Chapter 1: Introduction

[yufanz]

A cross-functional team:

• [ ] product management,
• [ ] marketing
• [ ] product architect
• [ ] UX designers (user research, user interface)
• [ ] visual designers
• [x] developers
• [ ] service designers
• [ ] ...

Unfortunately, people come with a host of

• [ ] idiosyncrasies,
• [ ] cognitive styles,
• [ ] cultures,
• [ ] interpersonal tendencies, and
• [ ] personality quirks.

No

• [ ] organizational role definition,
• [x] careful separation of the code into independent modules,
• [ ] management rules,
• [ ] organizational structures,

or fun outings to build team spirit can eliminate the need to deal with the issues of getting people to work together well.

[yufanz]

I have believed that users don't know what they want, and therefore that I should tell them what they want. While my premise may still hold, my conclusion is wrong; users may not know what they want, but everything they do portrays what they want. Like it says in the book, users are not engineers or designers, so they can't tell you what they want. But as a designer, it's my job to understand the user's context, and design products that fit into that context.

[yufanz]

I suspect that successful businessmen are not user-centered; they are assholes. My dad is an asshole, Majd doesn't really invest in user experience, and I've been told Steve Jobs was literally an asshole. It makes me think that I need to strike a balance between understanding the user's context and changing the user's context. Like I said to Melvin in Japan, people may not be passionate about what you do, but they may still want to share your passion. People's context changes all the time, so instead of grasping their whim, construct a context so ideal that they would abandon their own.