Mental models are tools for thinking. The better mental models you have, the better thinker you are. Writing this reminds me of the saying: “You are only as good as your tools (and the average of five people that you spend most time with).”

While designing experiences, as it turns out, a lot of thinking is required. The quality of the output heavily depends on how good of a thinker you are. This is true especially dealing with complex projects where multiple moving pieces work in conjunction with the project that we undertake. 

So, how might we improve the quality of our thinking? One of the answer was employing a latticework of mental models. Last week, I finished reading Farnam Street’s book: The Great Mental Models. While I am still in the process of distilling the learnings from the book, I wanted to share some of the mental models that I thought were obviously employable for someone who designs experiences.

Reduce the problem down to fundamental truths that MUST hold and then build from there. Ask WHY multiple times till you reach a core problem that must be solved first. Don’t assume anything.

e.g., Instead of blindly implementing what we are told, we can begin by asking the “WHY.” And then followed by another “WHY” — Why do we need this functionality? And why is that?

We might come across as dumb (or sometimes an asshole, so better watch that tone when you say “WHY”) but we will make sure that we don’t assume anything and we won’t be dumb tomorrow.

Bonus e.g.,SpaceX was born because Musk applied “First Principle Thinking.” 

“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminium alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fibre. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”

Models are inherently flawed and that’s why they don’t represent the reality. It’s possible to completely understand a “model” of something and mistakingly assume that you know the reality but it’s not true. Models (or maps) are simply an oversimplification of the reality. Sometimes the reality changes and the models don’t and as a result it can become outdated. Also, when learning the model, think about the creator and the context under which the model was created.

e.g., Model of a user flow diagram. While reading it, we can think about when was it made? What are the changes that have happened in the interface after it was made? When was it last updated? Who made it? etc.

Related talk: The Map Is Not The Territory by Ethan Marcotte

Play out your solutions in thought experiments based on the facts that you are in the know of and in control of. This method allows you to take a step back and play out multiple scenarios, identify decision points, identify faults, and come to an optimum solution. 

e.g., This is equivalent to considering multiple scenarios in an experience. It could involve thinking in terms of: What happens if users tap on back instead of next? What happens when user quits the app in the middle of sign up process? What happens when users’ internet connection is dropped while making a purchase?

This is probably an evolution of Thought Experiment. This model encourages you to go a step further and consider the second order impact of decisions. You can use this model to identify the issues and actors outside the immediate problem that are likely to get affected by your decision. 

e.g., What happens after you remove a piece of information from a page to reduce clutter? What will users do to find it? 

Given two equally good explanations of a phenomenon, the simplest one (with the fewer moving parts) is likely to be the correct one. Chase simplicity in your understanding. Chase simplicity in your decisions. Remove probability that comes with moving parts. 

e.g., A simple interface with less moving parts will always win over a complex interface because of the decreased cognitive overload required to process it. Who doesn’t want to work less?

What mental models do you apply in your daily work? Would love to know about more about them. (Ping me on Twitter).

Every year, like a damn ritual, I update the underlying tech stack of this site. And why shouldn’t I? Technology progresses and makes things faster, better (arguably). And since I am a nobody in this vast web of madness, I have no-one to answer to. No loyal readers to take their reading preferences in consideration. No loyal users to think about their account migrations. All I try with every update is to keep the old posts so that when once in blue moon someone lands, they can see “something.”

I don’t know when this started but I remember the inspiration behind it — Stammy. He had built his site with Jekyll and around 4-5 years ago, static site generators were cool. The idea that you just need a static server to serve the html files sounded bonkers. And it was pretty fast when compared to Wordpress. Following his post, I was able to set up S3 and Jekyll. 

However, as the content grew, Jekyll became slower and slower in building. And that resulted in sub-optimal developer experience. 

Then Hugo came in town and it blew me away. The build times were halved. Both worked on markdown files so it was easy to switch. 

In 2019, I heard about Gatsby. It sounded like an over engineered solution but I was excited to try this new framework that was “fast in every way that matters.” I felt the learning curve to Gatsby was steep (and I lacked some foundational knowledge of React and Graphql) so I took a course by Meng To and he got me up to speed. 

It brought some performance benefits, especially to images. With its built in plugins you could add progressive loading of images and svg filters. It felt futuristic. But complex. 

Last month, while building yet another small project — RemoteJobs.store — I decided to try out NextJS. And it clicked for me. Not only the documentation around it was great, but it also has a plethora of working examples that you can simply clone and deploy on Vercel. While building the RemoteJobs.store, I pushed Vercel to its limits — statically generating 8000+ pages during build time under 20 mins. 

And so I wondered, what if I took Gatsby out of the equation and move this site to just NextJS? It does static builds and server side rendering (and of course client side rendering). For sure, the setup will not be simpler but I am nobody and I can easily try things without anyone noticing.

While researching the possibility of moving the site to NextJS, I came across Brian’s site who is doing some amazing single user experiments on his personal site. Seems like he had done something similar — and it inspired to take a step further by integrating a headless CMS. 

The obvious advantage of something like a headless CMS would be that I no longer need to have my repository on my local machine to publish new posts. I can simply write my new posts in web editors of these CMSes that after “publishing” use the Vercel hook to automatically rebuild the static site. 

I looked at the available options like Ghost, Contentful and Prismic and settled on Prismic. As Brian realised in his research process before making the move to NextJS that none of these solutions will be perfect and every solution will be a hack. Once I accepted this, I ended up with following system:

Prismic as a headless CMS where I can add drafts, publish and edit posts

At this point, I should mention that I am still trying to figure out how to import (and export) my existing posts to Prismic and out of it. It seems like that I need to upgrade my Prismic Developer plan to something like “Medium” to have the option of Import/Export. Hopefully, I will figure out something soon. 

Memento Mori — “Remember you must die.”

If I had to put a quote on a billboard for everyone to read, it would be this: “Momento Mori.” It’s a latin phrase that roughly means — “Remember you must die.” It might sound morbid in the first read but it’s more than just that.

The quote has served me as a reliable reminder in the times when I felt disappointed and depressed. When I was jealous and jolted by sadness. It reminded me that none of these suffering matter in the long run and that life is too short to allow myself to suffer. Eventually we all will fade. So will our works and thoughts. Entire civilizations and species were wiped off in a blink.

This quote reminds me often that life is too short to spend it being unhappy. There’s really no excuse to spend life in misery. In the bestest case scenario we get 60-70 years of life and while the days might seem longer, the years aren’t.

In a blink of an eye, we’ll all be gone. 100 years compared to infinity is nothing. I talk to my sister all the time…. [I say,] ‘Girl, you better start having some fun. We’re gonna be gone in a minute. You’re gonna look back and say, “Shit, I should have been laughing and now I’m dead.”’ — Jamie Foxx

It just happened so that I attended a workshop recently where I was able to engrave these quotes on a silver ring. I sincerely hope that the engraving does it’s job of being a constant reminder that nothing is worth being unhappy about. And remember — we must die.

Today’s office was somewhere in the suburbs of Bangkok where I’ve been staying for the past week. Away from the city. Away from the hustle and bustle of the city. On the deck at dawn. At first, I was skeptical of working in daylight, but the screen with 500 nits brightness on the MacBook Pro is no joke.

It was also refreshing to feel the cool breeze in Bangkok (finally!) even though it meant getting up at few hours before the full-sun.

My morning routine hasn’t changed in the past three years.

Everyday, I wake up at around 7 in the morning. After the natural obligations are out of the way, I put up a pot of water on the stove to boil. Then, I put about two scoops of freshly brewed coffee beans in a manual coffee grinder and grind for about four minutes. There’s something esoteric about manually grinding the coffee. Or manually doing anything. The force and energy required to move the handle. The sound made by the burr as beans pass through it. Everything is clear. Everything is present. There’s no blackbox. I know what’s happening. It’s comforting. Therapeutic of sorts.

On a cup — usually white — I place a coffee filter and empty the grounded coffee. By this time, water starts to boil. Nobody is up in the house yet so I can hear the sound boiling water makes. I start pouring it over my grounded coffee and then I stop after a few seconds and repeat the pouring. This break in pouring is essential to accentuate intricate flavours of the coffee.

As the water drains through the coffee and filter into the mug, it makes another distinct sound and effuses a familiar aroma. An aroma that I’ve grown used to. My comfort aroma.

The coffee is ready now and it’s 7:30ish. I take the cup and sit on a nice comfortable chair with my Kindle Oasis. Sometimes its a hard copy of a book. When I was in Bangalore, I managed to score a knock off Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman for about $300 (original Eames cost $5,295.00). Now I switch between a $10 IKEA and $80 IKEA.

I can’t take the sip of the coffee just yet. It’s too hot. I prefer not hot. I turn the Kindle on and start reading where I had left yesterday. On this chair, at this time, but yesterday. I start reading and five minutes into the book, I make my way to the cup and take the first sip. I can feel the warmth of the coffee as it makes it’s way through oesophagus to my belly. I like this feeling. I wait for another minute to take the second sip. I continue to read and in the process I forget about the coffee. About 20 minutes later, the coffee is at room temperature now and I gulp the remaining at once. I continue to read and highlight. Sometimes, I take notes.

It’s past 8:30 now. And I have completed my morning routine. The same exact routine that I’ve been following from the past three years.

There’s nothing unique about the routine but the whole process sets me in the right mood to start the day — slow, thoughtful and focused. I tried to make physical activities as part of my routine but I didn’t like being tired in the morning. It works well for me and I don’t intend to change it in years to come.

People create better things together. More people bring wide set of ideas, perspectives, assumptions and use-cases. And as designers, we put so much trust in collaboration. Design sprints, design critique, design clinic, design insert your choice of word here. The underlying idea is simple — work with multiple people to make design solutions more robust. But how exactly might we do that? How might we set the stage for receiving good feedback? And how might we give feedback that actually is helpful?

At least for once, we all have heard feedback that goes like:

You should use the radio buttons instead of toggles!

And the list could go on and on. These are not good feedback. These are reactions and opinions that are preferential in nature. These reactions also lack any direction and don’t explain “why” something looks horrible. Or why we should use radio buttons instead of toggles? These reactions are backed by a hefty set of assumptions— the presenter didn’t consider radio buttons or other icons. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t but verifying it by framing these as question might work better.

Setting the stage for receiving better feedback

Any design that we create, tries to achieve a particular outcome. It might be attempting to improve a metric by solving a problem. OR it could be leveraging some business opportunity by filling in the user need. The point is, whatever we are designing, we are designing for a desired outcome.

As designers often we are so engrossed in the “how of things”, that we forget the “why of things.” We are often eager to share how we are planning to do, what we are planning to do—often ignoring why it was worth doing in the first place.

Setting the stage for receiving better feedback is a step by step process. I first came across this simple yet effective framework from the book called Discussing Design by Adam Connor, Aaron Irizarry. It looks quite obvious in the first sight but after following it in the past few months I’m convinced of it’s effectiveness.

State the problems and constraints to help set the context. The more convinced stakeholders are of the problems, the better feedback would be.

Point out design elements that are related to the stated objective.

Explain why (or how) those elements are working to achieve the stated objective.

Following this framework not only means that we’re setting the informative stage for receiving feedback, but it also means that we need to be very clear about our own thought process while designing. We have to be constantly asking “Why am I doing what I am doing…?”

On the other end, when a design is presented around this framework, it makes it easy to give feedback about. For every step, the reviewers can simply exercise the critical thinking — taking each of the presented statements and find out if it’s true or false.

It’s important that we agree on the stated problems and the objective before thinking about the presented solution. Once done, we can make sure that our feedback revolves around the stated objective.

An example of a constructive feedback could sound something like this:

“If the objective is for users to use filters more often, putting it in the top along with search bar might not be effective because it gets lost in all other components in the header.”

“If the objective is for users to use filters more often… states the objective the critic is analysing.

… putting it in the top along with search bar… identifies the design choices made that are being analysed.

… might not be effective because it gets lost in all other components in the header.”Explanation of why the critic thinks the design choices made won’t be effective.

Making feedback is not about establishing processes. It’s about individuals taking lead of presenting their work better with relevant context. It’s about reviewers making sure they provide thoughts around the stated objective. There’s no limit to the amount of improvements we can do to a product with infinite resources. But in reality, we need to work under constraints and limited resources. Staying focused around the objective — while presenting work and reviewing work — can improve the product within limited time and achieve objective that matters to us, efficiently.

Good feedback is hard and that’s why we don’t hear it often enough. However, with just a little mindfulness from the both sides — while presenting and reviewing — we can be more effective in making better things together.

Making Feedback Helpful in Design Discussions

Here we are in April and more than a quarter of 2019 has passed.

I have been trying to get back on my training routine and it has not been easy. I barely made it to 14Km this week. That’s total of 1h and 34m of exercise.

Yesterday, I visited Singapore Science Center. A bit overwhelming. I read so many things, saw so many installations. But, at the end I was only able to retain a minuscule of those information. What stood out was the difference between “Hypothesis”, “Theory” and “Rule.”

A hypothesis is a tentative explanation that can be tested by further investigation. A theory is a well-supported explanation of observations. A rule is a statement that summarizes the relationship between variables. In a nutshell, theory is just a more refined hypothesis and can be disproven.

The stealer of the show was the fire tornado (pictured above). I hadn’t seen anything like that before. The tornado was being created by nothing but openings at the base of the fire chamber that pointed in the same direction.

Behind every tool there’s a problem. Wordpress was a problem so the tools were static site generators. With the help of templates you generate a directory of static files and host it wherever you like.

There’s no denying the fact that Hugo has got everything that a static site needs. But I like React and while working on my Photos Portfolio, I found Gatbsy extremely exciting. This weekend, I thought of an interesting challenge for myself—how might I, with the least amount of effort, set up and running my blog on Gatsby.

I started with moving the contents of the blog from Hugo to Gatsby. It was easier than expected. I started with first changing the format of the markdown files from TOML to YAMLbecause as of now Gatsby plugin only supports YAML. I used the built in conversion tool. In terminal move to content directory and run this command:

Instead of writing the themes from scratch, I picked up the most popular starter called gatsby-starter-blog and I added my styles on the top of it. I also followed this guide to create custom pages that automatically generates slugs.

Gatsby makes things like Animating the page dead simple. All I did was use the gatsby-plugin-transition-link plugin and wrapped the components in TransitionLink tag. I still have to work on improving the performance and figure out how to use Gatsby’s in-built Imgtag in all the post images to leverage the lazy loading with blur-up effect. However, for now I am quite happy with the progress.

Hello, hello! I have twenty minutes left before another looong meeting starts on Monday and I think it’s a good time to cram in the last week’s notes.

I am done with the book Vegabonding — and I have enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s the right balance of philosophy and actionable items. Some favourite quotes from the book that I’ve been pondering upon:

“We end up spending the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it. — Thoreau”

“Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?”

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

“The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.”

I also got my hands around Variable Fonts. One font file to rule them all. As a matter of fact, even this site is now served by one variable font — FF Meta Variable Demo

I was also digging other premium variable typefaces like Orelo that aren’t boring or conventional and bring a sort of freshness with authority.

In other news, I finished designing a page that commemorates our Rinjani Walk that we did in June 2018. I asked other folks what they thought of the walk and I put their responses together with their portraits taken just after the completion of the walk. I am calling it…A Short Walk in Rinjani

Inspired by Mark Boulton, I’m giving this weeknote thing a try. If only to just get me in the habit of writing again. Let’s see how it goes.

I am writing this on a Sunday evening in Singapore, after having a home made dinner, while Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is being streamed on the TV. If you know me any well, I can watch Jerry Seinfeld doing anything, anytime.

I have also been reading a few books. Recently I picked up Vagabonding— book about taking time off from your normal life to discover and experience the world on your own terms. I haven’t even reached halfway through and I have been experiencing serious wanderlust. This book seems like a guide to long-term travel. More on this soon.

While we are at the subject related to life, I came across this thread on Twitter by Hugh Howey that makes an excellent point about why not everyone should go to college. Howey says if you’re passionate about something that doesn’t require college degree — software programming, writing novels etc — go all in and get the experience while being on the job.Time spent in college will never substitute for learning on the job.

On the contrary, I can’t help but reminded of the book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You which makes a convincing argument about how following your passion is a bad career advice and a better approach is to master skills that people value. Career Satisfaction will be followed after the mastery.

These two school of thoughts about approaching career sound different to me and I have no time to dissect these but to take the underlying positive suggestion — whatever you do, do not waste time.

For the past few days, Library@HarbourFront is where I have been spending my evenings at. Due to obvious reasons—books, closer (relatively?) to home, the overall vibe and a stimulating workspace setting. The library was opened recently so I can easily find seats at my choice of locations and right now I am digging the area nearby main entrance with windows facing an open space of Vivo City.

The chair and desk setting is just about right and I can look at people—carrying things, eating things, buying things—when I am bored from looking at the screen.

There’s something about working from a library that makes me feel weirdly secure. Thoughts like I can look up things when I am lost instantly comes to mind. But I am yet to do so. I felt lost multiple times while solve one or the other engineering conundrum but never looked up to books for a way out. Who looks for answers in books when you have Internet!? Searching books is inefficient. Searching in the books is inefficient. And yet, I feel secure that I can still look up things when I am lost.

Hi there!