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@spavel.bsky.social🐀 Profile picture
@PavelASamsonov
Sep 27, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Tech career blueprint: some PM adds a dirty growth hack, gets a raise for hitting their metrics, and uses the metric and new salary to get a better paying job elsewhere.

Short-termism and blindly following metrics will erode the foundation of the user experience. Business is UX.
There's a @MrAlanCooper quote - "user experience is a power struggle" - and this is exactly why. When the entire company (or industry) is set up to encourage pillaging customer goodwill for personal aggrandizement, your design system isn't going to solve any of the real problems.
I feel like the undercurrent of "just let us design" and pivot of the "UX Designer" role towards design systems is borne of this: a cynicization of a profession barred from making any real impact by an all-powerful lower level of abstraction.
We retreated from the real fight and bought into the propaganda of "just build" and "the only way through is to create." But when we abandon shaping the problem space, we stop being designers and become design tools for unscrupulous actors.

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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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