Baseball Mud and the Delaware River

Split screen of baseball field

Split screen of baseball field

Wanna write some original content?

Log out of social media and do some gardening.

Get your grocery shopping done.

Go outside and play some baseball.

Stare at a 400-year old painting face to face.

See a movie in a real theater, with real people around you.

You’ll notice the nuts and bolts of life, how less saturated with color reality is.

How a VERY small percentage of people you talk to actually know what SMH stands for.

Listen to what they say, what really matters to them.

Listen to their lives, what they’re worried about, how they still can’t figure out that rattling noise under the hood of their car, and how they’re holding off going to the mechanic until after they pay their mortgage this month.

Sooner or later, someone will tell you something you didn’t know that has nothing to do with clickfunnels or viral marketing or influencers.

Did you know that before every game, umpires rub six dozen baseballs with mud from the Delaware River to roughen them up so pitchers can grip them more easily?

I caught a foul ball once. It wasn’t shiny or new looking.

My hand was numb for ten minutes.

I didn’t care about my smartphone at that moment.

Reductive Design is Butter!

I spent a couple hours tonight helping a colleague stress test the user interface for a web hosting control panel, using cPanel. Amazing how my product design/methodology schooling came on like Spidey-sense. Some quick notes:

1. User interface is often about REMOVING elements and simplifying steps. Less mouse clicks, less keyboard entries, less words to explain anything.

2. It’s better to give the customer LESS OPTIONS and have him accomplish 1 thing very quickly than give him dozens of options and have him NOT be able to accomplish anything at all. Apple has made a fortune with this philosophy.

3. The biggest favor you can do for a developer is try to BREAK his system at the beginning as much as possible. Pretend you know nothing about computers and just click away. It’s much better than being surprised later when the pain comes from disgruntled customers, and by that time it’s too late.

4. Patience is a virtue but not when you’re pretending to be a customer. To emulate the customer, you need to be IMPATIENT, SKIM through the instructions, and NOT PAY ATTENTION to what you’re doing. This is what REAL PEOPLE do when they interact with technology.

#ui #ux #userinterface #stresstesting #experiencedesign #design #frontend