Issue 49: Little island created at a scale
Interactive mini-courses and tests for UX designers, What is Ashby's law and how to apply it in UX design and so much more!
Hello, dear readers! 👋
In this issue, among other things:
Why does the growth of the company lead to a decrease in the quality of the product
What is Ashby's law and how to apply it in UX design
What are the cons of the ChatGPT interface and other chatbots
How to adapt Live Activity notifications to an iPhone with an "island"
A practical guide on implementing accessibility standards in web design
A selection of landing pages with analysis of solutions to increase conversion
Interactive mini-courses and tests for UX designers
Why it is necessary to conduct tests, and not blindly repeat after competitors.
A large library of SVG icons for all occasions
Quotes from "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" book by Daniel Coyle
Enjoy reading!
📚 Book quotes
This week I suggest you another book by Daniel Coyle's "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" Review the quotes and decide whether to read or not:
Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.
The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.
Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.
Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.
When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.
One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.
As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.
Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.
We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.
While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.
You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.
Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices. This is why Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people—specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together.
You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.
This is a different way of thinking about human beings," Pentland says. "Individuals aren't really individuals. They're more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement others in the group. You don't look at the informational content of the messages; you look at patterns that show how the message is being sent. Those patterns contain many signals that tell us about the relationship and what's really going on beneath the surface.
The Culture Code | Unlock The Secrets to the Most Successful Teams
🗞 News and articles
What is Ashby’s law and how does it relate to UX design?
Dejan Blagic spoke about what Ashby's law is and how it can be applied in UX design. In the plane of UX design, the law says that the complexity of the interface should be less than or equal to the level of expertise of the user. To achieve this goal, you can either simplify the interface to the user level, or help the user learn how to manage a more complex system for him.
You can also combine the simplification of the interface with training and get the optimal "way of acquaintance" with the system.
What is Ashby’s law and how does it relate to UX design?
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
Amelia Wattenberger spoke about the shortcomings of the interface and functionality of ChatGPT and other AI-based chatbots. She also suggested several improvements for more precise management of such chatbots, which would help users simplify their work and get more predictable results from AI.
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future of Interfaces
«Craft at scale» is a white whale
Adam Stoddard's note on why the company's growth leads to a decrease in product quality and a shift in focus to profit-making, whether this rule applies to digital products and why designers, as a rule, cannot influence this.
At the end of the argument, Adam comes to the conclusion that if you want to create a quality product, then you need to look for a company that is developing slowly. Usually such companies are focused on long-term goals, and not on short-term profit-making.
“Craft at scale” is a white whale | Adam Stoddard
⚡️ Briefly
That little island changes everything. Alexander Savard spoke in detail about the design of interactive notifications "Live Activity" using the example of the Lyft taxi ordering iOS application, and also showed the process of their adaptation to the new iPhone with a dynamic island at the top of the screen.
“That little island changes everything”
Web Accessibility: A Reference to Creating Inclusive Websites. A well-structured reference article on the implementation of accessibility standards in web design.
Web Accessibility: A Reference to Creating Inclusive Websites
New technologies
Stability AI has released the Stable Animation SDK, a powerful tool for creating animations using Stable Diffusion. You can use text, text+image and text+video as hints. Any Stable Diffusion models are suitable for operation, including Stable Diffusion 2.0 and Stable Diffusion XL.
The price starts from $0.058 for one loan. For example: to create an animation with a size of 512 × 512px and a length of 100 frames, 37.5 credits will be required, which is equal to $2.17.
Detailed information in the official guide.
At the presentation of I/O 2023, Google presented a lot of new products, including tools based on artificial intelligence.
The main announcements on the AI:
A new PaLM 2 language model is presented, which uses about 540 billion parameters. It has, among other things, improved support for programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Prolog, Verilog and Fortran
The Bard chatbot, a competitor to ChatGPT, is now available for free to users from 180 countries. It is able to generate text, prepare a summary of web pages, explain code, plan trips and much more. Later, the bot will become multimodal and, in addition to text, will be able to generate images, and will also receive extended support for languages
A set of Duet AI AI tools will appear in Google Workspace office applications, which should speed up work. For example, users will be able to generate tables and make presentations based on a text query
Google will add "snapshots" to the search results — answers from AI that will help expand the search context
Android 14 will have new AI-based features. For example, it will be possible to generate wallpapers based on a text query and respond to messages using hints
The Magic Editor AI tool will appear in Google Photos, which will allow you to move or delete objects in the photo, edit the colors and shapes of objects, and much more
🧘 Inspiration
Branding
Concise identity of the Guan Shanyue Art Museum Document Library. The authors originally used the silhouette of bookmarks sticking out of the book and based on this flexible form built the layout of all materials.
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