August 2012
12 posts
The better question: Innovation vs. Refinement →
The lack of emphasis on refinement has led to a permanent beta culture in technology with the promise always being that someday it will get fixed. Someday you will be able to upgrade to Android 4.0. Someday RIM will make the PlayBook better.
Innovation is important, exciting, and necessary. But so is Refinement. We need to celebrate refinement more than we have. However we shouldn’t be...
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be...”
– Steve Jobs - Commencement Speech at Stanford
“One person’s obvious is another person’s revelation.”
– Joshua Porter - Stating the Obvious
“It is so easy to confuse getting stuff done with doing good work.”
– Joshua Porter - Bokardo - Interface Design & UX
For having work with advertising agencies a great part of my life, I cannot agree more with this statement. Good work, great work is rare. You need to admit to yourself that you will fail many times until you learn what works and not.
“I think “creativity” is better described as failing repeatedly until you get...”
– Seth Godin - The Great Discontent
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“Give more. Expect less.”
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UX is simple - The checklist →
If something is unclear - clarify it
If something is arduous - lighten the load
If something is complex - make it simpler
If something is over verbose - strip it back
If something is ambiguous - clarify it
If something is big - make it feel manageable
If people get lost - let them find their way out
If something goes wrong - let people recover
If something seems pointless -...
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Valve Employee Handbook (PDF) →
One of the most inspiring thing you would have read in a while. Download the eBook and read it. Please do.
How to Use this Book
This book isn’t about fringe benefit or how to set up your workstation or where to find source code. Valve works in ways that might seem counterintuitive at first. This hand-book is about the choices you’re going to be making and how to think about them. Mainly, it’s...
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Valve is different →
Valve is different.
Gabe tells it this way. When he was at Microsoft in the early 90’s, he commissioned a survey of what was actually installed on users’ PCs. The second most widely installed software was Windows.
Number one was Id’s Doom.
The idea that a 10-person company of 20-somethings in Mesquite, Texas, could get its software on more computers than the largest software company in the...
The making of Warcraft →
A very interesting story from the person who have created Warcraft inspired by hours playing the first real time strategy game Dune 2.
“Questions are your mind’s receptors for answers. If you aren’t curious enough to...”
– Jason Fried paraphrasing Clayton Christensen - What are questions? 