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Understanding the Obscure

During a casual conversation that I had with a co-worker yesterday, Bitcoin came up. No, we didn’t talk about the idea of cryptocurrency, or who is the real Satoshi, or even the fact that the price for a Bitcoin grew by over $300 in the past few months.

We talked about reading charts, that is reading the chart of the Bitcoin’s pricing. During the conversation, many phrases came up that I was not familiar with, including “support & resistance”.

It’s a new area of obscurity for me – how the financial industry works, as well as understanding the ratio of noise and signal during the day-to-day information broadcast.

Ultimately, according to my co-worker, it comes down to reading the chart. Not the newspaper, blog, TV shows, or Cramer, but charts. The ability to understand it based on your own experiences of trial-and-error, to slowly comprehend the point of buy-in, and sell-off.

Before I dabbed into the world of ‘travel hacking’, it overwhelms me. This feels the same.

It reminds me of a strange phenomenal with watching sports. After watching NBA or EPL for half-a-season or so, I become familiar with the names of the players. And at times, I can recall their name much easier than people around me. That level of familiarity with something that is distant was very interesting to me. Now if you have not watched NBA or EPL for a couple of seasons, you will start seeing names that are “obscure” to you. Then you will have to spend a few games to reacquaint with these names, and to understand who is a good player and who is not.

Buy into an interest, and get familiar with the obscure.

Simon Sinek

Missed Seth Godin’s talk, but manage to catch half of Simon Sinek’s talk at Sales Machine 16.

The biggest take away is the contrast between finite-, and infinite-based thinking, with one grounded in interest- and the latter in value-. This is a very interesting idea which he used to encourage the audience to not give too many weight to competition, but focus on the value that you are wanting to create, and hold dear.

The goal is not about being #1, as Simon described to someone who asked a question towards the end. It’s fictional, he said. The goal is to find, and focus on what you believe and stand for, not what you do. And according to Simon, if you stick to your value, people will start to appear and help you. Because it’s easier to get with people who believe in something, then someone who’s not.

He also mentioned that, as it’s not a race to the top, and with the infinite-based thinking, you can continue to grow. But try to gauge the goal you may have (as generated by the value- that you hold), and how you work towards it per day/month/quarter/year. Can you do it better.

He said he had winged the talk.

Good talk, and certainly applicable.

#SalesMachine16

Enterprise UX 2016

This was an eye-opener for me, not in a revolutionary kind of way, but in ways that reflects how closed off I have been -- whether by my choice or by context.

There were good talks, with highly intelligent and successful individuals sharing their thoughts. But the highlight is a heighten awareness of what is out there. The talks from these people left a deep impression in me:

Sam Ladner: Understanding the value of data exhaust (data you collect from your system). And understand you are designing for the user not the customers.

Fredrick Matheson: Finding the balance between burden carried by User, Tools, and Systems in regards to the complexity.

Russ Unger: The design language should encourage consistency > uniformity. (i.e. the sites should have the same look and feel, but not all the same. Think branding – you can tell if a certain product is of a brand even with different styles.)

Steve Baty: Any change introduces uncertainty. The solution to defending your idea is to come up with many ideas/concepts.

XPLANE Challenge Sprint on cross-team collaboration: Using activity to showcase potential problems, and therefore capable of collectively generate organic solutions.

John Maeda: Leaders can only lead those that wants to be lead. The word design is a poorly designed word. In Japanese, however, its meaning is more explicit – design and plan. There are around 4 light bulbs in our lives, take the next step.

Andy Polaine: Digital products are not products, they are part of the service. What is the end product/experience? Use tools to extract insights, opportunity/idea, and ultimately concepts.

At a personal level, its about doing more, and to look at problems from a macro-perspective. As John Maeda had said better design leader > better individual contributor. It’s not a matter of importance, but a matter of influence. But of course, things are not handed to you. You need to grow into the role. And this conference had helped me to understand what that may look like, and equipping me with tools to put them into action.

#eux16

There are no hard’n’fast rules about this kind of thing, but as Derek put it, it helps to think about whether the action involves controlling something (use a button) or taking the user somewhere (use a link).

Accessible progressive disclosure revisited

#DesignForAccessibility #uxdesign

Oh, so, Manishin is someone who might get a lot of business and/or press if Apple were sued for antitrust violations. Well, now it all makes sense.

The Macalope

It doesn't look like much from afar, but that's just perspective. A series of meandering hills that can take hours to hike up since with the sliding sands you are literally taking two step up, and one step down. And because of the nearby mountains and valleys, weather can go from blizzard to sunshine in matter of minutes. A fascinating place to be. #climbthathill #colorado #greatsanddunesnationalpark (at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve)

#climbthathill #colorado #greatsanddunesnationalpark