"You'll see how an electron microscope was built in a home shop, how an X-ray backscatter system works, how to make aerogel, and many other hi-tech projects"
DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview by Ben Krasnow
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdjY...
Wow!
Can your tool or your team or your genai workflow offer predictable comfort to your users?
And then do what propcazh said to calculate your design service pricing for taming the unpredictability of their problem and creating predictable comfort controls
bsky.app/profile/prop...
So there's a simple ROI for pitching design services even in AI era.
Can your genai workflow or team help your customers comfortably get their desired outcomes consistently reliably all the time by controlling it predictably within their context's limits?
One way : designing an api or library
If your library becomes a dependency for popular projects, you get passive distribution through other people's code.
Someone else built the crowd, you just position yourself where the crowd already flows.
In software, this happens whenever you build on top of, inside, or alongside a platform that already aggregates user intent.
What this means is someone else must have done the work to make the space/street popular or useful and simply by being in proximity to that shop I get to have visitors.
Where in software do you see this? Maybe plugin ecosystems of really popular software but what else
Vada pav seller makes money simply by being near a college and office. Simply by being in the right shared space near people who need it most or most likely to buy it. No marketing needed.
Whereas for digital products or services you always have to market.
Like you could be walking down the street to buy a shoe and come across a shop down the block selling pants
In software spaces are not shared, they are discrete. You have to make the person land on your landing page.
One huge advantage that a physical product based business has over software in terms of marketing is that a physical storefront can be in a good location and get footfall simply because it is in a shared space beside another shop the person could be browsing
One exception to tech that violates predictable comfort : musical instruments
It has managed unpredictability. For example a jazz instrument is unpredictable in output, but its control surface : keys, strings is highly legible.
Even there the uncertainty is contained, not chaotic.
Engineering can make a system work, but design is what makes it work for a human, within their cognitive bandwidth, emotional tolerance and need for predictability.
If a technology and it's control surface is so unpredictable that using it every time gives you anxiety over when it will break or what it will break it has failed to afford the basic use of technology : predictable comfort
The latter via the built environment, objects, technology help create a repeatable function but it's design that helps humans to control it predictably.
Which is why I think LLMs haven't been designed yet, only engineered.
Everything that affords human control over an activity predictably is design, like that which makes it possible for human mind and body, within its comfortable limits to take action is design's domain I think, not engineering or sciences.
A software developer or product design freelancer can't pitch their services as "you'll recoup your investment in my service by xyz time or outcome" that a gtm sales freelance guy still can, but then the gtm guy can't promise you sales without having a quality product built in the first place
"Let your constraints become your curriculum."
So true for learning in general.
"You don't need to become a different person to build.."
Yes...
but learning changes us. Also, building products requires understanding others wants or needs.
Learning this makes a better product and changes you.
You don't need to become a different person to build something valuable.
You need to let your actual life with its inertia, its gaps become the constraint set that shapes a product only you could make.
That texture is the raw material of product instinct.
Instead of waiting for enough life experience, you let the act of building generate the friction that teaches you what matters. Let your constraints become your curriculum.
You can only know if people want something (pmf) by knowing what they CAN want (design) i.e their mental limits and abilities to use something
I think every design principle and theory can be traced with this notion : Respecting an individual's limits & bending your idea or thing to fit to it, no matter how limited they are in terms of their mental bandwidth or faculties. So making your idea fit into what your user can do or know.
Its the art of fitting complex systems inside ordinary human minds.
You'll know your system is well designed when even the least prepared user can act correctly without thinking.
So design for the lowest common denominator
- assume user is distracted
- assume user is confused
- assume user will not read instructions
- assume user will make mistakes and then make the right action the easiest action and also make it easy to recover from errors
Respect people’s limits and bend the system to fit those limits
Design in a nutshell
He has made a figma plugin that loads his content library on top of your designs
www.figma.com/community/pl...
So you get a tight feedback loop of merging the lessons from case studies while you practice. Clever instructional design, thoughtful pedagogy.
x.com/builtformars...
Built for Mars : A collection of UX case studies
builtformars.com/case-studies
Such a useful platform, it has design case studies from docusign, apple, nike, monzo and he has also categorized it by industries and ux objectives
It can be framed as opportunity for folks in big tech that claims to want to do good/give back as : Use your bigtech logo to create credibility for folks who seem promising to you by publishing stuff together
I think the most practical one is a platform for co-authoring and cross-posting, co-creating content for essays, workshops, talks. In that way the time and energy for personal brand building work gets dissipated and you get to collaborate.
Another idea is for people from big companies working with outsiders to work on co-writing articles/workshop/talks together i.e both building their personal brands together. Especially if both align on key ideas, principles.
and Kshitiz Anand's BeerUX, think of it as house party with beer but to talk about UX
kshitiz.medium.com/getting-back...
A community where people can work together on side projects to upskill and demo stuff
For example Maggie Appleton's futureocoding event where people presented demos informally luma.com/agskn4zn
maggieappleton.com/gathering-st...