Jesús Vera Zorita

It's easy to blame ignorant people for their lack of knowledge, but the people with the knowledge have the responsibility to be better communicators, or at least to partner with skilled communicators. Because communication is a skill.

Otherwise, why bother knowing things.

Systems design: you have two cows. one of the cows dies; it drops 25 xp, 2x leather, 1x meat.

Narrative design: you have two cows. one of the cows dies; the other cow uses a salience-based storylet system to react with an appropriate bark ("moooo")

3c design: you have two cows. they can airdash

It took me years to learn the importance of repetition.

If you’re communicating across disciplines or levels of expertise or with people you don’t already have a strong relationship with, “but I told them already” doesn’t cut it.

The art is in not being tedious about it.

As I get older I’ve concluded, ‘everything is basically either a cult or a database’. I will not be explaining

It's easy to mistake the polish of a prototype for the quality of the idea

Tapping the sign.

The 2 key workplace skills:
- doing something without making it obvious that you are doing it
- making it seem like you are doing something without actually doing it

Picture of paper 'Epistemic Trespassing' by Nathan Ballantyne. With the first sentence of each section highlighted in yellow. Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing in ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognising this will require us to be more intellectually modest. 1. Introduction Epistemic trespassers are thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence - and pass judgment nevertheless. We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders. A few examples will guide our discussion. Linus Pauling, the brilliant chemist and energetic proponent of peace, won two Nobel Prizes—one for his work in chemistry, and another for his activism against atomic weapons. Later, Pauling asserted that mega-doses of vitamin C could effectively treat diseases such as cancer and cure ailments like the common cold. Pauling was roundly dismissed as a crackpot by the medical establishment after researchers ran studies and concluded that high-dose vitamin C therapies did not have the touted health effects. Pauling accused the establishment of fraud and careless science. This trespasser did not want to be moved aside by the real experts.

Two words: Epistemic Trespassing.
philpapers.org/archive/BALE...

When faced with a large initiative w/a ton of ambiguity and unclear POV, I tend to write a UX Brief as a way to put down the initial experiential goals, approaches, behavioral hypotheses, known constraints that presumably will drive the biz goals. It is kind of a straw man to shape the UX POC.

Knowledge is not power. Power is power.

arguably the job of design is to come up with creative ways of exhausting the space of mistakes, and doing it on the cheap

And yet it's true.

You made history, and for a lot of people you enabled us to get a job and start a life in design.

I am really sad about how it happened, but happy to know it did. Thank you.

Two-step process labeled the double square method: 1. The PM has an idea. 2. The engineers build it.

The "double square" is much less well-known than the "double diamond" methodology, but much more frequently practiced

The actual double diamond graphic off Wikipedia with the four stages labeled discover, define, develop, deliver.

two things can simultaneously be true:
1) the double diamond is a cliche, oversimplified process
2) pulling new stages for the double diamond out of your ass is not going to improve that process

working on a windows 95 themed automation game about making powerpoint decks #gamedev

Despite my best efforts I'm writing about AI again. Tomorrow's issue of Product Picnic is channeling Ed Zitron.

AI is no longer optional: it's forced into every product you use and scraping every word you write. If the past decades were the age of user centered design, now is the age of no consent.

Sigh. Fine.
I'll read Systemantics again 😔

Wha—I don't remember Systemantics having any drawings!

1962: we do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

2025: we choose to do nothing, because doing nothing is easy, and doing something is hard.

no, software is getting aggressively worse and affordances that have always been there have been silently disappearing overnight bc most of our software isn’t versioned any more

What book is that?

Ambiguity…

Someone posted a video of a husband and wife shopping for interior decor. They wrote: "when will people finally acknowledge the epidemic of men marrying women and being turned gay." Matt Walsh retweeted them and added: "Dudes like this were already gay. I’ve been married for 14 years and have never been home decor shopping, or even had an opinion on the subject, except for the one time when I had a painting custom made depicting me meeting a group of space aliens. It’s now hanging above a fireplace in our home." I screenshot Walsh's comment and added: "For a while, it was believed that women and gay men are born with a natural sense for aesthetics. In reality, straight men, particularly American male Protestants, have simply barred themselves from taking an interest in aesthetics bc they think this makes them noble." Finally, someone retweeted me and added: "Why does anyone listen to what this idiot has to say about aesthetics?" They attached a photo of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks."

Someone took issue with me saying that American male Protestants are unique in how they've removed themselves from aesthetics. I thought it was obvs that I'm talking about fashion and interior decor, which today are coded as "gay interests," not paintings or architecture.

But let me elaborate. 🧵

Auto-complete: real, can't hurt you Super-intelligence: not real, can't hurt you Layoffs: real, can hurt you LinkedIn: not real, can hurt you.

AI is a marketing term; before we discuss "AI is fake" vs "AI is real" we need to unfold what we *mean* by AI.

For example, "artificial general intelligence" is fake and can't hurt you. Layoffs excused by "AI efficiency" are real and can hurt you.

Linkedin discourse is fake - but it CAN hurt you.

It’s not the technology, it’s the business models.

What I observe from good product folks:
- They view things thru opportunity lens (vs solution)
- They drive clarity and alignment through well-defined metrics (quality, behavior, adoption)
- They are rigorous & ruthless w/prioritization from a program perspective (vs product)
- They ask better q’s

cf www.google.ca/books/editio...

A budget is a statement of moral priorities.

Building worker power is the only way to change the garbage way workers are treated. But it is *hard*.

Participating in collective decision-making is hard when you grow up in an individualist culture. Many people just want to do a stable job and clock out (not an unreasonable thing to want).

Just Enough Research — MULE BOOKS The bestselling design research classic. Essential knowledge, also jokes.

I'm over on the resume website fighting with people who think chatting with a stochastic parrot counts as learning things about the world.

If you work with people like this, I have a book for you.

www.mulebooks.com/just-enough-...