The only way you can go wrong is by not trying. ~

Web Design is Product Design, this post has expressed all I perceived as a qualified UX designer.

A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures.

Web design is product design. Drawing a picture of the product is not designing the product. Web design is experience design. Drawing a picture of on-screen content or mechanism behaviors is not designing the experience. The functioning html/css (and sometimes JavaScript) is the design.

Graphic design is often important in web design, but only as one component of web design’s requirements. If you stop at the .psd you’ve stopped well before midpoint in the design. The graphic designer who lacks html/css skill is insufficiently prepared as a web designer. A designer who lacks competence should address that issue rather than seek refuge within embarrassing debate.

Not sure if that’s the case for Shanghai. As quite a lot of designers I have been working with or knowing are just NOT capable of writing a single line of code. That is to say once they encounter a implementation issue, just like what is quoted, they seek for excuse and try to stay as far as they can. The result is their opinions are normally neglected by developers, good designs are thrown away as well.

This situation is okay if you are working for a big name company, everything will be divided into fine-grained piece to the right people to do in most cases. On the stark contrast, it could be very dangerous if you are only sticking on “specialization” for a start-up. Wearing multiple hats is almost a must have skill for anybody in a 5 to 50 people company. And you don’t have excuse.

I can write HTML, CSS, Actionscript, Javascript and now are actively moving onto advanced Javascript such as Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile to make myself be ready for mobile application design. In the meanwhile, I also touch Objective-C and help with my partner hopefully on crunching out out small but interesting projects on iOS. And believe me, none of them is easy. I wanted to develop my developer’s logic and tried to be acute on coding for years. In the beginning, I was extremely slow and frustrated, but then, things gradually got better and better.

Now HTML5 is becoming versatile than ever and lots of big names in the tech world are actively embrace it like crazy. As a call to UX designer, is your skill set ready for this revolution?

Originally I don’t plan to be another Steve Jobs advocator after the whole world is talking about him for years long. And especially recently after his resignation as Apple CEO. But an aside from Garry Tan suddenly made me think this as a fact:

It’s Apple’s series of products and Steve Jobs and his team lifted up the user experience industry to a unprecedented place. They made ordinary people to be better aware of the importance of user experience for a product. To be more explicitly, people today are willing to spend more than ever amount of bucks for a product with brilliant experience.

And this actually started from decade ago. What he said was really insightful and inspiring.

Question:

I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say java, in any of it’s incarnations, addresses the idea (inaudible). And when you’re finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last 7 years.

Steve:

You know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but…. One of the hardest things when you’re trying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas.

……

The hardest thing is: how does that fit in to a cohesive, larger vision, that’s going to allow you to sell 8 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year? And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology”. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case.

……

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take.

In another video, he also added:

You think about focusing, you think focusing is about saying “yes?” No. Focusing is about saying no. And you’ve got to say “no,” “no,” “no.” And you know you’re going to piss off people. and they go talk to the San Jose Mercury and they write a shitty article about you. And it’s really a pisser. Because you wanna be nice, you don’t wanna to tell the San Jose Mercury the person who is telling you this was just asked to leave, or this or that. So you take the lumps, and Apple’s been taking their share of lumps for the last six months. In a very unfair way. And it’s been taking them like an adult and I’m proud of that. And there’s more to come, I’m sure. There’ll be stories like that, they come and go, but focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products. Where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.

It was just 1 hour before a mundane Monday was off that I got a mail from my feature dev owner with a bad news. She said that one of the key features I defined in spec could not be done because the related dev has not planned for it.

The first thing I did with my PM hat was to figure out the solution to it. So I asked him about giving me a SWAG of the dev cost. With this data in hand, I can ask the dev lead for extra resources for implementing it. Everybody will be happy. No big deal.

What interesting is then the cause of it. I thought it through on the commute and saw 2 reasons that life could have been even easier:

1. I forgot to involve that dev who actually would implement the feature into dev review meeting. My assumption was that he was aware of it or at least would skim my spec. I was wrong.
2. Even I didn’t include him in the meeting. He could still give me a hand, only if we had fair relationship. But the truth is I have been roaming around recently without really getting in touch with him for quite some time. Another big no-no if you are working in a company located in China, no matter where the headquarter is.

If you are good at something, never do it for free. ~ The Joker

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. ~ George Patton

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. ~ Douglas MacArthur

Aaron Levie, Box.net founder made a quite valid statement at his Five Solid Startup Lessons at Stanford: Do something that was not possible three years ago. From my perspective, it can also be translated as “Use best of your knowledge and intuition to predict what will be big three years later and do it now.” Here are the items in mobile and web area that I believe will be possible or prevalent in 3 years.

• HTML5, not the mark-up language alone but more like the a set of related technologies such as CSS3, modernized Javascript and so on will dominate both web and mobile app world.
• Speaking of the mobile app, browser will be the next App Store (Marketplace, App World, App Catalog whatever you name it ). There is no necessary to download a client app to consume the content. An mobile optimized web site versus a mobile app will continue to be more blurry.
• NFC will be mind-blowing to fundamentally connect every “thing” in the world. Mobile payment is the foreshore application of it and will get more serious, eventually enter primer time.
• LBS will get big and business start making real cash from it.
• WebGL (see how awesome experiments Google has done here and here with it) and remote render farm will bring back the hardcore game back to the main stage. People will continue loving casual games, but we are able to see more and more 3D rendered masterpiece as well. Chances are we can play DOTA on iPhone 7.
• Apple specific: Mac OS X and iOS will eventually merge together as one single OS. A hybrid of iPad and Macbook Air will be empowered by it. Knell of PC era rings.

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. ~ Jim Horning