Designing for the Dead

There are some industries that require years of experience and education just to get a job - think medicine and law.

Then, there are creative fields. The barrier to entry is demonstrating your ability to do something. For aspiring UX designers, this means there are ways to "DIY" your way into the field of UX and product design. If you're on the fence about UX or pursuing a career in this field, here's how to do it without existing "formal" experience.

👀 How to get a UX job with no professional experience
(Heavily rewrote this article, which one one of UXBeginner's firsts!)
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🛏Death and Design
I don't know about you, but the thought of death crosses my mind at least once a week. I have a one hour commute each way to work, which usually makes me think if I'm going to die on the LA freeway. (Here's an article I wrote about a close call). Then there are people in my circle who have died too early, leaving their digital traces behind on the internet.

Facebook recently announced an update to the legacy contact feature, which provides "more control over the deceased’s presence on Facebook, including the ability to manage a new 'Tributes' section where loved ones can reminisce about the person they lost.

There are the brave souls designing for the uncomfortable topic of death. Common Practice made a game called Hello that encourages players to talk about death. At Stanford, there's a class called Designing for Death that has students "use immersive research and design to reimagine death." There's even a company called Over My Dead Body that allows users to design their own headstones.

Of all the articles I've read about death and death, Reinventing death for the twenty-first century has the best write-up on how designers are thinking about more meaningful ways of dying, on and off the screen.

Highlight: "All people seek to achieve personal understandings of what life and death mean. Interactive technologies and systems can place viewers or users into immersive emergent situations and experiences that can open the space for this kind of meaning-making to unfold. For example, systems that sensitively ‘reanimate’ the dead or transcend the barriers of death may have powerful emotional and even therapeutic effects.”

🚙 Grab - have you heard about this app?
There's no way to follow up writing about death but an awkward transition, so here we are. For those who've recently traveled to Southeast Asia - have you used Grab? It's often compared to Uber.

Steve Yegge, a 20 year software engineering veteran, recently wrote about why he left Google to join Grab. I found this article fascinating for 1) Yegge's strong opinions about Google:

"You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers."

And 2) How food delivery is more than just about getting food

Highlight: "Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. It turns out that food delivery is a democratization process: It democratizes the restaurant business, creating mom-and-pop entrepreneurial opportunities that simply never existed before. Opening a restaurant is a huge, prohibitively expensive endeavor. Food trucks lowered the barrier to entry significantly, but food delivery lowers it to near-zero."

What started as a read about a talented engineer leaving to work at a hot startup, turned into an education about the ultra hot Southeast Asia tech market, and the implications of food & transport tech. Read this fascinating article here.

🇺🇸The U.S. Web Design System

Who knew good old 'murica had a design system? Welcome to USWDS 2.0. Fascinating to see this design system, which focuses on a modular, component-based approach to increase adoption by other gov sites:

"Adding USWDS 2.0 doesn’t mean breaking existing site functionality, so it’s easier to make incremental changes. Our components and code play well with existing styles, and it’s easy to adapt our default styles to a look-and-feel appropriate to your audience."

Not only does the system have accessibility best practices baked in, it even comes with it's own new font: Public Sans. This new design system powers 200+ federal sites.

If you're feeling low about the state of the American government, at least the digital services are doing their job.