The Designer’s Guide to Creating Churn

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The Designer’s Guide to Creating Churn The Top Ten Techniques for Undermining Your Developer's Efforts to Meet Arbitrary Deadlines

Transcript of The Designer’s Guide to Creating Churn

Page 1: The Designer’s Guide to Creating Churn

The Designer’s Guide to Creating Churn

The Top Ten Techniques for Undermining Your Developer's Efforts to Meet Arbitrary Deadlines

Page 2: The Designer’s Guide to Creating Churn

Churn : The frothy foam of wasted effort that floats to surface of every project, often the result of incessant agitation.

Sue, the project manager, always aware of looming deadlines, worked tirelessly to prevent pointless work, but that didn’t stop Helen who couldn’t get enough churn, which to her tasted a lot like sweet, sweet revenge.

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Maximum Viable Product

Baking arbitrary functionality into the design is a great way send developers down a rabbit hole of despair. You should definitely add that advanced search flyout that wasn’t in the spec. Specs are just suggestions anyway.

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EscherizationCSS is not PhotoShop. What's easy in PhotoShop can be damn near impossible in CSS. CSS-phobic layouts are extremely fragile and can add whole weeks to the development process. If M.C. can make the geometrically improbable seem plausible, so can you!

100%

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Easy Hard Herculean

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Hidden Compartment in a Secret Drawer

Two features are twice as hard as one. Two nested features are four times as hard. Harness the power of exponential difficulty by nesting features inside of nested features inside of nested features ...

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Button 1 Button 1

Button 2

Button 3Button 2 Button 3

Quick and Simple Hours of

Programming

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Mobile Different Design

Developers are big on “responsive design” and “mobile first” so your desktop design should be your top priority. When you’re done do a completely different design for mobile. Reusable code is for sissies. Developers will thank you if provide the opportunity to build two apps instead of one.

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Desktop Mobile

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Nothing But Perfect Content.

Cherry pick your example content so it always fits in the tiny little box you designed. Never indicate how that box will behave if there is more text than can fit. If a developer asks where the scrollbar should appear, insist that scroll bars will “ruin the app’s mouth-feel" and "work against the brand"

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Hey you : I promise to keep this short.

Your Messages

Mai

KaleBro : Our IPO is in trouble. Sorry I can’t say more.

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Form Without Function

Your design must be gorgeous, but it doesn’t have to be complete. Make a point to omit the essential, but easily overlooked parts of important features.

Did you design a stylish search flyout with sleek animations? Omit the close button. If the developer adds one, point at the mockups and question his ability to implement even the simplest designs.

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Deceptively Simple Search Box

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Bad Behaviors

Your design is static but the webapp has behaviors. Hover-states, workflows, error messages should all be overlooked in the final design. This guarantees that the app will never pass acceptance testing.

Worried a developer might call you out about hover-states? Add them to the most obscure part of the design. Now you can question his professionalism. “Did you even look at the mockups?”

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The Mockups Are The Spec

You've agonized over color palettes and sizes and have thoroughly documented your decisions. Just be sure to omit that information when you hand your designs to development team.

When they ask what color that is border is, offer to show them how to use the color picker. If they want to know how wide that text field is, tell them Chrome has a cool measuring plugin. Knowledge is power, don’t give it away.

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Redoing the Done

Did your developers actually complete a feature? Don’t despair! Now’s the time to change the design. Just make sure you justify it by saying something like "This tested better with users. Our customers will want it."

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A Good Developer Would Find This Easy

Demeaning developers is great way to lower moral. Every hour they spend complaining other about you is an hour they have to spend working on the weekend.

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Who does this guy think he is?

Front End Architect at Galen HealthcareJohn Need

codepen.io/johnneed/@johnneed github.com/johnneed