roldie

>In the new smartwatch, a strip of specialized thin adhesive film collects tiny volumes of sweat, measurable in millionths of a liter. An attached sensor detects cortisol using engineered strands of DNA, called aptamers, which are designed so that a cortisol molecule will fit into each aptamer like a key fits a lock. When cortisol attaches, the aptamer changes shape in a way that alters electric fields at the surface of a transistor.

While I'm quite interested in being able to track my cortisol levels, the physics and chemistry behind this invention is just absolutely fascinating. I'm definitely going to be following this work closely.

This demo is really impressive!

I'm a ux designer and keeping my portfolio up to date is so tedious. For better or worse, I do a lot of "thinking" in Figma these days, so this would shorten my workflow considerably.

I currently use Squarespace (and previously rolled own code because I felt like I needed to prove I could) and even though it's about as easy as a WYSIWYG could be, I still find it a chore to use and struggle to get things just how I want.

All that to say, this is really exciting, and good luck!

I had a similar experience. I'm a ux designer, and I drove a friend's Tesla for the first time recently. Going in, I already hated the trend of touchscreens taking over vehicle control panels. But I didn't quite anticipate how difficult the Tesla experience was.

I kept worrying that I was going to crash because I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Or if I did know how to do it, it took concentration and significant cognitive load to do it. Changing climate control settings, any audio setting more advanced than volume up or down, etc.

Even shifting into forward or reverse was difficult because you have to swipe forward to go forward and backward to go in reverse. While this may be intuitive on a purely touchscreen interaction only level, it is 100% backward from the standard shifter layout of literally every other car on the planet.

On a different note, the driving experience was also a bit unexpected. Normal driving was actually kind of tough because I didn't get used to the single pedal regenerative braking in the short time I drove it. It was hard to keep the car at a steady speed.

But it's still very fun to drive overall, mostly because of the insane acceleration and torque.

The one on Newbury St. in Boston is open. Just bought some pens the other day!

Thanks for sharing, this looks like it's exactly what I've been looking for!

From one of the Youtube comments.

Game recommendations on the final slides:

Leanne: Parkitecht, Pokemon Go, Banished, Mineko's Night Market, Ooblets, To the Rescue

Kels: A Short Hike, Abzu, Animal Crossing, Mineko's Night Market, Skatebird, Ooblets

Josh: Yonder, Kind Words, Quench, Tunic, Welcome to Elk, Get In The Car, Loser!

I'm not sure how much time I could commit, but at the very least I could help spread the word.

What kind of involvement are you looking for design-wise?

This is really great! So much fun to try out different phrases.

I have the X-Bows. It's my first ergo keyboard, and I really like it so far. I even use it for gaming. They just released one with a Mac layout, so I might be picking up a second one.

Congrats on the launch!

This seems like a great tool to help corral all the disparate parts of conducting research. As a designer (who does a lot of research), I see a lot of value here, and I think you could make a big impact for those of us who do this often.

Some thoughts and questions:

- I think the pricing will have to be inexpensive enough for decision makers to want to handle recruiting in-house rather than hiring a dedicated third-party recruitment/research firm. Recruiting is extremely tedious and time-consuming. A researcher shouldn't have to waste the majority of their time recruiting, and a bootstrapped designer/PM would have even less time.

- It looks like this helps create a candidate database of existing customers only. Why should we use this over a Google sheet or Airtable/Notion/anything with light CRM capabilities? What about potential customers or customers of competitors? We can use something like Usertesting.com or User Zoom to recruit from a public pool of candidates and use screener questions to approximate our user base.

- On the post-study side, how will you beat something like Dovetail in terms of showcasing findings and other studies?

I think having everything in one tool is a powerful motivator. But I would be concerned that smaller teams try to make make use of the tools they already have, and won't pay for another one, and as you mentioned, larger teams can afford to pay for the recruiting team or all the individual tools.

With all that said, you seem to have solved a lot of pain points in this process, so I'm looking forward to seeing you succeed.

Question: I don't have much interest in plot line of season 4. If I skipped it (and just read Wikipedia summaries) how lost would I be if I went straight to season 5?

Thanks, subscribed!

I agree with the other comments here. Physical knobs and buttons are superior for cars. Until operating a vehicle can be done safely and reliably without driver focus (true autonomous) then we should really be focusing on physical knobs and buttons.

My car has a physical button that is customizable. Much like the radio station preset buttons, but it could be for switching to radio or cd or bluetooth. I think there were a few other options besides just media, but there were only like 5 or 6 options in total. I would love to have a wider selection of functions available to set for that button, and to have at least a handful of programmable buttons that could handle some simple tasks like switching to Android Auto, toggle between Spotify and my podcast app, activate voice, or setting the climate control to a certain setting.

In addition to bringing back physical interfaces, I think car designers should focus on improving NLP/voice recognition to the point where a driver shouldn't have memorize keywords or commands (too much thinking is also very distracting).

Wow, this is fantastic. Great work!

Sorry couldn't find anything, I must not have saved as much as I thought

Pretty sure it was one of the required readings for a course taught by one of these professors.

Erin Krupka https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Z1eLCr4AAAAJ

Yan Chen https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=He8AKt4AAAAJ&hl=en

I don't think it was either of their own publications, but these links might be helpful anyway.

To me the most important part of that blog post is the bit about serendipity. Serendipity or spontaneous interaction is one of the biggest factors that determines relationships. I'm not sure if there's an official name for this theory, but I remember studying it in grad school. The gist of the study was that increased frequency in unplanned/spontaneous interactions was correlated with increased likelihood of a relationship (or maybe the correlation was with a stronger relationship).

Your friends from school are your friends because you had the opportunity to see and interact with each other every day, and get to know each other.

Same thing with romantic relationships. If you keep running into that cute girl or guy you kinda know, you'll have more chances to talk and to get to know them well enough to ask them out.

I think this is partly why dating apps have been such a crapshoot for so many people, they don't get the chance to interact past the initial swipe or chat. This is also partly why it's difficult to make friends as adults. You simply don't have as many opportunities to meet new people. And you don't have as many opportunities to turn those new people into familiar people and eventually friends.

Spontaneous encounters can only occur if you put yourself in a place for that serendipity to occur. So if you join a community like the blog post encourages, then you set yourself up to have more of those spontaneous interacts with the same people.

Thanks, I appreciate the words of encouragement!

That's a good point. I probably put way more into my identity as a designer than I should or care to admit. Thanks, gives me something to think about and work on.

The same is true for design/ux jobs interviews. Well, at least for me. I got laid off a couple of months ago, and have been interviewing pretty steadily since then. I have yet to receive an offer.

I already know where my strengths and weaknesses are. I'm fine with 1 on 1s and all that, but when it comes to the technical part of the interview process like a take-home design project or a live design challenge, I usually fail.

I know I have the skills. My work has always been well-received, and I've always received good marks on reviews and feedback, but I haven't been able to translate it to the interview process.

I've tried to assess where I go wrong, and I think I panic and put too much effort into trying to figure out what they want to see or come up with something innovative rather than just doing the work and following my normal approach.

The stress of the time crunch (and sometimes not knowing anything about the product or problem) only add to my inability to improve in this space.

--

When I've sat on the other side of the table, I know that most interview processes aren't that well-structured or set up to actually evaluate the candidate. Even when there's a good process, it's often too easy for one person to influence the results.

So sometimes I tell myself that it was a crappy interview process and it just wasn't set up for someone like me to succeed. But I still end up stewing over it and feeling depressed for a few days.

Off topic, but would you mind sharing how you made the transition from design to product management? I'm considering making the jump myself and am curious about what the experience has been like.

They're not a US company. Nor are they a conglomerate.

Source: I used to work for them.

Thanks, never knew about rightgif. Their search is so good!

If you type `cmd /` you open up the menu focused on the search field. You can then type the command or plugin that you want.

Not quite sketch runner, but part of the way there.

I appreciate the technical achievement of "multiplayer," and it does work impressively well.

However, no one one my design team likes it. I certainly don't. It's akin to having someone breathing over your shoulder as you're trying to work. And with design, especially, I tend to create a bunch of nonsense and "bad" designs before getting anywhere near a level worthy of sharing or even a team critique. Even if I don't care what others think of me or my skills, it's very disruptive to the creative process to know that someone is watching you.

In my experience, at least, there do not seem to be very many use cases for "multiplayer." I mean, even using Google Docs at the same time as someone else is jarring and disruptive in most cases.

Perhaps the only use case where we've actually liked having it is for a critique (especially when a teammate is remote) or a demo.

Personal preference aside, I think Figma is great. I still miss some things from Sketch, but overall Figma is a great tool. My team recently transitioned/is still transitioning from Sketch to Figma, and I can imagine that many other design teams will be making the same move too.

This is fantastic! Very useful, especially for those of us who still think best with pen and paper.

What is it about Figma that changed the way you work?

Sure, my email is in my profile

Unrelated to the quality of the redesign. I would advise other designers to not follow this method exactly.

Talking to users is great, it's what separates a designer from someone who just pushes pixels, but it's not a good idea to ask users what they like or what they want.

"Does ____ look like a helpful feature to you?" "Does ____ work for you?" "Is this better than before?"

What's the response going to be? "Sure, sounds good to me". Or "nah, I hate that kind of thing".

What you should do instead is observe user behavior. Watch how they interact with the tool/site/etc. and what they do. What are they trying to click on, what are they looking for, what is confusing. Ask them to talk out loud and share their thought process as they're going through the design.

Granted, the designer here may not have had time or access to do this, but then the questions should be more along the lines of what goals the users are trying to accomplish, and what helps or hinders them.

There's the old adage attributed to Henry Ford, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Through observation, or task/goal-oriented questions, discover what people need instead, and design for that. My explanation here is very simplistic, but I hope it gets the idea across.

Source: Am designer, and review portfolios and conduct interviews. We look at process as much as we look at quality of output.

EconTalk has a recent episode on basic income [0]. The guest is against basic income but the debate is interesting.

[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/michael_munger_3.ht...