“Beauty triggers curiosity differently. It draws us in the content not with a promise of knowledge but with a promise of visual satisfaction. We feel touched by the work before getting to the knowledge. Beauty makes it easier for us to look deeper, to wander around the content, to gather knowledge while already being satisfied.”The power of beauty in...

“And in that moment I realized I was a character. And I had the chance to write that interview story as it was happening. Many literary characters experience conflict, but the real drama of a story begins after that conflict. A well-written character has agency to shape their destiny. Staying angry is the boring way out. Being the protagonist of a behavioral...

“Design thinking, double diamond, agile, scrum, lean UX, design sprint. Humans seek formulas. Formulas sell books, classes, and courses, and feed multi-million contracts where consultancies come in to fix teams that are misaligned and can’t get work done. Watch out for Trademarked Processes™ that claim to solve all your company’s problems. Instead,...

“This is the trend of making what I call complicated sticks. Complicated sticks are complex tech products that are useful for everything and nothing in particular. Evident in these wispy ads that try to give a blanket impression of good vibes and positivity that’s more suited to fashion, fragrances, and marketing within flooded product categories, not...

“If we’re being honest with ourselves, the transformative new era hasn’t been so transformative yet. We were given the ‘most profound technology since fire,’ and companies have used it to make fake candles.The next stage of this argument is to tackle a thornier problem: AI is seen as a loose-leaf solution rather than a new paradigm of user experience....

“In April, Supernova held a ‘State of Design Tokens 2024’ webinar panel with design system experts Donnie D’Amato, Jacob Miller, and Kathleen McMahon. Before long, the topic of ‘A Single Source of Truth’ for design tokens came up, and some people disagreed on what that meant. Opinions fell into one of three main assertions.”A “single source of truth”—and...