dotsandgrids

[dotsandgrids]

You will not always get to do gigs where you're helping make the world a better place. But do the work to make the world a better place regardless of where you are.

- Dylan Wilbanks

[dotsandgrids]

Never stop asking dumb questions. Never miss an opportunity to be the dumbest person in the room.

- Dylan Wilbanks

[dotsandgrids]

User Experience is a value loop: if value goes out to the people who use the product, it's highly likely that value will come back to the creator, the organization, the investor sponsoring the product. Value out equals value back in.

- Joe Natoli

[dotsandgrids]

Design, of any kind, is a problem solving discipline. Our job is to solve issues, problems of communication, of understanding, of comprehension to allow people to take actions based on what they see.

- Joe Natoli

[dotsandgrids]

If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.

- Albert Einstein

[dotsandgrids]

[dotsandgrids]

Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningul order.

- Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World

[dotsandgrids]

On a pragmatic level, a world of shrinking distances, fast air travel, and instant global communication cannot afford to have three-fourths of its inhabitants diseased, starving, or dying from neglect. The ethics of the situation are clear: we are all citizens of one global village and we have an obligation to those in need.

- Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World

[dotsandgrids]

You are responsible for the work you put into the world.

Carefully choose the projects you take on. Choose to leave the world better than you found it. Improve things for people. This doesn't mean just working on non-profit or purely mission-driven projects. A lot of commercial products and services improve life for people in large and small ways. Just make sure there is some meaning to what you are doing besides exploiting a niche. Be the advocate for the person who will ultimately buy, use, or experience what you are designing.

We have limited resources, whether natural, financial, or cognitive. Don't contribute to people wasting them on crap.

- Mike Monteiro, Design is a Job

[dotsandgrids]

The first step to designing anything: ask "Why are we doing this?"... Can you help set those goals? If so, do it... Anything that helps you do your job is part of your job.

- Mike Monteiro, Design is a Job

[dotsandgrids]

A designer solves problems within a set of constraints... A designer understands goals.

- Mike Monteiro, Design is a Job

[dotsandgrids]

Creativity demands sufficient sleep.

- Mike Monteiro, Design is a Job

[dotsandgrids]

I wanted control over the kind of clients I worked with. It's my belief that as a designer you are responsible for what you put into the world. ...we never feel we have to take on a job we can't ethically stand behind just to keep the lights on.

- Mike Monteiro, Design is a Job

[dotsandgrids]

Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates

Director: What's your biggest fear?

Bill Gates: I don't want my brain to stop working.

[dotsandgrids]

Doing UX work is all about not knowing; that's the foundation of the work we do. We don't know, so we find out. This is our normal, natural, state of being.

- Joe Natoli, The Way It Is

[dotsandgrids]

If you want to improve the usability of your site, make sure you address the content, not just the interface.

- Paul Boag (2017)

[dotsandgrids]

When we use the web we have questions and are looking for answers. The job of a website is to provide those answers. Yet too often we are more interested in convincing them than answering their questions.

Once we have this mindset it completely changes the way we approach our website. We should not start from the premise of “what do we want to say?” We should begin with “what questions do users want us to answer?”

This mindset impacts everything from the structure of our site to the content of each pages.

- Paul Boag (2017)