I recently noticed that my writing is a bit cold and impersonal in my reading and watching notes. Although these posts were meant to give a summary of the book/talk, I think adding in my thoughts or reflecting on how the content relates to my work would make a better blog post.
For example, I could write about how the book Design for Real Life has taught me how much of our everyday product decisions affect people’s lives. I could write about how it opened my eyes to the far-reaching effects of my own biases.
Increasing Frequency and Vulnerability
I don’t write as often as I’d like because I think of this blog as a medium for showcasing my work and my side projects. I want my posts to be polished because I see them as an extension of my CV. But because of this mindset, my posts end up lacking personality and vulnerability.
Contrast my writing here to my writing on personal.jagtalon.com. On that blog, I freely share my struggles (a recent surgery or my lack of productivity) and my personal goals (like my donation goals). I think this is because I’m not trying to perform or prove anything on that blog. I’m just writing to share.
So I think it would be good to adopt that mindset: focus on sharing instead of performing. In future posts, I’d like to share what I’ve been learning recently and the struggles that I run into when working on a project.
To me, the gist was about how we can make people feel smart and confident about their decisions. People see many inconsistencies in the world—from politicians who flip-flop on issues to companies who say one thing but do the exact opposite. As a result, people have become skeptical and even cynical. Inconsistency undermines trust, she says.
Because of this, people are starting to look inward: they’re making decisions based on what they believe in. Since people are looking inward for information, maybe we can meet them there, informing and persuading them on their terms. Here are the three tools that we can use to do that:
Voice
Champion familiarity over precision and consistency over novelty.
Example: When Mailchimp released a suite of e-commerce services, they didn’t want to alienate their long-time customers. They didn’t want people to worry and to feel like they would get lost in the shuffle. So they continued to make themselves vulnerable and open and fun, which was consistent with Mailchimp’s way of communicating. They went further and also opened up a store to tell people what they’re learning along the way while using their own e-commerce tools. This brand consistency made people more familiar and confident about the future of Mailchimp.
Volume
Offer enough detail to convey a complete story and make the user feel smart.
Example: America’s Test Kitchen creates a lot of content. They want to empower people whether they’re novices who are trying to get something right the first time, or experts who want to learn more about the history and chemistry of a dish. You can get the short, pithy version, or the long, deep read on a recipe.
Another example: Gov.uk has the opposite problem: too much content. So people end up going somewhere else online to understand gov’t services and information. (I do the same when I’m on IRS.gov. I feel like I need to search online to summarize things for me.) They since reduced the amount of content, getting people to stick around instead of shying away from the official sources.
Vulnerability
Compare, don’t exclude, and prototype in public to work with users, not for them.
Example: Buzzfeed opened themselves up to feedback when they were working on their newsletter. Similar to what Mailchimp did when they publicly dogfooded their own e-commerce product, they made themselves vulnerable to their audience and involved them in the process.
Fast is great for service-oriented designs. 80% of the time, we want to create designs that reduces friction and gets out of the way so that people can get things done.
This is especially important for transactions like donating to a charity or buying a product. The faster you can get a person from start to finish, the better.
Time = friction
When we need slow
The rest of the time when comprehension is involved, we have to slow things down.
We want to focus on absorption not conversion when it comes to comprehension.
Readability = it wants to be read
Legibility = it’s readable
Readability transcends legibility
Some history and observations
There was a service called Readability that made reading pleasant on the web. It removed “info junk” like banners and navigation so that you can focus on the content. The website has been discontinued since, but the open source code is alive in Safari’s Reader.
These days, you can use Mercury Reader if you use Chrome.
There’s an A List Apart article that talked about creating a simpler page on the web. It breaks reading distances into three categories:
Bed (Close to face): Reading a novel on your stomach, lying in bed with the iPad propped up on a pillow.
Knee (Medium distance from face): Sitting on the couch or perhaps the Eurostar on your way to Paris, the iPad on your knee, catching up on Instapaper.
Breakfast (Far from face): The iPad, propped up by the Apple case at a comfortable angle, behind your breakfast coffee and bagel, allowing for handsfree news reading as you wipe cream cheese from the corner of your mouth.
Jeffrey Zeldman wanted to create a more relaxed reading experience on the web. He wanted a web that can be read from afar (Breakfast category) and with a relaxed posture. He experimented on his personal website and wrote about it in 2012.
Medium.com came out and it focused on content. Big type. Lots of whitespace. (2012)
The New Yorker also came out with a redesign. “While before, reading the New Yorker on mobile was a tortuous experience of pinching screens and zooming in and out, the new mobile site is one long scrollable joyride. Sharp text at a good size and unfussy navigation make the site a vast improvement on what went before.” (2014)
It has to be branded. When all sites look the same, all content appears equal. Facebook posts are an example: A reputable news site looks the same in a post as a disreputable blog.
It should also be authoritative. It should convey that you put in a lot of time and effort into it.
I recently read the book called Design for Real Life, and I wanted to share some of the notes that I wrote down while reading the book.
Advocates for designing for the most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users. If you make things for people at their worst, they’ll work that much better when people are at their best.
Edge cases = Stress cases. Instead of thinking about these things as edge cases, we should think about them as stress cases. These are scenarios where our design and content fail, and they should be treated like a failing unit test or integration test.
Make a list of potential user scenarios. Here’s an example from the book:
People who want to share
Had a great year
Had a horrible year
People who don’t want to share
But want to relive it
Great year
Horrible year
And don’t want to relive it
Great year
Horrible year
Find fractures in your design by challenging assumptions and finding stress cases.
Make space in your design and accept a broader range of answers to accommodate your users:
Names: “Juan Antonio Gabriel Ancajas Talon,” for example, doesn’t fit in most input fields. Also, what is a real name?
Race: Consider how a generic “Multiracial” field would make people feel.
Design to include: What if your period tracking app doesn’t support people outside of: “avoiding pregnancy,” “trying to conceive,” or “fertility treatments”?
Classic edge-case thinking: “We’re designing for the 90%, not the 10%” or “That’s a difficult use case that I don’t want to think about.”
“For now” can lead to “forever” for a busy team.
Everyday stress cases (this can be people in crisis or something mundane going wrong). Examples from the book:
A person who as received a threat from a previously unknown stalker, and needs to delete or make private every public account as quickly as possible.
A university student whose roommate has declared they intend to commit suicide, and needs information on what to do.
Someone who has discovered their mortgage’s auto-pay has failed two months in a row, and is afraid they’ll be foreclosed on.
A person working two jobs whose only car was damaged in an accident, and is trying to submit incident information to their insurance company late at night, after they’ve finally gotten off work.
Stress cases are also technical failures:
Low battery
Slow Internet
Create personas that are real: Instead of thinking about ideal people who are smiling and have ideal lives, think about people who are distracted, short on time, have bills to pay, has dinner to prepare, and have kids to take care of.
Just like mobile-first design, try stress-first design.
Add contexts in your user journey. Consider who goes to the hospital in the morning, late afternoon, and at midnight. You’d find out that people who visit the hospital at midnight are people who are in crisis because normal visiting hours are over.
A table that represents the time of day. It allows people to contextualize where each persona falls into.
Add intention to designs: Do you really need to ask income level, real name, mailing address, salutation, or level of education? Consider how people would feel: “Why do they need my postcode? Why do they need my gender?”
Touchy subjects: Things that are likely to cause stress or make the reader uncomfortable (not just money, religion, or politics):
Error messages
Warnings
System alerts
Financial and privacy-related updates
Legal agreements
Compassion is more than being nice. It’s accepting people as they come—in all their pain, with all their challenges—and not just feeling empathy towards them but doing something with that empathy. Compassion is not meant to soften bad news or coddling. It’s understanding and kindness.
The premortem: Evaluate the project before it happens to check our biases.
The question protocol: Ensure that every piece of information you ask is intentional and appropriate by asking:
Who within the organization uses the answer
What they use them for
Whether an answer is required or optional
If an answer is required, what happens if a user enters any old thing just to get them through the form
The designated dissenter: Assign someone in the project to assess every decision underlying the project, and asking how changes in context or assumptions might subvert those decisions.
Figma has a new-ish feature called Auto Layout that I’ve been trying to get the hang of lately. What it does is it lets you specify how your designs will adapt once you adjust the contents inside it.
That’s a bit abstract, so here’s a more concrete example: You can automatically set the height of a button to increase or decrease depending on the length of the text within it. This can be useful for making quick changes in the copy without worrying about text overflowing. Without Auto Layout, you would have had to adjust things by hand or install a plugin to get the same results.
As you can see, padding around the button is preserved, and the height of the button increased to accommodate the text.
It very much mimics how production environments like webpages actually work. In fact, they borrow some concepts from the CSS box model to make Auto Layout:
After trying many different approaches, including some rather non-conventional ones, we felt the best way to marry the two worlds was to add a few core concepts from the CSS box model (specifically flexbox) directly into Figma. And by introducing Auto Layout as a property, you have the flexibility and power to apply Auto Layout to any frame, whether it’s in a component or not.
It’s definitely useful for translations, too. Just copy paste the text and the design changes accordingly.
So if you’ve written CSS before, you might be familiar with some of the things that you can do in Auto Layout:
You can make an element take up the whole width or height of its parent.
You can specify the padding around a container and between the children nodes.
You can make a set of elements stack either horizontally or vertically. (Just like flexbox.)
And it doesn’t just work with text. Modifying, adding, or removing any sort of node in a Frame that has Auto Layout—whether that’s text, an image, or another Frame—will change the dimensions of the design.
Auto Layout demo: The design adapts when you change the button and lorem ipsum text.
The downside of Auto Layout is that it’s quite different from how I’m used to designing. It’s a bit hard to master and it’sdefinitelyfrustrating for me to use sometimes. Every so often I get stuck, and I find myself falling back into the warm embrace of constraints.
And because of that, I’m finding that it’s better for me to use Auto Layout in the later stages of the design process. I feel that it ends up slowing me down a lot when I’m using it in the exploration stage.
When I’m converting a design to Auto Layout, I find that it’s best to start from the deepest layers to minimize the issues that I run into. Then I work my way up.
But I hope that this changes in the future. I’d like to use Auto Layout sooner in the process so that I could take advantage of its features. But I guess that will come naturally as I become more familiar with it.
I love that we’re now able to describe behavior in UI designs, and I hope that more design tools follow this direction. I think what I’m looking forward to is how this will make playing around with real data easier. Imagine not having to worry about the design breaking because the text is too long.
I used to ignore anything that looked like responsibility. I didn’t read my mail, I often forgot about appointments, I didn’t plan ahead, and I could never tell where my money was going. Although my strategy surprisingly worked for a couple of years, I eventually reached a tipping point where I was spiraling with guilt and mounting obligations. I’m happy that I’ve gotten to work on my ostrich-like hangups on life admin since then, and I think—for me at least—having the right software tools have helped along the way.
I often see peoplewritingaboutthe tools that they use to get their work done, but it’s rare for me to see much of anything on how people manage their lives outside of work. I’ve been reassessing my setup recently, so I thought I could share the things that have been working well for me and the tools that I’m currently playing around with.
You Need A Budget
In the past, I would budget my money by adding up all my recurring expenses each month and subtracting the total from my income. I’d put down the result as money that I’m allowed to spend. I figured that whatever is left behind after that can turn into my savings. It seemed like a good system: it was simple, and I didn’t have to do it that often.
But reality was very different. It felt like there was always that one “emergency” that would throw a wrench into the whole thing: a doctor’s appointment, going out to dinner with friends, a subscription that I forgot about. So even though I had a great system in place (I didn’t), I still couldn’t manage to put money towards my savings or my credit card debt. So I gave up and figured that I was just bad with money.
I forget how, but I came across an app called You Need A Budget around two years ago. I had a hard time using it at first because I couldn’t wrap my head around the philosophy of only budgeting the money that I currently have. I also struggled because I didn’t understand that I needed to be proactive with budgeting. I didn’t know that I had to:
Actively look at what’s left of my budget to guide my decisions
Figure out what categories I needed to prioritize
Plan and set goals
With YNAB, you can only budget the money that you already have.
But after a couple of failed attempts, I eventually joined their workshops and learned how to use the app. I’m not going to go into detail about its features (there’s a bunch), but the gist is that it’s super useful for life admin. Those “emergencies” that I talked about earlier? They’re basically things that YNAB helps me prepare for. If I know that I’ll be getting my wisdom teeth removed soon, I can start putting money towards a category called “Oral Surgery.”
I also have a thing called a “wish farm” to budget my discretionary money into categories like future travel or a pair of boots.
Fantastical
I couldn’t find a single calendar event before 2016, so I don’t really know how I managed to remember things before that year. I think I had this idea that calendars were only for very busy people. Normal people like me, I thought, don’t really have a use for it outside of work. Unfortunately, I wasn’t any good at keeping tabs on my appointments and get-togethers. I realized that computers were a lot better at remembering dates than I am.
I have my calendar hosted on Fastmail, and I started to use it a lot more when I found Fantastical. I think what got me to use it was how ridiculously easy it is to add an event in the calendar. Basically, you just type in “Water plants every other Friday” and it’ll automatically create a recurring event just for that. It suddenly made remembering events easy for me to do.
Fantastical removes some of the friction from creating events.
One other feature that I love about Fantastical is that it lets me bundle calendars into different sets. This means I can switch between different contexts throughout the week:
A set that just shows my personal calendars. (Perfect for weekends or when on holiday.)
A set that just shows my work calendars. (This gives me an overview of my work.)
A set that combines personal & work calendars. (This is usually my view during the week because, naturally, I don’t want to miss any work meetings or personal appointments.)
Reminders
I don’t have any complex to-do list requirements, so I’ve found popular apps like Things and Todoist to be a bit too much for my personal needs. I didn’t think it was worth paying for features that I wasn’t going to use. Paper, on the other hand, is often inconvenient to carry around and to write in while I’m on the bus or train or at the grocery store.
I was doing some research on to-do lists, and it turns out that most calendars already support simple task management. I thought this would be great at first because the bulk of my tasks are basically events that I want to check off like “Take the trash outside at 9pm every Monday” or “Change out your contact lenses every two weeks.” The downside is that it the more tasks I made, the more cluttered my calendar looked.
The solution for me was to switch to Apple’s built-in Reminders app. It actually syncs with my calendar on Fastmail which meant that I didn’t have to migrate my tasks over to another system.
Reminders makes it easy to for me to create to-do lists that sync with my calendar.
To-do lists are at the heart of my life admin because I would forget a lot of things if I didn’t have it. It has a lot of those recurring items that I used to forget like paying off my credit card every month or taking the compost bin out. Since it’s also on my phone, it’s also really useful for remembering those responsibilities that bubble up when I’m commuting. “Oh yeah I need to get some onions for dinner later.”
Monica
In the past, Facebook was my contact list. I could message friends easily, I could hop on a video call with them, I knew what people were up to, and I knew if their birthdays were coming up. It worked pretty well up until I stopped using Facebook. And at that point, I didn’t realize just how much I relied on it for keeping in touch with friends.
Fortunately, a friend told me about this website called Monica. It’s basically a CRM but without all the business-y language around it. I managed to use it for a couple of months, but my motivation died out soon after.
I tried Airtable for a little bit, but that ended up being even more work. I just wanted something that didn’t require me to build the scaffolding so that I could get on with the actual work. So recently, I started using Monica again, but now I also have a reminder to update it every other day so that I don’t forget about it. I also made it into a “desktop app” using Fluid, so that I’m reminded of it whenever I’m on my computer.
It’s too early for me to say if it’s working for me, but I’m glad that there’s a way for me to keep track of when I last hung out with someone, the names of their pets, and the things that we talked about. It’s almost a complement to my journal. I also appreciate that I get reminders from Monica that basically says, “Hey, you should really keep in touch with this person.”
That’s it
You made it! The invisible work of life admin isn’t glamorous, but thanks for letting me geek out and reading all the way to the bottom. If you have tools that you use to manage your daily life, I’d be happy to hear about it.
There’s seemingly no limit to the number of wonderfulplugins that are already out there for Figma. It’s inspiring but also humbling because it meant that I probably have nothing else to add to that infinitely growing list. It seems that every plugin idea that I can think of already exists in some form.
As an alternative, I briefly thought about making something frivolous, like the Dad Jokes plugin for Sketch. It’s just like lorem ipsum but with dad jokes as placeholder text instead. But I did have a plugin idea for slightly improving copy-pasting content.
What it does is that it fetches all the text nodes within a selected element and organizes them into a table. This should take some tedium out of copy-pasting content since it automatically selects and copies the text for you as you click around. All you have to do is to make a selection and run the plugin.
I’m actually surprised by its simplicity: Under the hood, all it does is run document.execCommand('copy') whenever a table cell is selected, and that copies the selected text on to your clipboard. While it’s not exactly a must-have plugin, I did enjoy learning more about how Figma Plugins work. I’m also glad that writing plugins forced me into the world of Typescript from the very beginning. I admit that I haven’t dealt with explicit types in a long time, but I love that it makes web development so much more pleasant thanks to IntelliSense‘s autocomplete and API documentation.
There’s no need to search for API documentation when you already have it in your IDE.
There’s still a few refinements that I need to do and some edge cases that I need to fix before I could call it done, but you can follow the progress on Github.
Update
Fast Copy is available to everyone! There’s still a lot to do, but at least it’s out there in public.
The other week, I had some time to look into Figma Plugins during “Hack Days” at work. Since I’m familiar with both frontend and design, I thought it would be a good chance for me to take a step back from my day-to-day priorities and work on a hack days project that involves the two disciplines. I had a vague idea of creating a plugin that would help me with some of the grunt work that’s involved when I’m designing mockups.
The reason why I’m particularly excited about Figma is that it’s a design tool that’s built on web technologies. (It’s actually written in C++, but it’s compiled to WebAssembly and runs on modern browsers.) That means that I’m already familiar with the concepts and the tooling around building the plugins themselves. For example, I could use the built-in DevTools to explore and manipulate all the different objects on the page, using it as a sort of visual REPL for changing, say, the color of a rectangle on the page.
Finding objects using .findAll and .findOne
Changing the rectangle’s properties by assigning a cloned object. (Sometimes you can’t directly change an object.)
You can use DevTools to find the rectangles on the page and change their colors on the fly.
It was a bit overwhelming to learn how Figma Plugins work when I first started, so I figured that I start off by playing with basic shapes to keep things simple. It made learning more manageable compared to working on a component that’s filled with many different objects in it.
The objects on Figma have a lot of properties that you can change. For example, you can directly change the opacity of a rectangle.
I found that text objects were reasonably easy to modify, so I figured that I could write a plugin that would translate the text in some of the mockups that I had. Translation plugins already exist in Figma (see both Translate and Translator), but I wanted to see if I could write something similar.
I had high expectations from myself at first: I wanted the plugin to actually work and translate any sort of text that I had. But I couldn’t get my plugin to do network requests to a translation service because I had trouble setting up packages from npm. I kept on getting errors from webpack that I didn’t understand so I gave up and went with mock requests for now. In hindsight, it might have been better if I didn’t rely on npm and made the requests myself using XMLHttpRequest or the Fetch API.
A demo of the translation plugin. It shows the plugin creating a copy of the selected frame with all the text inside of it translated into Spanish.
The UI of the translate plugin where you’re able to select the language you want.
An example of a translated frame appearing beside the original frame.
Another example of a translated frame.
Screenshots of the translate plugin and its results.
The translate plugin ended up working reasonably well otherwise. You were able to choose which language you’d like to translate your mockup into, and it doesn’t overwrite your original work.
The second plugin that I worked on populated the Yelp Review designs with new data. I found it tedious to copy-paste actual data online, so I thought I could solve that by letting the plugin do the hard work for me.
A demo of the Yelp plugin. It shows the plugin creating multiple copies of a frame, all filled out with fresh data.
Unfortunately, just like the translation plugin, this plugin doesn’t actually make any network requests, and it only works on a specific component. So I think the next time I write a plugin, I’d like to create something that pulls in real data. I’d also like to figure out a way to generalize plugins that would work on any component that’s thrown at it—similar to how Microsoft’s Content Reel plugin works.
I’d definitely like to continue working on Figma Plugins in the future whenever I find some spare time. I’m impressed that they’re able to pull off a Google-docs-like design tool that’s cross-platform (you can design on a Chromebook if you wanted to), and that also has a well-thought-out plugin system. It’s an incredible tool, especially for remote workers like me, so I look forward to seeing Figma grow in the years to come.
Last Friday, the same day Apple started selling the newly-released iPhones to everyone, I decided to pry my iPhone 7 open. It had an aging battery, and I had the option of taking my out-of-warranty phone to either the Apple Store or a local repair shop. But swapping it out myself sounded more fun, and going the DIY route also meant that I would pay less.
It was, of course, a complete coincidence that I did it on the day of the event. But learning about it after the fact made me feel a bit more defiant and subversive. I felt like I had just saved my wallet from the world’s first trillion-dollar company by holding off on buying a new phone. I felt good about extending the life of a device that Apple doesn’t want people to repair.
I’m fortunate that I also don’t do much on my phone, so it pretty much does whatever I need it to do. I can play games, browse the web, find my way across the city, take pictures, and manage my budget. The only thing that was really missing was a longer battery life.
But changing the batteries myself does have its risks. I was terrified of opening up my phone because there was a chance that I could accidentally puncture a component or pull on the wires a little too hard. I definitely didn’t want to lose the whole phone altogether. This fix could easily switch from being the cheapest repair option into being the most expensive one.
But I went ahead and did it anyway. I had the tools and the battery, so to hell with those sunk costs.
You need to disassemble and remove a few components first before you can get to the battery.
Of course, it ended up being a success. It took around fifteen minutes, and all I did was follow instructions on iFixit. I felt empowered and proud that I was able to extend the life of a device that I use every day, but also a bit of relief that I didn’t end up bricking my phone. I also felt like I’ve crossed a boundary: I no longer feel like a consumer, but more of a participant in the device’s existence.
There was one thing that I did screw up: I forgot to reapply the display adhesive around the screen. It’s meant to prevent water from getting into the phone, but as long as I never take it near a tub or a swimming pool, I should be good.
Back in 2015, I had a bit of a fascination with loading animations. If you’re not familiar, these are animations that you see whenever you wait for content to load on a website or an app. They’re meant to show progress or to distract you from all the waiting. Anyway, there was a couple of weeks where I spent most of my free time breaking down and poring over the details of different loading animations from products like Slack, Asana, and iMessage. I wanted to see if I could try and get my own web-based imitation to look as close to the real thing as possible.
Part of the appeal for me comes from the fact that these kinds of animations are compact and approachable: The only thing that you have to worry about is figuring out how to get something to move. The rest of the time is just spent on endless tweaking to get it to look right. I wasn’t doing it for anything, really. At that time, I simply found satisfaction in trying to learn how to create tiny, single-use animations on the web.
Luckily, it eventually ended up being useful to me at work. I got to use the animation skills that I learned and got to apply it to a few projects that I built. One of those projects was a website called Privacy Heroes. It was a brief collaboration between different privacy companies to try out magazine advertising, and I was responsible for designing and building the website portion of it.
It’s been a year since I last thought about this website. But a co-worker reminded me about it the other day, and it brought back memories of why I like working on animations, and why I’m excited about the web in general.
I think the reason I liked working on this particular project was that I could go further and add a bit of motion and energy on the website—something that we could never do in a magazine ad. With a few lines of code, I can draw attention to a superhero’s speed lines, bring shooting stars to life, and add a bit of twinkle to the stars.
Of course, the applications of animations also extend beyond the superficial and frivolous because it can also be a way to communicate effectively. Take a look at how Stripe demonstrates the value of their products using animations.
Call me biased, but I love the web because it’s a medium where ideas can come alive and become available to anyone with an Internet connection. It’s also a medium that’s available everywhere, existing in many different devices ranging from your TV to your laptop to your phone and, most recently, to your wrist. The upsides are also its downsides because this means you have to accommodate for all sorts of environments. Animations could run slowly on low-powered devices, and your designs could look terrible on really large screens or really small screens.
But, for now, it seems that the benefits of working on the web outweigh its downsides. Only time will tell.
