Digital Product Design Notes

Reading this interview with Joel Califa made me start taking a few notes. I especially liked this card suit analogy:

♣️ Club: “This is bad.” This is blunt negative feedback. You aren’t given any insight into how you could improve. This kind of feedback only serves to demoralize.

♥️ Heart: “This is good.” This is blunt positive feedback. You aren’t given any insight into what about the thing you did was good, so you can’t learn from it. You feel good, but on the whole it’s not super useful.

♠️ Spade: “This isn’t great because…” “This could be better if…” This is sharp negative feedback. It explains why something isn’t great and how it could be better. This makes it actionable. Note that this doesn’t mean you’re “solutioning” for the presenter (which is almost always counter-productive in reviews)—you could be giving them potential areas to explore.

♦️ Diamond: “This is awesome because…” This is sharp positive feedback. It lets you feel good while learning what to keep or continue doing.

You don’t want clubs and hearts. You do want diamonds and spades. Good feedback is relevant, timely, constructive, and specific.

Joel Califa

I also loved Joel’s Google Sheets hack:

This is a nice system by Joel … esp because it doesn’t use another #!*&#!$& tool.

All of this reminded me of the article on UX Collective with this terrific summary:

  1. Everyone is a lead
  2. Designers are too busy to design
  3. Design is not saving the world
  4. Designing for less
  5. Our obsession with methods
  6. Should design tools code?
  7. Thinking outside the artboard
  8. Embracing the open kitchen
  9. Making tech work

This all made me wonder about a bunch of others things I’ve seen popping out there. Like this competency model:

A complex toolkit for a complex problem?

And tangentially made me think of the benefits-driven approach by Andrew Chen.

Then there is this framework on delegation principles that I found based on this idea below:

https://twitter.com/schlaf/status/1077295804103180293?s=21

This is a good one from Shaun Coffey:

Gordon MacKenzie

via Bob

Pyramid – organizes into ‘Divisions’ (the state of being divided) and ‘Departments’

Plum tree – organises into ‘Groups’ (a number of persons who act as a unit) and ‘Forces’ (groups having the power of effective action)

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