The State of UX, Social Media, and Agile Development

A few small thoughts and good links from around the web.

Author

Ted Goas
December 20, 2024

đź”– What I’ve been reading

The term “Agile” sometimes get a bad rap, but I love David Hoang’s take on the alternative:

My career dream is to destroy the concept of design handoff. My fundamental belief is that poor or outdated documentation is worst than no documentation. The prototype or demo’ed working software is the artifact in which documents should be inspired by. A vital mistake designers can make is not working closely enough with engineering along the way. I’ve always viewed the best iteration cycle is sketching interactions with engineering early. This allows them to get ahead on the intention, ensuring we’re not over-designing.

David Hoang

I still hear the terms “handoff” and “freezing design” being used at day job and it sends a chill up my spine every time. We’ve been changing our product development process this year, and while changing years of waterfall mindset isn’t easy, we’ve made a ton of progress in just a few months.

A watercolor sketch of a process starting with a backlog, going through agile, and finishing with a product.

A bleak but sobering read about the design industry this past year. Designing for growth and organizational politics instead of customers. Shipping trash that ain't ready. Posting for social algorithms rather than our peers.

On their own, these shifts might fly under the radar. But zoom out, look at the whole year, and the patterns start to emerge—giving us a glimpse of where Design is headed. […] It will change everyone’s perception of who is equipped to design, how long design takes, and—inevitably—how much design is worth paying for.

Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga

The article starts out in a rather cynical tone, after which I expected some sort of transition to an upside, but it never came. The article just trails off into saying “Change is constant, don’t worry it’ll be fine.”

Not the most comforting “Year In Review” article I’ve read this year.

I may be done with social media. The Twitter → X tire fire may be what pushed me over the edge, but truthfully it’s been a long time coming.

There was a time when my feeds were filled with posts from my friends, links to articles, breaking news, and funny quips. Was it a bubble? Maybe, but I had a really enjoyable run on social media for most of the 2010’s.

Since then the algorithms started favoring growth and my feeds became dominated by influencers, ads, bots, the free speech crowd, poor-quality boosted posts, and general enshittification.

My feeds got less interesting and my reach cratered.

I still enjoy keeping up with design and tech, but social media ain’t the way anymore. It made me realize that I enjoy writing, not posting. That I enjoy reading pages, not consuming timelines. That we need our own websites and newsletters that don’t rely on big tech:

Building our own websites, making independent media, and striving for more democratic social networks—I think these are some of the small but crucial things we need to be doing to create alternatives to the monopolistic, billionaire-owned and increasingly authoritarian tech ecosystems currently dominating our lives.

Brian Merchant, quoted by Gita Jackson

So next year I’m doubling down on writing on my site and in this newsletter, and divesting from social.

I love finding someone's home-made blog (not a Medium or Substack or something) and binging three years worth of articles in one sitting. Plz keep making your own websites folks, the world appreciates it ❤️

— Ted Goas (@tedgoas.bsky.social)2024-12-10T17:25:02.205Z

I don’t think I’m alone.

I work with dashboards a lot and appreciate how hard it is to get data visualization right, so I was thrilled to see eBay include detailed graph guidelines in their new brand playbook. More of this please!

Maven offered a free lightning talk on how to work with execs (friendly link). My main takeaway: when presenting, start with the punchline. The final design, the metrics, etc. Background and context is good, but don’t spend 15min building up the story.

The tech job market is still rough, so The design of getting hired is a timely piece on how recruiters actually scan and rank resumes (contrary to popular belief, it’s not all handled by Ai).

Email Love Wrapped 2024 contains some of the best email designs from 2024. Tons of email inspo!

Problem Driven Development is another great post from Stay SaaSy. The first sentence hooked me: “Figuring out what to do is a big part of senior tech roles.”

🏛️ A favorite article I periodically re-read

Experts vs. Imitators: If you want the highest quality information, you have to speak to the best people. The problem is many people claim to be experts, who really aren’t.

âťť One Good Quote

I think it's generally human nature to over-estimate risk and under-estimate opportunity. ... The risks are probably not as big as you perceive and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive.

Jeff Bezos

I’m generally risk-averse at work and with money, so this has given me something to think about.

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)