Frank Tisellano

July 2024

• Copying is the way design works

  “As long as there is design, there will be copying.”

• The Right Kind of Stubborn

  “Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don’t work at first, but they’re not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does. Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won’t listen. They beat their heads against a wall and get nowhere.”

January 2024

• An app can be a home-cooked meal

  Beautiful idea.

December 2023

• AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years

• 10 Weird HTML Hacks That Shaped The Internet

  Those were the days.

November 2023

• The Decline of Usability: Revisited

  Spot on, and the first installment is great, too.

• Business questions worth asking

  Yes yes yes.

October 2023

• The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop

  Another banger from NN/g. I’ve been redesigning a website for my son’s school, and I have to be honest: I prefer the design from 2012 to the “modern” thing we’re converting it to, at least on desktop.

• A Few Laws of Getting Rich

  “There are 13 divorces among the 10 richest men in the world. Seven of the top ten have been divorced at least once.”

• Nobody Cares

  All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.

• Career Advice

  “I know that by making choices designed to land me in the first class cabin, it would be difficult to avoid also inheriting the dreariness associated with its current occupants.”

September 2023

• CT Scans of Coffee Equipment

  Sad to see quality drop off over time, especially from Bialetti, but these scans are amazing nonetheless.

March 2023

• Juice

  Juice is the non-essential visual, audio & haptic effects that enhance the player’s experience.

  Juice is about the tiny details. It’s about squeezing more out of everything. It’s about serving the user’s emotional needs, not just the functional. It originated in games but can be used in other types of software.

• ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!

  OpenAI and Microsoft have been killing it not only in product but in the go-to-market groundwork they’ve been doing long before launch.

  With seemingly every launch, they have a slate of really compelling partners already using the new service (e.g., Wolfram Alpha and Zapier using ChatGPT plugins), giving them a big press bump from the articles those partners write and social proof. Not to mention, of course, the product is better because it’s already been tested with real customers.

  It’s a beautiful thing, and a masterclass every PM should be paying attention to.

• Banking in very uncertain times

  I typically avoid (publicly) bookmarking current events-type stories, but I expect this breakdown of how America’s banking system works to be valuable long after the current crisis has ended.

• Modern Font Stacks

  Because they use fonts already available on your visitor’s OS, font stacks are a great way of keeping page load times fast while maintaining a modicum of control over the design of your site.

  I use a similar stack for this site but might transition to one of these soon.

• Why Write?

  “Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.”

February 2023

• A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept

  Timeless advice. 1% better every day, and before you know it, you’re an elite performer.

November 2021

• Why You Should Repeat Yourself, A Lot

October 2021

• Flexport CEO Tweets About Container Backup

  “Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport’s partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here’s a thread about what I learned.”

December 2020

• Simple Math to Set Up a Sales Team

  Great explanation, from experience, with lots of color commentary, of how to structure and compensate a software sales team.

September 2020

• Improvising

February 2020

• To Get Good, Go After The Metagame

  I work with a few people who are really good at this. They’re at once awe-inspiring and terrifying.

• Gears

  This is an absolutely phenomenal ‘explorable explanation’. It methodically layers concepts to foster understanding, deploys interactivity to build intuition, and on top of all that provides crisp, clear narrative on top of all of the amazing visualizations.

January 2020

• Things You Should Never Do

  Never do a rewrite.

• The perils of constant feedback

  What’s the right amount of feedback?

• I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

  A product manager’s job is to make the business successful by defining and shipping products that solve customers’ problems. Defining and shipping alone are not enough.

• Guide to Internal Communication, the Basecamp Way

  A thoughtful, valuable, list.

December 2019

• The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before

  Great storytelling. Beautiful visualization.

November 2019

• Yes! and...

  Brilliant take on workplace politics and the ‘performance of work.’

March 2019

• Technical Debt is like Tetris

  An apt analogy deftly applied. If your stubborn CEO only reads one article on technical debt, make sure it’s this one.

February 2019

• A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jim Barksdale and “Barksdaleisms”

  “The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.”

• How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters)

  We discussed this at my previous company almost every day. Our users were experts, they wanted more information on the screen at once, and they were OK with a slight learning curve if it meant higher productivity long term.

• Obvious Always Wins

  “It’s tempting to rely on menu controls in order to simplify mobile interface designs —especially on small screens. But hiding critical parts of an application behind these kinds of menus could negatively impact usage.”

December 2018

• Design in Enterprise Software Companies

  Product design communicates product positioning. Product design is fundamental to a product’s core value proposition. Product design enables new paths to market. Yes, yes, and yes.

• Unconscious Incompetence

  Interesting take on managing new folks on your team.

September 2018

• All Things Sales! 16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders

  Product is distribution. Ultra valuable, easily consumable resource on sales mechanics, planning, and org structure. Wish I had this 5 years ago.

August 2018

• Meet Our New Home Page: The New York Times

  This is monumental. It’s telling that “fixtures like Briefings, ‘The Daily’ podcast, [realtime] weather and stocks are available at the top of the page.” If they weren’t already, the Times is now firmly a digital-first paper.

• The Disconnect

  An offline-only digital magazine. Beautiful idea and remarkable execution.

• Google and the Resurgence of Italian Design

  I love my (many) Apple products, but Richardson’s spot on in describing their design as “ponderously serious.” Gorgeous objects, but ultra minimalist and restrained. Google’s doing great, humanist industrial design. Mi piace.

January 2018

• Forest: Stay Focused, Be Present

  Beautiful concept for an app. “Whenever you want to focus, plant a tree. The tree will grow in the following time. The tree will be killed if you leave this app.”

December 2017

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers : Computing’s fundamental Principle of No Learning

  “There is a false dichotomy at work in modern app design: the drive is for apps to be so simple you can use them as soon as you’ve tapped the app icon, but this is taken to mean that there doesn’t need to be anything more to do in the app than what you can see when you have tapped the app icon.” Yes, yes, yes.

• Sets in Windows 10

  Really interesting new UI technique from Microsoft. Tabs from multiple apps sharing the same window. This is a baby step — ‘sets’ should get you some additional benefit other than creating simple groupings.

September 2017

• Does your solution solve the right problem?

  Brilliant, from Intercom’s phenomenal blog (I can’t believe I haven’t linked to it before). All working engineers, designers, and PMs would do well to take this advice to heart.

August 2017

• Above the fold is a myth.

  It’s not 1997 anymore.

• Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

  Facebook, Snapchat, et al should have full-time Product and UX teams working on this problem.

July 2017

• New Aesthetics of Goaltending: Myth of the Standup Goalie

  Excellent analysis. Even if you know little about the game, read this for its rejection of the common wisdom. If you know and love hockey, be sure to read all three parts.

• Self-Managing People Are Smart about Asking for Help

  Yes yes yes. Ask, vent, brainstorm, but do it right.

June 2017

• All Thumbs, Why Reach Navigation Should Replace the Navbar in iOS Design

  Great, great analysis. I love the Music and Maps apps in iOS 10. Hoping this piece inspires more designers to take a bottom-first approach to large-screen mobile design.

• What Makes a Good Product Manager?

  Speaks well to the demeanor and attitude that can help make a PM successful. The attributes Rich lists aren’t necessary, but they’re damn useful.

  Note: unfortunately the original URL doesn’t work. Searching for an archived version of this.

August 2016

• Here’s What May Sound Like a Crazy Idea

  Interesting reflection on the role of CLI-like interfaces. UI discoverability is sometimes at odds with the goals of a high-skill, professional user.

• The Product Designer Role

  UX is more than a coat of paint. See my tweets on the relationship between PM and UX for more.

• The Myth of Self-Service Analytics

  Stephen Few on self-serve BI platforms. Incisive.

• Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

  Beautiful, effective visualization from NYT that kindles your intuition and simplifies a pretty complex series of data. (Also one of the rare cases in which scroll-jacking works — in part because it’s executed flawlessly.)

July 2016

• Dark Patterns are designed to trick you (and they’re all over the Web)

  A good primer. Don’t do this.

• Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

  “As Munger says, ‘80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.’”

June 2016

• Book: Just Enough Research

  Buying a copy of this for every executive and designer I work with from today on.

• The Real Product Market Fit

  Great PMs (and founders) focus on the market and the problem, not on a particular solution.

• Adobe Experience Design CC Preview

  Great to see more competition in UX tools, and great to see Adobe listening to customers.

• Did Jeep's Recalled Gear Shifter Contribute To The Death Of Star Trek Actor Anton Yelchin?

  Bad UX kills. Users need feedback about the effects of their actions.

• Here's What Happened To All 53 of Marissa Mayer's Yahoo Acquisitions

  Great engineering and great products can’t exist in a vacuum. If you can’t sell ‘em (whatever that means for your company), it doesn’t matter.

• 39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes

  Speaker notes from a talk given by Kennedy Elliott at OpenVis in April 2016. Kennedy works on the Washington Post’s immensely talented Visual Journalism team.

• Too Many Knobs

  “Too many knobs do come with a cost.” A study.

• On Icons

  Cogent, reasoned commentary from iA on icons and text labels. iOS gets this 100% right in the tab bar. Even the Material Design team is beginning to see the light on this.