In my first job, I was a ghostwriter for a local politician. I wrote letters on behalf of the Illinois State Treasurer to business leaders and politicians across the state. These letters were signed by an autopen—a robotic arm that legally notarized documents when the treasurer was too busy to do it himself. A letter that was written by me and signed by an autopen. (Keep that on the DL). After…
For as long as I can remember, design tools have been kept separate from presentation tools. Designers have to repeat the supremely annoying process of exporting screenshots, importing them into Google Slides, and updating them when they get out of date. Those days are over (I hope). Thanks to Figma s prototyping feature, designers can now create and present in the same tool. I put together a deck…
Competence without comprehension. We can learn a lot about goals from honeybees. Yes, bees! A honeybee colony can be said to have a goal (i.e. manufacture honey) even if no individual bee is aware of this goal. Honeybees have competence without comprehension. The goal of their hive system is the product of a bunch of individual mindless behaviors. Similarly, all of us have goals whether we’re…
Let’s imagine what an alien would think of our corporate cultural norms—the rituals and scripts that govern daily office life. I’m documenting these bizarre habits before I forget that they’re bizarre. If you’ve been in the workforce for more than a year or two, you might even think they’re normal. Our alien friend is like an annoying little kid who can’t stop…
For years, designers have been stuck in their tools all by themselves. Thanks to Figma, we can now create in real-time with others—even if they re not in the same room. Lately, I ve been experimenting with using Figma to do UX exercises with the marketers, engineers, and designers on my team at Uber. It s been a super fun and useful way to generate and share ideas—especially with remote teammates.…
“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it…
There’s a glass of sparkling water in front of you, but you think it’s a Sprite. You lift it up to your mouth, expecting to taste something sugary and lemony. When you take your first sip, you’re caught completely off guard and almost spit it out of your mouth. Your expectations did not match the inputs your brain received from your taste buds. You wanted a refreshingly cool drink, but all you got…
Imagine your friend just texted you with some bad news—their grandfather recently passed away. Would you feel comfortable responding with a Bitmoji? Now imagine your friend just texted you to tell you that they scored their dream job. How would you feel about replying with a Bitmoji? If you’re anything like me, you’d steer clear of Bitmoji after hearing bad news, but wouldn’t hesitate to…
Tristan Harris: Sean—I’m having trouble sleeping at night. A handful of tech companies are controlling billions of minds every single day, and no one seems to give a damn. Sean Hannity: Why should I? Harris: Social media platforms are taking advantage of our psychological weaknesses—our discomfort with boredom, our attraction to negativity—in order to maximize the amount of time we spend in their…
Last week, I went to a screening of “ City Rising ”—a brutal, eye-opening documentary about the Bay Area’s housing crisis. The long and short of the problem is that low-income locals are being displaced in large numbers by the tech boom. When a community experiences a big influx of high-income workers, landlords are incentivized to evict poor tenants and raise rent prices. In many parts of…
Here in Silicon Valley, people live and die by the “growth mindset.” For the unacquainted, growth mindset is the belief that you can become better at anything with enough hard work and effort. (This is in contrast to “fixed mindset,” which implies that your abilities are innate and static). Growth mindset often escapes critical examination because it feels self-evident to its cheerleaders. When I…
Last month, I challenged myself to create one drawing per day during my 15-minute commute. I turned to an unlikely medium: Snapchat. There’s something inspiring about its constraints. A drawing tool. A color picker. 4.7 inches of screen. A few emojis and stickers. It’s the anti-Photoshop. What could go wrong?
1 Alice and Bob are two friends who have never met in person. They live on planet Xorab, where there is a very strict law re: communication. They are only allowed to talk via videophone. The law forbids them from meeting face-to-face. Now, and forever more. Meanwhile on planet Ploxtar, there live two friends, Cindy and Dave, who also have never met in person. Their communication is subject to a…
1. Seek out responsibilities that you’re not quite qualified for. Uber treats its interns like full-time employees; we’re given more creative freedom and control than we probably deserve. The company is too young to create trivial intern assignments that don’t contribute to the core business. One of my projects, for example, was UberEvents—a service that allows event organizers to buy rides for…
This article was originally published on Huffington Post . By now, you’ve probably seen the video of a Yale student yelling at a professor, the Facebook post about a “white girls only” party, or the email about offensive Halloween costumes. Unfortunately, the short YouTube clips and articles I’ve seen don’t even come close to painting an accurate picture of what’s happening at Yale. I’m a senior…
They call my generation digital natives, but the word “digital” is starting to feel very dated to me in most contexts. I think I’ve finally figured out why. “Digital” seems like a word from a transitional era. When digital products were first released, it was necessary to distinguish them from their analog counterparts. Take the camera as an example. For over a hundred years, the word “camera”…
Can a web design be as timeless as a book design or a piece of artwork? We revere the centuries-old Gutenberg Bible and the Mona Lisa. But we laugh at web designs that are only a few years old. Will the craft of web design be subject to the whims of ever-changing trends and fashion and style? What would it take to make a web design timeless? The foundational principles of graphic design certainly…
Enrique Allen — the co-founder of Designer Fund and a teacher at Stanford’s d.school — is on a mission to rid the world of “shitty user experiences.” Last month, I sat down with him at Designer Fund in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood. The space feels more like a home or a lounge than an office. Beautiful posters hang on the walls and books line the shelves next to a small kitchen in the back.…
Ankit Shah is the kind of person who asks, “How are you?” and means it. If you say “good,” he’ll ask why. He doesn’t want to know what you do for a living, but how and why you do it. Ankit’s curiosity extends to everyone he talks to. Even strangers. In fact, he’s met over a thousand strangers since founding Tea With Strangers in the spring of 2013. Though some might peg Tea With Strangers as an…
When Evan Spiegel gave a talk at Yale last month, he told a room full of students that “the next year is going to be a lot about media on Snapchat. Broadcast media. One week later, Snapchat launched Snapcash—a feature that allows users to easily send money to their friends. Many in the press characterized it as a Venmo competitor. But Snapcash isn’t just about P2P payments. Now that users can…