WDRL — Edition 249: Better design briefs, mental models, practical crypto and how IT radicalized the world.

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Hey,

How much does design affect the perception of our product and the users who see this? To me it’s getting clearer that design makes all the difference and that unifying designs to a standard model like the Google Material Design Kit doesn’t work well. By using it, you of course get a decent design that works technically quite well. But you don’t get a personal experience that lasts or even targets people on a personal level. Good design fits to your company’s purpose and adjusts to what visitors expect, makes them feel comfortable where they are. Now think about which websites you visit and if you feel comfortable being there, reading or even contributing content to the service. It’s something that e.g. Instagram manages to do very well. Design can help us to stay grounded or it can be a nice but anonymous, not interesting design that people don’t care about. We have it in our hands to shape a better experience and it turns out that it’s shaping our society. We can choose whether for the good or the worse.

UI/UX

• HolaBrief looks promising. It’s a tool that improves how we create design briefs and wants to keep everyone on the same page in the process, something that so far barely happens in projects.
• Mental models are explanations of how we see the world. Teresa Man wrote about how we can apply Mental models in product design and why it matters.

Security

• Svetlin Nakov wrote a book about Practical Cryptography for Developers and it’s available for free. If you ever wanted to understand or know more about how private/public keys, hashing, cyphers or signatures work, this is a great entry for you.

Work & Life

• Stig Brautaset on why he nearly failed to get into his job as submarine sonar operator due to a silly hiring rule and how he made the best out of the situation and succeeded. This is a lesson to all who hire people to not stick too much to guidelines and rules but trust your gut and listen to peoples’ stories.

Go beyond…

• Neil Stevenson on Steve Jobs, creativity and death and why this is a good story for life. Although copying Steve Jobs is likely not a good idea, this provides some different angles on how we might want to work, what to do with our lives and why purpose matters for many of us.
• Ryan Broderick reflects on what we did by inventing the internet. He concludes that all that radicalism in the world, that weird political views are all due to the invention of social media, chat software and the (not so sub-)culture of promoting and embracing all the bad things happening in our society. Remember about 4chan, reddit and similar services but also Facebook et al? They contribute and embrace not only good ideas but often stupid or even harmful ones. This is how we radicalized the world is a sad story to read but well written and with a lot of good thoughts about how we shape society with technology in it.

—Anselm