Backseat Software – Mike Swanson’s Blog
People use “enshittification” to describe platform decay. What I’m describing here is one of the mechanisms that makes that decay feel personal. It’s the constant conversion of your attention into a KPI.
Link tags: products
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Why doesn’t anything work anymore? | Jason Rodriguez
I’ve worked in the tech industry for close to two decades at this point. I’ve seen how difficult it is to build quality products, but I’ve also seen that it can be done. It just feels like no one gives a shit anymore, beyond a handful of independent devs and small shops. It’s wild.
Decentralizing quality || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader
I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.
Addicted to Every Possibility by Nathan Beck
Find freedom not in infinite choice, but in working a single seam until you strike gold: conducting dozens, even hundreds, of iterations within a tight parameter space—not in search of more, but in search of better.
Durable products | Brad Frost
Wherein Brad says some kind words about The Session. And slippers.
Slippers are cool.
Prescriptive and Descriptive Information Architectures | Jorge Arango
Interesting—this is exactly the same framing I used to talk about design systems a few years ago.
Hixie’s Natural Log: When complaints are a good sign
This is a very smart way to handle feedback about a product.
AI-free products
Develop a simple, focused app that does what it says on the tin — not one where the tin talks back at you.
Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.
Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since.
A great round-up from Cory, featuring heavy dollops of Anil and Aaron.
No Taste | Scratching the Surface
Designers can’t help but participate in these displays and debates of taste. It’s part of the job. There’s an irony in the predominantly liberal and inclusive political leanings of most creatives that often become unbending and exclusionary in their work and everyday lives. Comic Sans, Thomas Kinkade, New Urbanism, clutter—there are too many heretical acts to count. Natalia Ilyin writes in Chasing the Perfect, “For people who want their straight lines to be straight, life itself is the problem. The modern urge is the urge to get away from organic existence in general.” No wonder most movie villains live in spartan homes of concrete, glass, and steel. The often humor-free designer is not so different, if not in evildoing, then at least in temperament.
How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever - The Verge
Wanna get angry all over again?
(Now do Geocities!)
Privacy in the product design lifecycle | ICO
A very handy guide to considering privacy at all stages of digital product design:
This guidance is written for technology professionals such as product and UX designers, software engineers, QA testers, and product managers.
Vibe Driven Development
This describes how I iterate on The Session:
It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will.
This whole post reminded of the episode of the Clearleft podcast on measuring design.
The problem underlying all this is that when it comes to building a product, all data is garbage, a lie, or measuring the wrong thing. Folks will be obsessed with clicks and charts and NPS scores—the NFTs of product management—and in this sea of noise they believe they can see the product clearly. There are courses and books and talks all about measuring happiness and growth—surveys! surveys! surveys!—with everyone in the field believing that they’ve built a science when they’ve really built a cult.
Giving your future self a little credit with progressive enhancement - Blog - Pixo | Apps, websites, and software development
We often talk about technical debt — the costs we’ll need to pay in the future when we make short-term compromises. Progressive enhancement is the opposite of that — a sort of technical credit that will make things easier for us in the future.
A good explanation of how progressive enhancement works perfectly with the idea of a minimal viable product:
We focus first on a core experience that delivers what your users are looking for, and then we start adding enhancements that will delight them.
Open sourcing the Product Planning Prompt Pack
This is very generous of Anna! She has a deck of cards with questions she asks in product planning meetings. You can download the pack for free.
Open Lecture at CIID: “Keeping up with the Kardashevians” – Petafloptimism
A terrfic presentation from Matt Jones (with the best talk title ever). Pace layers, seamful design, solarpunk, and more.
An Archeology for the Future in Space
I really enjoyed this deep dive into some design fiction work done by Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo, and Fred Scharmen.
(Remember when Simone spoke at dConstruct about toasters? That was great!)
Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com
The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern:
selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.
Software Crisis 2.0 – Baldur Bjarnason
Baldur Bjarnason writes an immense treatise on the current sad state of software, grounded in the historical perspective of the past sad state of software.
The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation” – Chelsea Troy
Businesses focus on efficiencies—doing the things that net them the most money for the least effort. By contrast, taxpayer-funded public programs are designed and expected to cover everyone—including, and especially, the most marginalized. That’s why they’re taxpayer-funded; so they don’t face existential risk be eschewing profit-driven decision-making. Does this work perfectly? No. But I think about it a lot when people shit on the bigness and slowness of government. That bigness & slowness is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities, that a “lean,” fast approach deliberately ignores.