Product Design Is Lost

In Product Design Is Lost, Rune Madsen writes:

Design workflows at most tech companies follow an incredible number of structured tasks: for each project, designers must create user personas, user stories, journey maps, wireframes, user interviews, and much more. However, driven by a desire from businesses to turn design into a process-heavy, measurable function, we’re filling our time with checklists instead of focusing on the very thing that makes designers relevant.

… and he’s right. People don’t think anymore. They mindlessly follow rituals, hoping to create something useful. This is how universities and bootcamps teach “design”. Check any university website, and you’ll see that it’s all about creating personas, user flow diagrams, low and high fidelity prototypes. While being useful at certain cases, they don’t gurantee “quality”.

If you look at design methodologies, most of them are created by either professors or consultants. None of these people practice product design. But they do get bonus points and money by reinventing the wheel. Design Thinking? What were people doing before Design Thinking?

He then makes another good point on the gap between designers and engineers:

For years, I’ve argued the design profession – fueled by how we educate designers – operates on outdated ideas about the separation of labor. Designers are expected to come up with the ideas, while engineers are merely there to execute them. Design stays in a corner away from technology.

The idea “I’m a designier, I don’t code” is so artificial. If you want to create good solutions, you cannot delegate understanding of technologies to other people.

In the past, designers were engineers who loved and respected computers. Today, it’s rare to find a designer who genuinely enjoy creating software.

Not Newer, but Better

In Vitsoe: A Purpose-Driven Company, Mark Adams says:

Focus on better, not on newer. Why are we obsessed with the new? We should be obsessed with better. That is what drives us at Vitsœ. After all, it is the way that the natural world operates: constantly improving, not launching new species.

Every company, every movie director, everyone tries to create something new. Very few people try to make something better. Many forgot that creating new is not the goal, it’s a byproduct of creating something good.

Maybe it has always been like this. People create new things, it’s our nature. Still, it feels today time between fashion trends is narrower.

Creating new things for the sake of being new not only brings shallowness, it also deteriorates the quality of what we already have. We destroy what has been done before and instead fill our world with novel inferiority.

Quality work requires patience, contemplation and deep thought. In the race to “innovate”, there’s little time left to pause and reflect.

Variable Fonts Demo

I’ve put together a little interactive demo on variable fonts where the font’s weight and optical size change when you move your mouse around. It’s easier to see how the letter shapes adapt to the changes. Notice how the letters “open up” when the optical size decreases and how the stroke thickness varies unevenly when the weight changes.

One interesting thing I noticed while playing with it is how cool it feels when your actions and their results are coupled. When you work with a computer, your thoughts and actions are translated into a series of discrete steps. You type a letter, create a rectangle, or open a tab. This is not how we communicate with objects in real life. But this example feels closer to how you drive a car or play a musical instrument.

Apple Deleted My Music Library

I used Apple Music in the 2010s then switched to Spotify and I used Spotify for a few years. Recently, Spotify made a few controversial product decisions, nudging me to switch back to Apple Music.

After renewing my Apple Music subscription and logging into my account, I discovered that my song collection was missing. Since Apple Music recommended me songs based on what I played a few years ago and because I could still see my Replay playlists from the past years, I was hoping that my library will eventually resync. So I kept using Apple Music anyway because I thought it was a glitch.

A few months passed with no change, so I contacted Apple support. They told me that this was intentional, citing a clause on their support website:

If you canceled your subscription to Apple Music or iTunes Match, your music library is removed on all of your devices except for the device your music library is stored on. Any music, including playlists, that you added or downloaded from the Apple Music catalog is also removed.

Thus, Apple deletes your library after a few months after you cancel your subscription.

This was unexpected and, frankly, ridiculous. I can’t find any justification for this user experience. Even if licensing rights are an issue, Apple could at least preserve a file with the IDs of songs I liked and restore them when I renew my subscription.

Now I must choose between a company that holds my data hostage and a company that neglects its UX.

Recently 002

Realized that my life has become too data-driven. I consult ratings when I choose wine, a movie, a book. I’m surrounded by vanity metrics — likes, views, retweets — that shape what things I pay attention to. Does the fact that someone liked your post mean it’s good?

It turns out you can still buy a bottle of wine without consulting Vivino, choose a movie based on trailer/director/friend’s recommendation, and you can still write for yourself.

There’s another side of the same coin — rating things. Today, everything needs to be measured and then digitized to become real. Everything is consumed and nothing is experienced. The experience is so much richer when you don’t narrow it down to a single digit.

Redesigned my website and moved to Blot. Now it looks like a feed because I’d like to write more. When you have a list of posts, you treat them as sacred as if every one of them should be well-crafted and polished piece of work. The feeling is similar to when you buy a sketchnotebook and you’re afraid to make mistakes.

Started working on a MacOS app. This is something I’m doing for my own pleasure. Most todo apps are too complex for my needs as I need something as simple a piece of paper sitting in the menu bar. Small desktop apps give you the scale that is easy to reason about. They provide closure when you finish them.

So far, the hardest part was all the plumbing I needed to do to make something nice in SwiftUI. It gets easier once you learn all the needed patterns.

Watched some nice movies. Rewatched a few Harry Potter movies over the christmas holidays and then I watched mostly european cinema. Some notable mentions are below.

The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino. It’s one of those movies that captures “feelings” instead of relying on a plot. You don’t watch it, you experience it.

Mr. Nobody by Jaco Van Dormael. Sometimes you get the feeling that it’s the right time to watch something. It was that time. It might feel like Mr. Nobody is a “cheap” movie as it has popular topics such as the chaos theory and the butterfly effect, and it stars Jared Leto. But if you look behind the things that might make it popular among general population, it has many hidden layers. And it’s so much pleasure to watch it again and again.

Triangle of Sadness and Force Majeure by Ruben Östlund. These were good. Seeing longer shots feels like novelty today, and Ruben Östlund gives you enough time to feel awkwardness of anything happenning on the screen. Also something I liked — once you think you know what he tries to say, he turns it upside down in the next scene. Possibly, Ruben Östlund got frustrated with the modern world so he just makes fun of everything.

An Eames Anthology

The book is collection of letters, notes, speeches, articles from and about Charles and Ray Eames. Completing this book was unexpectedly bittersweet. It felt as though I had lived alongside these two wonderful people, immersed in their ideas.

While this book is mainly about the Eames family and their work, it can offer so much more. For me, it’s a book about philosophy of design. If you ever wondered how to unite form and function or what a good design means, then this book might be for you.

Many times they were able to capture the essence of what I believe in but don’t have words for. Below are some of the pieces I liked the most.

The first step in design, that of determining the need, is a very hazardous undertaking. It is not simple, even the most sincere can easily confuse the actual need with the traditional idea of need and be led off on a hopeless tangent.

I liked the following short piece because I’ve been thinking the same for long. You can’t just close your laptop and stop being a designer. The designer’s approach to problem solving permeates his life. I don’t know how it can be otherwise.

Design is a full time job.

The next one is interesting because Herman Miller and Vitra (who are official distrubutor of Eames furniture in the US and Europe) price and sell their furniture as luxury items. One can even argue that replicas are closer to the original than what Herman Miller and Vitra sell now.

The objective is the simple thing of getting the best to the greatest number of people for the least.

These ones on copying.

Now, you may reuse something else, but if you do it sort of knowingly, as the best solution of that problem as you see it at the time, it’s not a cliche. And anyone who would avoid using something just because it has been used before would be knowingly not creating the best solution, if in his mind he knew it was the best thing to do and he was not doing it because he knew it had been done before.

It would be nice if people improved on a piece of furniture when set out to copy it. Unfortunately, they are not usually concerned with quality.

On creativity in design.

To my mind crafts seem to suffer more from overdoses of originality in design rather than from lack of this.

And on the design process.

The idea of design as a development of progressive sketches is romantic and not very accurate.

It is more an optimizing process that is apt to start from a series of hunches which are either developed or discared by purely intellectual means long before any skethch or model is made.

When these hunches finally begin to combine in such a way that they seem to satisfy more aspect of the problem than any one has a right to expect, then this is the beginning of a concept.

When the concept is formed it represents about 5 percent of the design effort — the remaining 95 percent of the effort being used to keep the concept from falling apart.

And the best one is this Q&A with Charles Eames.

Keeping Aspect Ratios in Figma

Figma doesn’t have a built-in feature to set constraints for frames to support specific aspect ratios like 4:3 or 16:9. But I found a way to get around this limitation.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create two frames. The outer frame will be the image container, while the inner frame will be responsible for keeping the desired aspect ratio.
2. Set the outer frame’s width to either fill or fixed and its height to hug.
   
3. For the inner frame, set its width to fill and its height to 0, essentially making it invisible.
4. Now, rotate the inner frame by a specific angle based on the aspect ratio you want.

You can calculate this angle using the formula:

angle = arctan(height/width)

For instance, if you’re aiming for a 4:3 aspect ratio, the calculation would be:

angle = arctan(3/4) = 36.87°

Here’s the table of aspect ratios and their corresponding angles:

Why this works?

This is likely due to a bug (or perhaps a feature?) in Figma. The bug is that if you rotate a frame inside of an auto layout, its width will be set to the width of the outer container, even if it’s rotated.

Changing the width of the outer frame also alters the width of the inner frame, which changes the height of the inner frame, which in turn changes the height of the outer frame. The extent of these changes depends on the angle.