1. All of the ideas in How Design Makes The World are encapsulated in these four questions every product team should ask regularly. #design#ux#designmtw
2. Many projects have requirements, schedules and cool ideas, but forget to focus on improving something specific for real people. Or get lost along the way.
Good teams refresh the real goals often, like a lighthouse.
3. We're all prone to forgetting our biases and designing for ourselves.
If we don't go out of our way to study our customer's real needs, and how they differ from our own, we will fail them and possibly not even know until it's too late.
4. Everyone wants to succeed, but how to *ensure* it? It's not easy.
Experts like user researchers and UX designers, and the methods they use, are the best ways we have to improve the odds projects succeed at making good things for people.
5. We all know tech stories of unintended consequences (e.g. social media and misinformation, cars and gridlock traffic).
To make something truly good means thinking about how it can be manipulated or how 'success' can create new problems. Design for the next generation.
6. The book has 20 short chapters filled with stories and easy lessons. Each chapter maps to one of the questions.
This helps your entire team easily understand the role they play in enabling or preventing truly good design. #designmtw
7. Free chapters from How Design Makes the World, plus reviews, a short film and more are all here:
Study decisions, not just ideas. It's decisions and the people who make them that define how ideas are evaluated.
If you only care about ideas you'll stay mystified and angry about why "the best" idea never gets chosen.
Study decisions. Learn how to influence them.
I've read many books on decision making but this one had the most powerful impact on me.
For the approach he takes alone, studying front line workers making life and death decisions, it's a worthy read.
Sources of Power, Gary Klein
Have you ever kept a decision journal? Here's how it works.
When you have a big decision:
1. Write down your thoughts about your options. 2. And your rationale for deciding. 3. Then decide. 4. Experience the outcome. 5. Review 1 & 2 - what can you learn now? write it down
1. We have 5 basic senses - then why don't designers and experiences use all of them?
It's always fun to step back and ask this question, which often leads down the path to SMELL-O-VISION.
2. It sounds like a joke but Smell-O-Vision was one of many attempted innovations to improve the movie theater experience.
Like many attempted innovations, many approaches were tried. Some tried to pump in scents into the theaters, but the timing was a problem.
3. Others tried a simpler approach, using "scratch and sniff" cards - Instructions would appear on the screen telling you when to use which one. Clever.
1. When people say "innovations happen faster today than ever before" ask:
Does this person know anything about the history of innovation?
It's an impressive sounding statement rarely challenged since we like to hear it. But it's misleading in several ways that I'll explain.
2. The pace of change is not the same as scale.
For example:
The shift from hauling water on your back to indoor plumbing is HUGE. The shift from iPhone 10 to 11 is SMALL.
Have there been shifts as transformative to your quality of life as plumbing recently? I doubt it.
3. We love Amazon for Prime delivery and consider it a breakthrough, but in 1900 Sears had the same business model: huge catalog + ship anywhere (thx to new railroads).
You could order an entire kit for a house and thousands of Americans did.