Some good insights in reading about Flipkart’s popularity in India and how they achieved that.
https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/how-did-flipkart-convince-indians
Category: Product
The examples are hugely exaggerated for effect but the explanation of why so many people in software engineering keep themselves busy with solving imaginary problems is worth it.
https://cerebralab.com/Imaginary_Problems_Are_the_Root_of_Bad_Software
After using all kinds of note taking tools (eg. Notational Velocity) at some point some years ago I moved all my personal notes to Bear and it has been my secret productivity boost ever since.
I’m glad to see that they’ve held to the vision and didn’t compromise to get Bear 2 just right. It can be difficult to pull something like that through.
https://www.theverge.com/23786996/bear-2-notes-app-iphone-ipad-mac
Looking back over my notes and reactions from Interaction16 where I gave a talk calling chat interfaces the “UI for AI”. Feels good to be right.
Ink & Switch is doing amazing work leveraging technology like CRDTs to create novel highly-interactive multiplayer interfaces. Here’s their work on Upswelling which is a git-like take on writing and editing.
It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).
What we need with the Bürgeramt though is not 10% more appointments but the automation of at least half of the processes there to no longer need human intervention. We needed that 10 years ago.
Going through these presentations by Matt Jones the main thing I’m left wondering is if anybody still does any real design and thinking work anymore, when it comes to technology or if all of it now is just flinging shit against the wall (which it very much looks like).
“When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
“He believes that a justice lens can help foster collaboration and creativity in a much broader way that goes beyond our current power structures.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/
Important prototyping work to show how German government forms can be much better and much friendlier than what’s out there right now.
Getting anything like this to production will be very very difficult without a lot of systemic changes and groundwork done first.
Planning should be about confidence intervals and de-risking, not about loading capacity full with commitment.