John Gruber of Daring Fireball made an important point about product design recently in response to Robert Scoble’s concern that many Google employees were not wearing their Google Glasses. After Scoble suggested that a lack of employee support might hurt adoption of the Glass product, Gruber responds: “Scoble has the cause and effect backwards. If […]

Continue Reading: Product quality trumps evangelism

In Shipping is the beginning of a process, Paul Adams of Intercom writes of the crucial difference between shipping as an end vs. shipping as a beginning.: “Shipping is not an end goal. Unfortunately too many teams launch and move on to the next thing. Learning from what you shipped takes discipline. The larger and […]

Continue Reading: Shipping as a beginning, not an end

I don’t think the recent spate of articles on building startups without writing code are a fad. Here’s why.

Continue Reading: Before you write that code…

I think the future of sharing design work will be more about story and less about visuals.

Continue Reading: Tell your design story

Amazon has designed themselves into a Local Maximum but mobile and tablet use will help get them out of it.

Continue Reading: A thought on Amazon’s new product page design

Great post on Serious Pony about cognitive resources: Your app makes me fat. This post retells the story of feature bloat in terms of the cognitive effort it forces upon the people who use our design. As we add more features, we add additional friction to the user’s day, and not just while they’re using […]

Continue Reading: Can an app makes you fat?

Great post by Ryan Singer: Vital elements of the product design process. He outlines a simple way to think about the pieces of a product: the job it does, the design patterns you use, and the resulting product concept. Lots to like in this article, including this gem of an analogy: “When the job isn’t […]

Continue Reading: Singer’s vital elements of product design

The way to have product team members trust each other and get along is to have them sketch together.

Continue Reading: The importance of sketching in product design

If you’re a product designer this is one of the most important topics you have to deal with. Braden Kowitz of Google Ventures Design, in his recent post Why you should move that button 3px to the left: “Designers notice the gap between functional and delightful, and that’s why we obsess over the little details. […]

Continue Reading: Justifying fit and finish

Product designer David Cole of Quora writes in The Rise of Product Design: “Looking back at the ideas espoused by the UX community, I find their relevance to my work winnowing by the year. Many of the practices seem forged in the fires of consultancy. Advocacy is a repeat theme in UX writing, but is […]

Continue Reading: Product design replacing UX?