Issue 73

Mouthwashing after A/B testing

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

• Useful tips for a designer's career

• What is "Zenitism"

• A cool guide to animations for interfaces

• A huge collection of styles that Midjourney knows

• AI is a tool for generating color palettes

• Why you should not blindly rely on A/B testing

• Generating React components based Tailwind CSS by text query

• …and much more!

Enjoy reading!

🗞 News and articles

State of Brand Report 2023

A large report by the branding agency Just Creative on current trends in the branding industry. It contains statistics on pricing, key industry issues, customer acquisition strategies, the use of AI in work and other issues.

For example, you can find out from the article that 86% of respondents receive clients through word of mouth, 70% already use AI in their work, and 18.8% receive additional income for consulting and other services.

Dan Mall’s 10 Principles for a Worthy Design Career

Dan Mall spoke about 10 principles that will help a designer solve complex problems, prevent burnout, as well as stimulate learning and develop his career.

Tips from the article:

• Start your journey by choosing a goal worthy of your efforts. It should be exciting, important and frightening

• Place your bet on the area where you have the initial advantage

• Choose clear and achievable goals

• Be able to stop in time when reaching the goal. Also, sometimes it's worth giving up a goal for something more

• Before you start the project, take the time to prepare. Brainstorm and look at other people's work. This is just as important as a warm-up in sports. Do not dive into the Figure without warming up

• Don't be afraid of routine work. It can serve as an antidote to burnout

• Do not lose pace in your work, even if it seems boring. Preparation before work will help you to be on the move from the very beginning

• Find a purpose in your work. Understanding why you are taking on a project is just as important as knowing how to do it

• After completing the work, be open to new goals. Even if you fail, you can always change the vector by starting a new chapter

Optimizing for Taste

David Kramer wrote about why you should not blindly rely on A/B testing in a product strategy.

Despite the popularity of this method, he believes that such a strategy leads to indecision and stagnation within the product, as well as deprives its creators of a clear idea of further development.

Instead, David suggests relying on taste, which should be based on the experience and expertise of the decision maker.

Metrics, Cowardice, and Mistrust

Ivan Vendrov explained why the desire to rely on simple engagement metrics in product development is caused by cowardice and distrust.

He says that people don't want to be responsible for making subjective decisions, especially if their idea fails. For the same reasons, they are afraid to delegate the decision to someone else, since in case of failure it may affect them. As a result, the whole team decides to rely on metrics to protect themselves.

In addition, simple and "stupid" metrics are often used, because more complex ones can reveal existing problems.

Ivan offers two solutions to this problem:

• The monarchy of one visionary who has enough courage and competence to take responsibility for important decisions. This is how Apple developed its products, where Steve Jobs was the monarch. The downside of this approach is the limited attention of the leader, but he can grow his assistants

• A decentralized ideology that holds a set of ideas that company employees can rely on. This is usually called a mission. In reality, when making difficult decisions, individual employees or investors may rebel against ideology

I also recommend Ivan's previous article, in which he talked about why teams of large products are chasing new users, and not thinking about retaining old ones.

⚡️ Briefly

Stop Lazy Loading Product and Hero Images. Jason Grigsby explained why you shouldn't use "lazy loading" for all the graphics on the page. Instead, it offers to immediately upload images on the main screen, and upload the rest of the images when the user scrolls through the page below or starts scrolling through the gallery.

He also recommends using the new loading="lazy" attribute instead of JavaScript libraries for deferred loading.

New technologies

The creators of the Vercel developer platform have released a V0 tool that allows you to generate React components based on shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS by text query.

At the time of publication, the tool is in private beta testing mode, but on the website you can see the components that it creates.