Ridwan Sanusi - Interaction Designer

Working as an experience designer at Amazon. This is a daily journal including notes and quotes from recent readings.
March 18, 2024

Agile software promises efficiency. It requires a cultural shift to get right

Agile developers work iteratively, creating functional software bit-by-bit and confirming that the result meets expectations before moving on to the next step in the roadmap.”

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March 18, 2024

Agile software promises efficiency. It requires a cultural shift to get right

Many programming teams follow the Agile Manifesto, a set of software-team management principles meant to improve quality and user happiness. Among those principles: Deliver value frequently, maintain a sustainable working pace, keep it simple, and regularly reflect and adjust your development practices to boost effectiveness.”

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March 18, 2024

The soul of software

An object cannot have a high bar of quality or soul if the creator did not put care into it. Whether it’s a software designer, Willy Wonka experience organizer, or filmmaker, you can tell if people don’t care about the quality of their work because it’s soul-less.”

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March 18, 2024

The soul of software

As designers, we’re taught early in our education to detach ourselves from the work. In critique, you shouldn’t take things personally because your work is not you. Though this is true, it’s also difficult for some designers to separate themselves from the work because of how they pour their soul into it. We should take big swings like Villeneuve did with Blade Runner 2049 for everything we create. We might fail, but if we put all our love into it, you might end up making something truly great.”

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March 18, 2024

The soul of software

All art and creative work is subjective, and I don’t expect everyone to love his style. What I think people all agree on is his craft is revealed through something that’s opinionated, expressive, and deliberate. One does not accidentally craft something.”

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November 20, 2023

Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them”

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October 30, 2023

A Few Laws of Getting Rich

Never be so foolish as to believe that you are stirring up admiration by flaunting the qualities that raise you above others. By making others aware of their inferior position, you are only stirring up unhappy admiration, or envy, that will gnaw away at them until they undermine you in ways you cannot foresee.”

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October 30, 2023

Systems Thinking in Design: Shifting Our Mindsets

Thinking in systems can be overwhelming. Because everything in this world can be interconnected, it is very easy to get trapped in a rabbit hole in an attempt to map a system and to understand its dynamics. This is perhaps why systems thinking has relatively slow in gaining popularity in practical industry work, compared to the design thinking movement. It is easy to get stuck in the theoretical framework rather than just take the steps to apply it to work.”

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October 20, 2023

The Intellectual We Deserve ❧ Current Affairs

what’s new in it isn’t true, and what’s true isn’t new”

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October 20, 2023

The Intellectual We Deserve ❧ Current Affairs

Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.”

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October 20, 2023

The Intellectual We Deserve ❧ Current Affairs

A more important reason why Peterson is misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

Explain the entire chain of So what’s

So what? Why should people care about your new idea?

Probably because it accomplishes useful, which the presenter should explain. This part is generally obvious.

Unfortunately, the explanation often sounds like this: So if we do hocus-pocus, this function will now be whizbammable! Then the presenter looks around the room excitedly, as if to say Isn’t that amazing?

The problem is, the presenter assumes the audience understands the So what? of whizbammability. Alas, the presenter assumes too much. The audience (especially if they are executives) are rarely thinking as much about hocus-pocus or whizbammability as the presenter.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

Establish a shared foundation

Before you introduce a new room to the team’s architectural diagrams, you must make sure everyone had the same original plan in mind. It would not do for you to suggest let us add another floor but in your head, the original plan was a 2-story house and in your colleague’s mind, it was a 3 story house. So do the equivalent of showing the shared foundations before introducing your new idea.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

If a team does not have mindmeld, it will instead reap pain — the entire spectrum from resentment to sloppy output, circular conversions to office politics.

If you are on a team and you do not sense everyone is on the same page, you need to make some noise about it.

I find this rolls off the tongue quite nicely: We do not have mindmeld.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

If you and your team are trying to build something together, the same reality holds — you do not get anywhere unless people work towards the same goal, and ideally in a coordinated manner.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

If you and your team are rowing a boat together, your boat does not get anywhere unless you all row in the same direction, and ideally at the same time.”

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August 29, 2023

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations. The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.”

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August 29, 2023

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be. If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.”

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August 29, 2023

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.”

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July 6, 2023

A Guide to Building Design System Beyond Primitive Elements

Design systems should address these key principles to build complex components: discovery for composability, building for extensibility and driving consistent layouts.”

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July 6, 2023

Working with Templates | ServiceNow Developers

Pages based on an original template will have a consistent look and feel, regardless of where they are used.”

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July 6, 2023

Working with Templates | ServiceNow Developers

Use page templates to create pages more quickly. Without a template, a developer needs to create a page completely from scratch. With templates, a developer can either:

Use the original template: The developer needs to pass parameters to the page to match the experience. Copy template contents: The developer has full control over the contents of the page but starts with an existing layout and content.”

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July 6, 2023

If you have a complex project, follow Gall’s law” — or it will fail

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,” Gall wrote. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.””

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July 4, 2023

Beyond design systems for interfaces: an megasystem of design systems

Every team might be using the same interface design system, but it doesn’t guarantee a harmonious, coherent and consistent overall experience within one product. Not every organisation has a team dedicated to ensuring user journeys and service-level experiences, or processes that enable teams to connect effectively to ensure the re-usability of different components of a user journey. Team members and product managers often self-organise and attempt to harmonise features, journeys and experiences. In organisation with several products (customer-facing, or internal-facing), experiences can also be wildly different between products despite adhering to the same interface design system.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

Stage Two people get stuck because they feel as though they should always be doing more, doing something better, doing something new and exciting, improving at something. But no matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

Stage Four is important psychologically because it makes the ever-growing reality of one’s own mortality more bearable. As humans, we have a deep need to feel as though our lives mean something. This meaning we constantly search for is literally our only psychological defense against the incomprehensibility of this life and the inevitability of our own death. To lose that meaning, or to watch it slip away, or to slowly feel as though the world has left you behind, is to stare oblivion in the face and let it consume you willingly.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

At some point we all must admit the inevitable: life is short, not all of our dreams can come true, so we should carefully pick and choose what we have the best shot at and commit to it.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

These are the serial entrepreneurs” who are 38 and living with mom and still haven’t made any money after 15 years of trying. These are the aspiring actors” who are still waiting tables and haven’t done an audition in two years. These are the people who can’t settle into a long-term relationship because they always have a gnawing feeling that there’s someone better around the corner. These are the people who brush all of their failings aside as releasing” negativity into the universe or purging” their baggage from their lives.”

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September 7, 2021

Design Matters From the Archive: Seth Godin | Design Matters

One of the challenges so many of us have is that life is always uneven, and usually, when you’re in a slog, there’s someone around you you can look to, who’s not. But this is universal, and it’s been a slog. I don’t think many people are going to miss 2020, but it’s also been a chance to decide what’s important, and to lean harder into that stuff.”

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September 4, 2021

Travel Advisory: REMINDER — On September 7, new measures for fully vaccinated international travellers to Canada will come into force - Canada.ca

Beginning at 12:01 am EDT on September 7, 2021, fully vaccinated foreign nationals will be eligible to enter Canada for discretionary (non-essential) reasons, such as tourism;”

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September 4, 2021

Travel Advisory: REMINDER — On September 7, new measures for fully vaccinated international travellers to Canada will come into force - Canada.ca

as the volume of travellers has increased in recent months, the border test positivity rate has remained low. Between August 9 and 26, the positivity rate for fully vaccinated travellers randomly selected for testing at the border was 0.19% (112 positive tests out of 58,878 completed). While cases are currently increasing in Canada, the illness severity and hospitalization rates remain manageable as Canada’s vaccination rates continue to rise.”

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July 28, 2021

Why I Am Still A Designer - Christopher Butler

A designer, well-versed in a variety of sources of information and practices (synthesis, hello!), and confident in their discernment of many possible opportunities and threats, can make a uniquely savvy facilitator beyond the traditional design” context. This is the heart of Design Thinking” that I think is actually meaningful. A cross-disciplinary team where the role of the designer is to facilitate research or systemization, rather than to export design”, could be far more effective. Designers need to see their objective as connecting rather than delivering. We do not export design. We integrate externalities.”

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July 25, 2021

Just Blaze Posts Photo of ASR-10 Kanye West Used During Roc-a-Fella’s Heyday

“I remember one day when I was making beats in her crib, she told me, Kanye, until you make money off this, it’s a hobby.’ But she’s never the type to say nothing negative toward music. She wanted to get me the keyboard with the big keys so I could learn how to play. The other keyboards had small keys, but that one had sequences on it so I could play and save it. But she didn’t buy me that one because it was $50 more. She was like, I don’t want to pay for that.’ Then she turned around, totally redeeming herself, and she helped me get my ASR 10 keyboard.””

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July 23, 2021

(45) The Myth of the Myth of the Unicorn Designer - Emesis

If you accept the holistic view, then you have to accept that design itself is just a piece of a larger effort, which is to build something that changes the world. Design work that never gets built is not real; you cannot truly separate design from implementation.”

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July 23, 2021

(45) The Myth of the Myth of the Unicorn Designer - Emesis

The notion that you can’t be good at more than one practice is silly because most practices are themselves comprised of more granular skill sets. Typography teaches you about kerning, font pairing, and legibility. But typography itself is just one component of what we call graphic design, which is the unified application of many additional skills like color theory, layout design, and so on. We may call them different things, but that’s an abstraction to aid study and discussion. Their utility, and our primary concern, is in their function as part of a holistic system, where they work together to achieve an outcome. This never stops being true, no matter how far up the chain you go.”

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July 11, 2021

Dear young designer

If you’re discouraged by someone else’s success, or you worry that you’re not part of the design in-crowd, you’re spending too much time online. Sign out of Twitter and make something for yourself. The rest doesn’t matter.”

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