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Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
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10 Feb, 15 tweets, 2 min read
THE CUSTOMER

is an anagram of

UTTER SCHMOE
DEVELOPMENT TEAM

is an anagram of

MEET, MVP DONE LATE
USER STORIES

is an anagram of

ISSUES RETRO
AGILE AT SCALE

is an anagram of

I ESCALATE LAG
THOUGHT LEADER

is an anagram of

THULE GOATHERD
PRODUCT ROADMAP

is an anagram of

DUMP CRAP AT DOOR
SILICON VALLEY

is an anagram of

CLOSE VILLAINY
TECH INDUSTRY

is an anagram of

THIRTY DUNCES
GRAPHIC DESIGN

is an anagram of

GRID SPACING, EH?
INNOVATION

is an anagram of

VAIN NOTION
LEAD DESIGNER

is an anagram of

DERANGED LIES
DESIGN ANAGRAMS

is an anagram of

AMASSING DANGER
MICROSOFT TEAMS

is an anagram of

MOST MOIST FARCE
PIXEL-PERFECT

is an anagram of

PEPTIC REFLEX
CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE

is an anagram of

RICKETY PLACEBO PLOT

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More from @PavelASamsonov

Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
28 Jan
One of the most important Enterprise design tools you can learn is PowerPoint
This is not (just) my usual spiel about most visual tools being merely documentation - if you don't know how to make your decks look good, it'll be rough to get your ideas across.

PowerPoint can do almost everything InDesign can do. Take advantage of it.
Being a great speaker with pretty, TED-style full bleed image slides won't help you when an exec asks you to email them your deck.

Being able to comp beautiful presentation layouts in Photoshop or Figma won't help you when an exec asks you to email them your deck.
Read 7 tweets
Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
28 Jan
One (perhaps the only?) positive development on the Web since the glory days is that the "normal" size of text on the average website has gone up from minuscule to legible or even a little bigger than it needs to be.
That's not to say there weren't websites with big text in 2004, or websites with small text today. But our visual language for "this is what a website looks like" has evolved. What it means for a website to look "designed" vs "normal" (for lack of better terms) has changed.
Even pages intentionally aiming for an "undesigned" or brutalist feel tack towards larger, rather than smaller, text.
bloomberg.com/features/compa…
Read 6 tweets
Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
21 Dec 20
Smaller teams move quicker, but having the correct team composition and mandate is much more important than size. Unless your team has decision authority, you will fall behind again while getting stakeholders caught up to your progress and insights.
Making polished presentation: 3 hours
Presenting findings to execs: 1 hour
Answering follow-up questions: 1 hour
Arguing with the legacy power centers: 8 hours

vs

Having an exec sit in on a user interview: 45 min
Listening to them having their mind blown in the debrief: 15 min
When your audience doesn't have the same context you do, it's much harder to explain what's going on and why the problem matters or the solution is correct. Narrowing that gap as much as possible will tighten your feedback loops more than anything else can
Read 6 tweets
Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
28 Sep 20
Whichever way you slice it, "clean" handoffs between stages of the software development process create friction and leave each role frustrated due to lack of influence into neighboring spaces.

The solution is working in parallel, not expanding your "slice" until burnout.

1/ Diagram showing 6 rough stages of software development: busi
The standard "designer does the design" runs into friction on each side: the PM hands down a constricting definition of the problem space, and the designer's great ideas for the solution rarely translate into code the way they expected. Iteration is very difficult as well.

2/ The first column of the original table, pivoted sideways. Ca
What if we split the design role into UX/R and UI/Dev? Problem not quite solved: separating "business knowledge" & "user knowledge" is a recipe for conflict. Separate front-end and back-end teams can lead to resentment over dependencies when cool UI ideas simply do not work.

3/ The second column from the original image. Captions: When PM
Read 7 tweets
Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
27 Sep 20
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.
Read 4 tweets
Pavel A. Samsonov Profile picture
24 Sep 20
One power of physical objects is the ability to fill the field of view. Even the smallest one can be held up to the face and force the rest of the world out of focus.

Digital spaces are bound by a viewport, so objects must project their full size into the imagination instead.
One of the simplest ways they do this is to visibly extend offscreen, like most web pages (this is why thou shalt not fuck with browser scroll behavior) but doing it visually isn't the only way.

One of the aspects of good information architecture is implying the content iceberg.
Even though metaphors are ultimately limiting, they are useful to quickly give an impression of depth, through a familiar hook. Like a canned character archetype in a short story, you can get away with "saying" little to sketch the complete outline.
Read 4 tweets

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