Simon Joliveau Breney
@simonjb
Simon Joliveau Breney
@simonjb
The desktop user interface is a mainstay of computing. Bread and butter, if you will. A pointer, icons, windows, menus and buttons, controlled using a keyboard and a mouse. Ingenious simplicity.
For almost half a century now, we haven't really managed to come up with something better, and that's not for lack of trying. This fact seems to annoy a lot
... See moreThis is hard for me. It’s actually easier for me to do more and work more, than to stop and listen to my energy levels and inspiration and create from that place. My brain has been trained quite well under the “putting more in, means you get MORE out of it, so, ERGO! you gotta do more” model.
I’ve spent years reading, experimenting, and gathering ideas about this. And while I won’t claim to have the secret recipe to cure all issues, there’s one thing all successful remote teams have in common:
they fight the siloing of information as if their survival depends on it.
Because it does.
“Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want.” - Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter To Shareholders
Brian and most everyone at the company is comfortable failing publicly, which I admire.
Give good feedback (and ask for it, explicitly). A lot has been said elsewhere so I’ll go with: do it frequently and immediately, from a place of care, as a set of things you have observed, explaining the impact.
But we shouldn't build entire paradigms, or even just individual interfaces, based on the assumption that everyone else is using computers the same way we ourselves do. Most people don't conceptualize graphic design ideas or freestyle pretend corporate presentations. Some are controlling an industrial process, editing a feature film, designing an
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