Train yourself in frustration, confusion, and inefficiency

For professional reasons, I like to mess around with software. It’s a form of training, because some of the messing around leads to frustration, confusion, and inefficiency. And that’s good.
My hope is that my experiences will help me to better understand what I put various groups of software users through when they use the software […]

Design and engineering culture

I’m sure Douglas Bowman’s blog last week was widely read. His post was a kind of public exit interview, titled Goodbye Google.
As Bowman left Google, he pointed out the pro-engineering bias in its approach to problem solving—including problems of design. Two of several examples he gives:
[…] a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 […]