thisisfranciswu

Dad reflexes are 10% athleticism and 90% assuming your child has a complete disregard for self-preservation.

How complexity accumulates How systems vecome risky without anyone noticing.

Each new feature or process is a tax that compounds. Here's a great dive into how complexity is created, famous failures, and some mitigation strategies. I especially like the "one in, one out" policy. It happens to be how I avoid household clutter. uxdesign.cc/how-complexi...

Humanity Still Producing New Art As Though Megadeth’s ‘Rust In Peace’ Doesn’t Already Exist WASHINGTON—Saying that any further endeavors of technical skill and imagination were pointless, experts at the Smithsonian Institution reportedly questioned Monday why new art was still being…

Sometimes my stance on the Google Fonts icon library is not unlike The Onion's stance on Megadeth's "Rust In Peace". theonion.com/humanity-sti...

Reality Doesn’t Negotiate Seek reality, not validation.

Assume you're wrong, make the smallest bet possible, and let reality prove you're right. #productmanagement medium.com/@m2jr/realit...

Your, My, My - Fighting Proper Noun Feature Names Elevating every feature in your interface to proper noun status will make a mess of your interface and technical writing. And confuse the heck out of users.

Proper noun feature names are a communication tax on everyone. Marketing, sales, users, ICs, and support—everyone pays it. If it looks like a duck (etc.), call it a duck. Not a "Submersible Flat-Billed Avian Rodent™." You're adding negative value to everything. kubie.co/blog/fightin...

TIL about the Shared Mutable State anti-pattern and the Principle of Least Privilege. I’ve felt the UX friction these cause for years, but now I know them by name. Design education is too indexed on graphics, ignoring that we’re in also systems design, a field with its own rules that also impact UX.

We stopped forcing the subscription model on our users. Here is what happened. How and why Lovable introduced ‘top-up’-style monetization.

Tools like Stripe have given us the ability to experiment with business models, and here’s a really good study from Lovable. www.elenaverna.com/p/we-stopped...

It’s truly astonishing how a whole mode of communication got wrecked like this. 😢

Windshield washer fluids, mouth wash, and household cleaners have no business looking like they're packed with delicious and refreshing electrolytes.

The Scrum That Actually Worked Extreme Programming and the Success Story We Chose to Forget

Kevin Muldoon knocks it out of the park with this article on how we went from extreme programming to Scrum, and the things we lost along the way. medium.com/agileinsider...

LinkedIn Pulse

Feature improvements can be just as impactful as new sexy high-risk features. #productmanagement

Design systems don’t kill creativity – our biases do - zeroheight Donnie D'Amato looks at the cognitive biases that go into the way we frame design systems, and how to make sure they don't creep into our work

Creativity lies in working around principled constraints, not in perpetuating popular anti-patterns. #designsystems

Your browser is up to date You can use YouTube's latest features!

Lenny‘s interview with the co-founder of Slack and Flickr is so densely packed with product insights, from friction vs comprehension to LARPing work.

I wasn’t ready for the Blade Runner, Ricky Martin, and S Club shared universe, but I’d like to hear more about it. 🤣

I was drafting our Design charter for Owner.com this week and my conviction is that we move our design systems from Figma into github, from an abstraction layer into our product — our source of… | Darrin Henein | 13 comments I was drafting our Design charter for Owner.com this week and my conviction is that we move our design systems from Figma into github, from an abstraction layer into our product — our source of truth...

When I traded my code editor for Figma, I actually traded working code for excessive documentation. This is kind of the antithesis of Agile. So this post really, really resonates. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

An AI note-taking app, but filtered through Werner Herzog’s unforgivingly bleak lens. “There is no positive outcome in the feature. Only a collective murder of time and spirit.”

The Growing Split in How Organisations Approach Design Systems Two speeds of design systems, why context now matters more than best practice

"Instead of paying repeatedly for alignment, quality, and coherence, the organization pays once and amortizes that investment over time." There's a cost to any design system deviation, so it better be worth it.
www.designsystemscollective.com/the-growing-...

Why Engineers Can Say “This Is Wrong” and Designers Can’t One ships. The other schedules more meetings

Kevin Muldoon's previous post covers how design kinda lost the plot. His follow-up is equally phenomenal, diving into the authority gap between engineering and design, and what designers can start doing to dig themselves out. www.designsystemscollective.com/why-engineer...

A two-panel Drake "Hotline Bling" meme. In the top panel, Drake looks away with a hand raised in rejection next to the text "SUSHI BOAT." In the bottom panel, he smiles and points approvingly toward the text "SUSHI AIRCRAFT CARRIER."

That feeling when you're fiending for sushi.

The Hidden Where-to-Play Element in Strategy Value System Stage

The trap of the "complete solution" forces you to deliver features that are worse than the tools your customers already use. Competing against specialists only dilutes your winning strategy. You’re better off integrating with those tools rather than aping them. rogermartin.medium.com/the-hidden-w...

Skipping alignment leads to zero-impact UX Deliverable artifacts are only a small part of the social system that product development entails. Any "productivity" gained by ignoring that system is an illusion.

"The same exact pressures and constraints that made us do the wrong thing this time will also make us do the wrong thing next time [… ]" Jumping straight to outputs was bad, but now AI allows managers to do it faster and more frequently than ever before. productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/skipping-a...

Startups succeed on "illegible" speed. Rapid pivots, unspoken context, and gut-feeling decisions that don't need giant prescriptive Jira tickets. www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-...

Ship It Scared Your scared self will always move the goalposts.

"The market rewards the product that exists." This is equally applicable to features and should always be kept in mind when scoping. Just get something good enough to test assumptions. medium.com/@joncphillip...

LinkedIn Pulse

Great blistering post about the alleged failure of Agile and UX. The real culprit is the organization's intellectual incuriosity and "the absense of insight infrastructure". www.linkedin.com/pulse/ux-isn...

“Players are selfish”: Fallout 2’s Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy Avellone recaps his journey from learning on a TRS-80 to today.

“What is their power fantasy?” This in many ways mirrors my B2B design ethos: Designing for users’ performance reviews lays the groundwork for success. arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/...

New features is like getting into running: You don't just start full-steam. There's research, preparation, planning, maintenance, and risk mitigation, all the while communicating the lifestyle shift to your family. Product thinking requires the same thoughtful approach. #productmanagement

It bears repeating. Designing to reduce clicks is like an architect designing to reduce walking. What you’d get is a home where the entryway is cluttered with the furnishings of the kitchen, bedroom, living room, and washroom. #ux

Fizzy A refreshing take on cards, columns, and kanban.

I love the bespoke feel of Fizzy and 37signals products. As someone who champions design systems, here’s a sobering thought: Maybe design systems are just a solution to the problem of not giving product teams the time to truly cook. fizzy.do

GitHub Just Killed Toast Messages (Here’s the Accessibility Data That Forced Their Hand) A deep look at the research, user testing, and compliance data that forced GitHub to remove toasts from their design system.

Github threw its might into making toasts accessible and threw in the towel. “Even technically compliant toasts are fundamentally harder to use than persistent alternatives.” Nature is healing. #a11y #usability javascript.plainenglish.io/github-just-...

🤣