UX purports to empower users, to remove barriers that badly-made systems impose.

Why, then, is expertise on perception and human performance, on activity systems, etc, barely a topic in UX?

Where did the ideas of augmenting human capabilities through technology disappear to? Could it be that much of UX is not quite a descendant of design and computing, but rather an extension of marketing, where insights have been retrieved from research on human perception, cognition and decision-making, and used
to optimize outcomes for the vendor, not the user?

Remember Macaw? That team is back with @cloverappco, which brings boards together with tooling for writing, task management, daily notes and more.

Freeform layout lets users create their own information environment. This is a big deal.

https://twitter.com/attasi/status/1479135346277376007

I do have one major beef, though. Internationalization.

Always let users set …

1. which day the week starts on (this is a major blocker)

2. How dates look, everywhere

3. How time is formatted

4. Week numbers

For me, the top bar is a *major* annoyance.

The likely answer is that macOS is an afterthought. Top talent likely wants to create wholly new interaction genres for AR / VR / handheld / wearable.

WIMP UIs are decent now, but are being weakened by trying to make them “more like mobile”.

https://twitter.com/movito/status/1473423062007795714

In interaction design, things typically come down to ease versus power.

There are more people buying ease than power — the total addressable market (TAM, how many you can sell to) of “ease” is way bigger.

https://twitter.com/movito/status/1478521761784291328

Takeaways from producing hybrid events

🧵

1. NDI5 is primarily for Windows, which is popular in broadcast. Got a Mac? Too bad. So, that's a blocker.

1/n 2. webRTC is great, but where's the interface for manually directing all these feeds?

Pexip, Whereby, Restream, Lightstream (etc – there are so many providers) all have parts of what I want, wrapped into lots of stuff I don't need. (Millicast is cool but I need a GUI)

If you have a good design system, you can hide the fact that you're not very good at interaction design.

Case in point: @MicrosoftTeams "start new call" window. At first glance, it looks well-organized and easy to operate. Can you see what isn't working here? (Hint: Fitts's law) And here's another fail. Do you see it? Let's say I made a mistake when joining the call. Tough luck. You have no way of knowing that the only way to reveal the settings for mic and camera … are to make the window bigger.

Remote presentations are terrible because almost everyone who used to give ok-to-great talks in front of other people don’t have the tools or the habits or the systems or the setup to present well remotely have the right software, formats and workflows to present well remotely. TBH, “presenting remotely” is fast becoming something of an oxymoron.

SaaS products: architect your permissions, users and groups@well early on, so you won’t have to rebuild everything later.

The enterprise tier is where SaaS companies can make a decent profit.

But almost every new tool I evaluate has an amateurish permissions model. Stuff almost everyone does badly, or not at all:

- one place to remove a person from all projects / groups
- easy for collaborators to add a third party to a project / group and have an admin know about this
- multi-tenancy, so people can jump between accounts / projects

How did “architect” become a regulated title in the UK?

“The Architects Act 1997 creates an offence of using the title “architect” in business or practice whilst not on the Register, and places a statutory responsibility on ARB in relation to regulating the use of that title.”

https://twitter.com/randydeutsch/status/1213143076375539712

“If someone is not on the Architects Register they are not a UK architect - it’s as simple as that.”

arb.org.uk/public-informa…

Thinking of UX quality, Deming and Topsight on discovering that my @BMW i3 hasn’t charged after all.

How can we monitor whether our services *actually work* for our customers? At scale.

How can we better understand how our customers deal with the coordinations and breakdowns? How can we catch errors, and how can we understand their impact on our customers’ lives?

Netflix tackles this with chaos engineering medium.com/netflix-techbl…

@jeffsussna shows a path, with Promise-Driven Design
medium.com/@jeffsussna/vi…

vimeo.com/326447998

This is the best presenter remote out there if you’re running big events.

It’s expensive, and it is not good looking. But it lets you command two computers at once, reliably.

This is the remote that WWDC speakers use. Welcome to the A/V market, where good design is a rarity. We have to explain to speakers which button is which. That’s how bad the graphics on the remote are. The ergonomics and range, however, have not let us down yet.

This is a great thread. UX has inherited the studio traditions of graphic design and the processes of industrial design (like Archer’s 200+ step systematic method for design), ways of working developed more than fifty years ago, for a wholly other business and profession.

https://twitter.com/berkun/status/1136367689482481664

UX is woven into its organization. It isn’t a separate thing the way a nicely designed toaster can be wrapped in a bad box and be sold in a crummy store.

But, as a field, UX hasn’t quite figured out what the heck it is, or how it’s supposed to operate, so we lean on old models.