This document provides guidance on user experience (UX) design through a series of brief statements and quotes from sources. It emphasizes that UX is about demystification, inspiration, and guidance. UX involves listening to users, understanding them, and reflecting on their needs and pain points over the long term. It is not just about usability but also trust, pleasure, and understanding. The sources provided give examples of how listening to users and early prototyping helped create successful products and services like Instapaper, GitHub, Dropbox, Tumblr, Instagram, and Stack Overflow.

1. some notes on UX
by Rui Lopes

2. demystification. inspiration. guidance.

3. demystification

4. UX is not
a boogeyman

5. UX is not
a panacea

6. UX is not
just for coolness

7. UX is not
abstract

8. UX is not
sacred

9. UX is not
(just) usability

10. UX is
listening

11. UX is
knowing

12. UX is
reflecting and understanding

13. UX is
pleasure

14. UX is
trust

15. UX is
a long term relationship

16. UX is
a process

17. inspiration

18. source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_instapaper_was_created.php
I would find things during the workday
that I wanted to read, but I was at work
- so I really couldn't. I would skim
articles [or] I would open a tab and
never go back to it, until my browser
crashed and then I forgot about it.
And then similarly, I had to commute on
the train everyday for about an hour or
two. When I was on the train, I had my
iPhone and I could browse the internet -
but only before it went underground.
There were a load of things I had to
read.
– Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper

19. source: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github
It started more out of necessity than anything else:
we both loved git but there was no acceptable way
to share code with others. Tom thought I’d be
interested in helping fix the problem, and I was.
Shipping early and often lets you see how people
are actually using your site and allows you to
react accordingly.
– Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of github

20. source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/08/dropbox
I love Dropbox. The appeal is its utter
simplicity – it's essentially invisible, doing the
task that isn't hard but none of us care to
remember to do, namely, backing up our files.
I had a hard-drive meltdown this summer,
and even though I broke into a cold sweat, I
really hadn't lost anything because I had been
working on those files within Dropbox. The
hard drive and my whole computer, for that
matter, was just a piece of metal and plastic
that I replaced. Disaster averted.
– Susan Orlean, staff at NewYorker

21. My daughter came home from college on
thursday night and showed me all of her
friend's Tumblrs. All the cool kids have
them at her school now.
A Tumblr is self expression. Jessica's
looks different than Emily's, mine and
the Gotham Gal's. That's powerful. And
that is what I think is driving Tumblr's
popularity. Self expression matters.
– Fred Wilson, aka AVC
source: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/self-expression-matters.html

22. source: http://farukat.es/journal/2010/10/482-addictive-allure-of-instagram
Through its mix of efficiency, charm
and community, Instagram quickly
creates an emotional connection
amongst its users, while at the same
time offering a great amount of
functionality.
Instagram [...] brought me back to the
place wherein I enjoy sharing my
photos [...]. I’m followed by far more
strangers on Instagram than I am on
Flickr already, but everything about it
feels intimate and personal.
– Fred Wilson, aka AVC

23. versus
Between the worse data aggregation
method and the much higher amount of
work Wesabe made you do, it was far
easier to have a good experience on Mint,
and that good experience came far more
quickly.
– Marc Hedlund, founder of wesabe
source: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

24. source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/code-its-trivial.html
If you then tell a developer to replicate
StackOverflow, what goes into his head are
the above two SQL tables and enough HTML
to display them without formatting, and that
really is completely doable in a weekend.
If you really want your code to be successful,
you'll stop coding long enough to do all that
other, even more trivial stuff around the code
that's necessary to make it successful.
– Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow

25. But despite these wins, and numerous loyal
fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption
we would have liked.
– Urs Hölzle, SeniorVP Google
We're dedicated to giving you better access
to the information you currently have in
Google's Wave servers. We aim to provide
multiple ways to let you export and migrate
that information [...]
– Pat Coleman, GoogleWaveTeam
source: http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/11/exporting-your-waves.html

26. Twitter is over capacity.
– Fail Whale, HTTP 404 on Twitter.com

27. source: http://damnyouautocorrect.com/1479/todays-plans/

28. guidance

29. idea listen prototype

30. ideas
your own pain points

31. ideas

32. ideas
sleep, shower, get distracted

33. listen
learn to listen!

34. listen
talk to people

35. listen
facilitate

36. listen
pain points will be expressed

37. listen
free text

38. listen
user support

39. listen
A/B testing

40. listen
analytics

41. prototype
paper & pen!

42. prototype
powerpoint et al.

43. prototype
HTML

44. one more thing

45. copy

46. thank you.