How annoying (but really, fantastic) that people use our product in so many ways. Turns out, product design isn’t about laying out elements in the most ideal scenario for the user that’s most convenient for you. As product designers, we have to foresee every outcome, and anticipate every potential user need.

Which brings me to another annoying epiphany: if you want to do it well, and account for every user, product design is so much more snarly and tangled than you’d expect going in. I began with a simple goal: to improve the experience on just one of our key product pages. However, every small change impacts every part of the product to some degree, and that impact has to be accounted for. Every decision is based on assumptions that have to be tested; I test my assumptions by observing users, talking to the team, wireframing, and prototyping. Many of my assumptions are wrong. There are days when it’s incredibly frustrating, because an elegant solution for users with one goal will complicate life for users with another goal. It’s vital to solve as many scenarios as possible, even though this is slow, sometimes mind-bending work.

– Meagan Fisher, “What I Learned about Product Design This Year“

We tend not to think beyond our own experiences, believing we can extend what we know to the rest of the world. This makes us very (very) prone to solving problems that apply only to ourselves. When you design only for yourself, it’s not design; it’s indulging your vanity. Which is completely fine, but not what you’re here to learn.

– Stephanie Engle, in Intro to Product Design​

Good metrics aren’t just about raising money from VCs … they’re about running the business in a way where founders can know how — and why — certain things are working (or not).

– Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen in “16 More Startup Metrics“

 

Metrics are often wrong. I think this is something that is often not talked about as much publicly out of general embarrassment. But every company faces this.

– Samson Hu in Building Analytics at 500px, a brilliant article on building and evangelizing analytics infrastructure and dashboards

‘What Travis infuses in the company is that the best ideas win,’ he says. ‘You have to be willing to step on toes to make sure the idea is heard, and you’re supposed to only be loyal to the idea, to the truth.’

– Max Chafkin quoting Uber’s CTO Thuan Pham in What Makes Uber Run

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far.   Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand.  Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV.  So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

– Poul-Henning Kamp, Bike Shed