The question

...the question we are called on to answer is no longer primarily, “can it be built?”, but rather, “should it be built?”

Ash Maurya, Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, O'Reilly Media, 2012.

gain this confidence

Bandura calls this process "guided mastery." I love that term: guided mastery. And something else happened, these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. They just gained a new confidence. And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy -- the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.

....

I really believe that when people gain this confidence -- and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO -- they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. We see them come up with more interesting, and just more, ideas so they can choose from better ideas. And they just make better decisions.

David Kelley, "How to build your creative confidence," TED 2012,
www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence.html.

the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers

The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system -- all the species, all the links -- and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with.

Eric Berlow, "Simplifying complexity," TEDGlobal 2010, Jul 2010,
www.ted.com/talks/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity.html.

We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.

With the rise of the product designer, there’s a simultaneous progression and regression in digital experiences. Using Jesse’s 12-year-old diagram (!) as a framework, we’re seeing the top two planes getting tastier and more interesting — look at Path, Square, AirBNB. Luscious full-bleed high-design screens where it’s clear that designers obsessed over every pixel and element of movement. But in that middle plane, digital experiences suffer from a lack of attention to flows, taxonomies, relationships between content areas, etc. (Any attempt to navigate Path turns into a trip down the rabbit hole.)  We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.

Peter Merholz, “'Product designers' and design team evolution," peterme.com, 31 Oct 2012, www.peterme.com/2012/10/31/product-designers-and-design-team-evolution/.

getting out of the building

... Lean UX is an approach that quickly followed the lean startup movement. It is not a new thing. It’s just a new name for things that were always around. The difference is in the packaging of these ideas.

One other factor that has changed dramatically is the audience. Entrepreneurs and startup founders have always been asking themselves how to develop great products. The answer that UX practitioners, usability professionals and UX researchers have been giving them was too complicated. UX people (me included) have been using disastrous jargon that only we understand. We have been talking about usability tests, personas, field studies and areas of interest in eye-tracking studies.

The lean startup answer to the same question uses plain language that people understand. When I say, “We need to conduct a contextual inquiry,” I usually get a deer-in-the-headlights reaction. When a lean startup person says they are “getting out of the building,” it is a whole different story. We mean the same thing; we use different words.

Tomer Sharon, "Lean Startup Is Great UX Packaging," Smashing Magazine, 10 Oct 2012, uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/10/10/lean-startup-is-great-ux-packaging.

The Obscure Features Hypothesis

The Obscure Features Hypothesis approach to innovation articulates the many ways that our neural system automatically generates meaning and then constructs counter techniques to uncover what is overlooked. Once the obscure is unearthed, then innovation is not far away. Innovation is putting the obscure to work for something useful.

Tony McCaffrey, "Why We Can't See What's Right in Front of Us," HBR Blog Network, 10 May 2012,
blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/overcoming_functional_fixednes.html

Expensive solutions

As founder Ingvar Kamprad wrote in his autobiography, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer: A Little Ikea Dictionary (Ikea, 1976), “Wasting resources is a mortal sin at Ikea.… Expensive solutions to any kind of problem are usually the work of mediocrity. We have no respect for a solution until we know what it costs.”

Deniz Caglar, Marco Kesteloo, and Art Kleiner, "How Ikea Reassembled Its Growth Strategy," strategy + business, 7 May 2012, www.strategy-business.com/article/00111?gko=66b6e&cid=TL20120517.

We don't want people to remember their interactions with Facebook

Facebook is playing a different design game than the rest of Silicon Valley. Instead of obsessing about making tasks like posting a photo easier or making the interface more beautiful, Facebook is getting its product out of the way. The goal, explains Cox, is to "make the experience of using Facebook as seamless and easy as talking to people in real life." That sounds like the absence of design, but the simplicity of the look and the reach of the service has attracted top designers....
"The biggest thing that's different is that Facebook is not about human-computer interaction," says Cox. Most designers in the computer industry have focused on helping humans interact with machines. But Facebook is about human-to-human interaction. "We don't want people to remember their interactions with Facebook," says director of design Kate Aronowitz. "We want them to remember their interactions with their friends and family." Cox calls this "social design"....

E. B. Boyd, "The Design of Happiness: Why design is the secret engine of the social network," Fast Company, Mar 2012,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/164/designing-facebook.

“Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Tweaker: The real genius of Steve Jobs," The New Yorker, 14 Nov 2011, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell,
via Sam Grigg.

Jony Ive on Design at Apple

Q: What makes design different at Apple?
A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Q: How does a new product come about at Apple?
A: What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but then the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.
The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring. There is an idea which is solitary, fragile and tentative and doesn’t have form.
What we’ve found here is that it then becomes a conversation, although remains very fragile.
When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you
made a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes - the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.

Q: What makes a great designer?
A: It is so important to be light on your feet, inquisitive and interested in being wrong. You have that wonderful fascination with the what if questions, but you also need absolute focus and a keen insight into the context and what is important - that is really terribly important. Its about contradictions you have to navigate.

Mark Prigg, "Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh," London Evening Standard, 12 Mar 2012,
www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jonathan-ive-the-iman-cometh-7562170.html via Core 77.