Vincent Schlothauer

I hosted a watch party tonight which I feel like is kinda the best of both worlds. You don’t have to travel far but you still get to talk about the new features with other nerds

Many teams tend to treat user stories like nothing more than a funky way to format a JIRA ticket summary. Instead of “add refresh button” they’ll write “as a user I want a button that lets me refresh the app”

I’m a huge hater of disabled component states and will proselytise about it any chance I get. At the same time I’m trying to collect examples of when a disabled element was actually the best tool for the job. I currently have one (1)

Agreed. And in general that using a design system in which each individual component has been usability tested doesn’t mean you’ll build a usable application.

Screenshot of a tumblr post by user “orjasm”. The caption reads “had the worst toast-buttering experience today”. They then credit user “theindomitablerioghan” for their “artist rendition”. The image is a crude drawing of a person bent over a counter and squinting at a piece of toast they are trying to butter with one hand while keeping a cat from getting at the toast with the other hand. The captions read “no glasses”, “using arm to hold plate”, “cold butter” and “cat likes butter”.

The thing with genAI is that everything is flawless but also incredibly mid. My mother (bless her heart) sent me a picture of my cat “in the style of Van Gogh” knocking over a vase. Wasn’t even briefly tempted to chuckle. Meanwhile I still laugh every time I think of this post

I cancelled my subscription last year when they essentially suggested Harris throw trans people under the bus as a low-effort sign of goodwill towards Republicans.

LLMs are trained on nearly unfathomable amounts of human-made data. It really makes you wonder about the motives of many of the people behind it – instead of framing it as accessing a never-ending wealth of human wisdom and ideas it’s “machine” learning and “artificial” intelligence.

Was just in a meeting where someone said “I guess we can hit this whole thing with the UX/UI bat too” … what does that even mean

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
Bertolt Brecht

“This is the best design book ever” can occasionally also mean “I finally managed to read one (1) design book and I just have to tell people about it”

After you recently added the ability to sort modes, there’s one one variables feature I long for desperately – please let us add opacity to referenced variables. It’s all I’ve ever wanted 🙏

Honestly I breathed a real sigh of relief this morning when I got a message about our company-internal “diversity month”. I didn’t think it was going to be cancelled, but this year I extra appreciate the thought and effort going into it.

Thanks for all the input! That’s the site we were using for reference in our evaluation (which, side note, absolutely wild UI going on there), and I did think APCA performed better for dark mode. I guess the safest bet is to define colour pairs that satisfy both calculations.

Take us to your leader

Yeah, goes to show that while it’s good to look ahead it’s bad to jump the gun. 😅 Don’t want to be in the alternate universe where we overhauled our entire contrast system for APCA

That’s wild, thanks so much for alerting me to it! We tried to evaluate the impact on our design system last year and decided to put it off until it became unavoidable. I’m surprised bc I felt it did look “more readable” without my glasses, but I’ll definitely keep reading.

I also do so wish they’d offer APCA as well.

CSS IS GENUINELY AWESOME in a box where the words "genuinely" and "awesome" are overflowing the box

I shouldn’t have posted a comment that could potentially be read as mean-spirited to someone I don’t know, even in joking. My bad 🙂

Me, to designers, constantly:

Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.
Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.
Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.
Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.
Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.

Oop, sorry if it came across the wrong way! I was going for a joke 😅 I have a lot of non-design coworkers who would probably assume they can “vibe design” anything they need with AI

Same I was about to write a strongly worded skeet

I don’t love the squirrel – I had been thinking we’d probably replace it with something that better illustrates the purpose of the app – but it gives people a moment of joy amidst a stressful work day.
Anyway @figma.com please don’t take our pals 🥲

I create interfaces for B2B/B2E contexts, and you’d be surprised how important these little islands of joy are, especially in the workplace. While doing user research for a redesign, we had multiple people explicitly ask us to please not take their squirrel away.

We’ll all have the opportunity to observe something interesting when Figma inevitably removes their April Fools FigPals – what happens when you *take away* moments of delight?

My head is so full now, but so is my heart. What a great event! 🙌

Spoke at a Friends of Figma event today and had an absolute blast. Community is so important, it’s easy to forget that.

The terrible thing is that at first I thought you were making a genuine suggestion. I’ve seen things man

This question fits well with the gradual rebranding of “user experience” as “product experience”, away from the “user story” as in the story of the user and their needs and towards The Story™️ as in the story of the product and its significance in the world.

Just watched a snippet from a BBC programme about the early internet from 1994. Wish that thing was still worthy of the name “information superhighway”