Cap Watkins: Treat Your Life Like a User Experience Problem

Too often, the product design, product management, and engineering teams are thought of as three separate entities. This divide, according to Cap Watkins, the VP of Design at Buzzfeed, can lead designers to feel undervalued or even defensive when the product managers or engineers attempt to make suggestions to their work. Having realized this battle at Buzzfeed, Watkins proposed the question: “How do we create a culture of empowerment for design?”

In this 99u talk, Watkins provides a step-by-step process to blur the lines between the different product building teams in an effort to get feedback on not only the work being done, but also the process on how that work gets done. Change is complicated and creating the internal partnerships will adjust the way people work, ultimately for the better. “We have to realize that working together doesn’t mean we’re trying to take each others job,” says Watkins. “We’re just trying to be better collaborators.”

Endless September (10 quick rules)

Seth Godin: 

Here are ten things to remember, feel free to share with those that are less experienced. Happy September:

Don't hit 'reply all' to an email unless you have a really good reason. And don't write, "take me off this list" to a listserv, because everyone on the list will probably get your note. That's been true for thirty years and it's still true. 

You may think you can recall a sent email, but you probably can't. Best to breathe three times before you hit send.

Don't type in all caps.

Don't buy anything on the phone (or by email) from a stranger, especially anything having to do with your small business, your computer, your Google listing or a charity. Just hang up.

Everything you click on or surf on or do online is being recorded somewhere. Act accordingly.

Backup your data, get tenant's insurance and turn on 'Find my iPhone' on your Mac.

When in doubt, restart your computer. If that doesn't work, visit duckduckgo and type in your question. You'll be amazed at how many people have had the problem you're having.

To become an expert in something, you're going to need to read more than the first link that comes up in a search. And before you forward something you're not an expert in, check Snopes.

Offer help on something you're good at to the community at least three times before you ask that community for help. Someone is always coming up behind you.

Don't believe everything you read online. In fact, don't believe most of it.

Bonus #11: Be kind. Thanks.

The Importance of Staring Out Of The Window

The School of Life: 

We are so busy and so obsessed with our phones, we rarely take a break to do that vital and rather philosophical thing: stare out of the window. 

Augmented Urban Reality

Frank Rose in The New Yorker: 

The Times recently reported that midtown sidewalks are so crowded that people have taken to walking in the street.

It’s a bit curious that this is happening just as digital technology infiltrates everything. If the automobile caused us to disperse, the information age seems, paradoxically, to be drawing us back together. Widespread predictions that the Internet would free us all to telecommute from the greener pastures of outer Podunk have not been borne out. Being hyperconnected in the digital dimension appears only to make us want to feel hyperconnected in the physical as well. Which is fortunate, because cities are generally beneficial in any number of ways—more efficient than suburbs and small towns in their use of energy and other resources, more conducive to the free flow of ideas, more tolerant, more, well, urbane. The question is whether technology will be able to support the millions of people whom cities are now attracting.

Pixar: What Makes a Story Relatable

A quick look at Pixar's approach to storytelling and character development.