Here are the slides (as a PDF) and the 1-page handout for the speech I’m giving tonight at Agile SoCal. It’s entitled Simplicity Appreciation 101. (Note: These materials have been revised greatly since I debuted the topic at Code Camp last January.)
Monthly Archives: September 2011
On Shortening Wait Times
According to The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda, shortening wait times goes a long ways towards the appearance of simplicity. People hate to wait, and systems that make people wait seem more complicated than systems that don’t. So, for one thing, an engineer charged with improving the performance of a system would do well to first look at the places in the UI where the user is made to wait and optimize those areas, before moving on to areas where the user does not need to wait. Continue reading On Shortening Wait Times
The Reasonable Man
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
Brainstorming for One
I just went digging through some old blog posts of mine, and a found a few worth reposting. Here’s an excerpt of one from early 2004…
A colleague of mine gave a presentation yesterday about brainstorming techniques. For example, he talked about how an initial pool of ideas can be built up in the generation phase by pushing the boundaries, piggy-backing on the previous ideas, and inverting or negating the previous ideas.
I will never forget the first time I tried it. Continue reading Brainstorming for One