When will phone camera bumps stop growing?
Welcome to the first weekly Better Design roundup, where we look at the most interesting stuff in design, product development, tech, and policy over the last week.
Please submit tips and ideas to me on Twitter @pwthornton.
When does it end, exactly?
For all the talk of computational photography, and Apple has done fantastic work there, you can’t stop basic physics. Apple keeps putting bigger sensors and bigger lenses on their cameras because they let in more light and produce better photos.
As long as people want to continue to use their phones as their main camera, expect camera bumps on phones to keep getting bigger.
Looking at this chart, it seems unlikely that smartphones will stop focusing on photography capabilities anytime soon. This is probably one of the biggest blockers to making foldable phones and tablets a bit hit.
Playstation VR2 is a big upgrade if you can get over the cable
The early reviews of Sony’s Playstation VR2 are in, and it’s a huge upgrade with much better visuals and motion tracking. The hardware looks and feels great, and it is much more consumer-friendly than most existing VR.
First, games are a clear use case for VR (hanging out in work meetings, not so much). And Sony is a great maker of video game systems and games.
Second, the PlayStation VR2 is set it and forget it. You don’t need to worry about having the right computer setup to get the most out of this.
That pesky wire is the only holdup, but so far, no one has delivered an elite experience without a wire to more powerful hardware. Can Apple change that later this year (and will Apple care enough to release great software on their headset?)? The wired setup that Sony uses accomplishes several things (ample graphics power, no need to charge the headset, and much lower costs).
No integration is ever seamless
Don’t trust people who tell you otherwise.
Microsoft’s approach to accessibility takes it to the next level
Accessibility is for a lot more people than you expect. Everyone benefits when we make products accessible. Most of us, even if we don’t have or acquire a permanent disability, will have temporary or situational disabilities. We will benefit from accessibility affordances.
You can also get huge product wins from making your products accessible. One example is producing a transcript for your podcasts. This makes them accessible. Do you know what else it makes them? Searchable both on-site and via search engines. Huge win.
Saying no is a skill
And knowing when to utilize it is critical.
I agree that it is critical to say no to things, and this is one of the biggest things many of us struggle with. We want to push further and further. One of the best ways to do that, it turns out, is to do less work — but better.
Still, sometimes, the backlog has stuff you want to get to, but won’t be able to for a while (and then maybe priorities will change).
Where do you stand on the great backlog debate?
This is going better than at least 50% of Lean Product MVPs
How to conduct user interviews
If you want to learn how to do user interviews or how to get better at them, read this primer.
Leading questions can take a few different forms — all bad. The most obvious form is a leading question designed to elicit a specific response.
If you are asking those kinds of leading questions, you aren’t ready for user interviewing oryou are not open to honest feedback.But a lot of other leading questions arebecause people almost get nervous with asking stark, non-leading, open-ended questions.
Instead of just asking the question, people will ask the question and then suggest a possible answer or two. A common, benign example would be, “Got plans for the weekend? Maybe watching some football?”
What happens is that you have prejudiced the answer by priming thoughts in a person’s mind. You want answers to be as expansive as possible. This means don’t provide users with possible answers.
But in this example, we have now primed a person to think about football. They will spend a noticeable amount of time thinking about whether or not they are actually going to watch football, and if so, they’ll tell you about it.
People do this all the time. It’s almost a nervous tick, like they can’t just ask a stark question. Embrace asking stark questions. This is a user interview, not a chat with a friend.