Just in case you need some rabbit holes to fall down on your Friday afternoon.
things
About
Six-word restaurant reviews. Example: tried it twice. Got stomachaches twice.
On May 12, 2023 at 10:24am NZ time, the sun officially passed 18 degrees below the horizon. This marked the end of Astronomical Twilight, and the beginning of the true night. We won’t see any light from the sun until August 3.
Read post paired with The Thing theme music.
“Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”
From an article about Brown by Shirley Povich Source
Outlines are IA by Christopher Butler:
The text-outline as an information architecture tool is useful when evaluating the effectiveness of an existing visual design. Whenever I look at a page or screen, the first thing I do is scan it to understand what kind of information it contains and how that information is arranged.
I’ll plug all sorts of things into Workflowy (my outliner of choice) to see the raw structure. And then drag the bullets around to remix and re-organize.
Most of my friends still had mothers but the fathers were endangered, then extinct. I was surprised, though I had always known the ladies lasted longer; the fathers fooled me with their toughness; I had been duped by their jogging and heavy lifting, misled by their strength when they slapped me on the back or shook my hand.
From Disappearing Fathers, a poem by Faith Shearin.
Caravans by Eleanor Crow.
Cleaning out my tabs on a Friday afternoon:
We were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion
Art by Gerard Dubois.
The UX Research Reckoning is Here
Lots of nuggets in this article, like:
It’s time for us to lean into the future, to realize the last 15 years was more fools golden than golden age.
fools golden, woof … and:
Middle-range findings [e.g. user interviews] are usually not specific enough. They tend to be too general and descriptive, even when a researcher does an amazing job communicating. They’re hard to turn into specific recommendations and thus easy to poke holes in or ignore. They are most likely to trigger the post-hoc bias, which invokes the stereotype that researchers work for months only to tell us things we already know.
On more micro research:
Low-level, technical UX research isn’t always sexy, but it drives business value. When research makes a product more usable and accessible, engagement goes up and churn rates go down. Companies need that for the bottom line. Users get a better product. Win-win.
And more on macro/strategic research:
Great macro-research is multi-method — desk, quant, and qual combined. It provides priorities and frameworks more than answers or hypotheses. It’s unabashedly business first and future first. And it requires direct collaboration with executives, cutting out the messengers who might dilute the business value of research.
Can’t say I don’t disagree. It’s something a lot of client services UXers have known for a while now. Clients are more willing to pay for macro and micro research.
Bottom line, lots of angst (me included) is being stirred up between lay-offs and AI causing lots of us to reevaluate the direction of our careers.
The Wind. I can almost hear this painting:
The explanation for why He-Man has a tiger. “Put a fucking saddle on it!”
El Bueno Y El Malo. Agree with this review: “all the mystery of the desert at night compressed into a rare jewel of an album”
The Floppotron 3.0. A noise-making contraption.
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