" is far too abstract. Rather than think about how to scaffold that work, designers skip to drawing pictures of someone else's ideas.
Read 5 tweets
@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
Dec 27, 2022
People broadly understand that designers "make designs"

But a "design" is just an artifact documenting design decisions for some purpose. Most stakeholders request (and many designers make) artifacts without understanding *what the artifact will be used for*—making it useless.🧵 DESIGN ACTIVITIES AND ARTIFACTS What is the purpose of the a
btw this is why I call Figma et al "documentation tools" - they don't help you *make* design decisions, only to visually document decisions you have made. "Loop zero" for designers is looking at that documentation, realizing you don't like it, and changing the decision.🧵
Loop one - the critique feedback loop - works the same way. The designer's internal process has stopped improving the artifact, so it's time to show it to the rest of the team, which requires slightly higher fidelity (think sketches -> wireframes). 🧵
Read 13 tweets
@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
Dec 22, 2022
Conversations about taste in the context of design are always fun because some designers are all too happy to call something out as "bad taste" without having any idea of what taste is *for* and the ways in which an object can be good or bad at achieving that purpose.
Taste is a signal of belonging; a design can only be "good taste" or "bad taste" within the context of its milieu.

Positioning all objects on the spectrum of a single "taste" - as designers like Schiff and Schneider *love* to do - is an attempt to universalize their milieu.
Privileging their aesthetic preference is very convenient for designers: not only does it mean that they don't need to have any range or think about what their work needs to *accomplish*, but it positions them as having some inherent authority as arbiters of taste.
Read 14 tweets
@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
Dec 22, 2022
Yet another reminder that the first step to doing anything is identifying the problem you are solving.

Critique of specific solutions or implementation challenges is not meaningful critique of the vision's desirability.
Start in the 3rd loop: is the thing we want to do desirable? Do we agree to work towards this outcome?

Then move on to the 2nd loop: Is this course of action going to get us to that outcome?

And only then the 1st loop: is the implementation working?
Critique of the implementation does not invalidate the solution. Critique of the solution does not invalidate the shared vision of a problem that needs solving.
Read 4 tweets

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