Items of Interest

Collecting amazing and interesting things on the web.

Page 8

Will the Real Introverts Please Stand Up?

August 9, 2014

introversion / personality / psychology

Introversion is one of the most misunderstood dimensions of personality. Many people are not aware that the original definition of introversion, as posed by Carl Jung, is not how the term is used in modern personality psychology. Jung equated introversion with “inwardly directed psychic energy”. Even the modern Wikipedia page for Extraversion and Introversion defines introversion as “the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one’s own mental life.”

But that’s not introversion.

UX Week 2014 Keynote Josh Clark on the Future of Digital Product Design

August 9, 2014

design / mobile / product design / user experience

I think it’s really important to remember that the software is ideological. There are politics to software, in terms of the values and biases that you embed into it. And in a business where we design and shape paths of behavior, it’s important to acknowledge what those values are, so we can be conscious of it as much as possible. I think that as much as you can keep your eyes open to understand what those motivations and agendas are, the better served you’ll be. I think there’s a natural human impulse to assume that our initial guess was right, and so we’re sometimes blind to our own agendas or biases.

Using Grunt with Pattern Lab

August 9, 2014

brad frost / grunt / pattern lab

I haven’t yet started using Grunt, as my job involves a lot of projects, and people with a lot of different front end/command line skillsets, but I’m itching to get started. The more things like this I find, the more helpful it looks.

The Myth of Learning Styles

August 9, 2014

education / psychology

So here is the punch line: Students differ in their abilities, interests, and background knowledge, but not in their learning styles. Students may have preferences about how to learn, but no evidence suggests that catering to those preferences will lead to better learning.

Leah Buley – UX as a Team Sport

August 9, 2014

design / leah buley / user experience

What’s less common or less prevalent, is a team that’s able to function with a clear shared point of view that’s informed by real observations of users, about what the right role of the product is in the customer’s life, and how it’s going to fit and work to meet customer’s needs.

What I find in the work that I’m doing it’s that, teams want that so badly. Teams have a lot of observations and ideas and empathetic feelings about customers.

It’s not always the case that teams have a shared and clear idea of, “This is who our customer is. This is how this product is realistically and compellingly going to solve that particular need.

This is how it’s going to fit unobtrusively into the mess and chaos of a normal customer’s life.”

What UX brings is not teaching people how to feel or love or care about other people. It’s about helping form and create a informed point of view, about how to make a product that is helpful for customers and useful for customers in the way that customers want it to be and the business wants it to be.

Keep export commands working in Fish shell

August 5, 2014

development / mac / terminal

I enjoy the Fish command line shell on OSX, but occasionally it causes issues with items in my .bash_profile since it doesn’t like export commands. I kept reading about how Fish expects other types of commands, but I really didn’t have time to go through all the things I had and translate them. But finally I didn’t want to lose Fish, so I found this: a translator for export, into Fish.