Product Design

Paul Stamatiou’s Craft dives deep into improving product quality through design. It’s the best thing I’ve read lately. If you read only one thing this month, make it be this!

I especially love the part where he talks about the culture of design quality:

Is quality baked into the normal product development process, or is it often relegated to low priority "polish" tickets that pile up. Will leadership pause a launch if the quality is below their bar? What is that bar? If support for quality does not come from the top, it's far too easy for ICs to skirt over issues and pay a little less attention to details they think their reporting chain won't notice.

The whole thing is worth your time, I promise.

I periodically re-read The Digital Designer of the Future by Diogenes Brito. Stammy takes it one step further by giving real world examples of these concepts.

Email

Email design systems. I’ve built them in the past and it looks I might be doing it again.

It’s been a few years, though, so I tried catching up on the current state of email design systems. While I found a slew of articles and tutorials about email design systems, I didn’t find many examples of actual email design systems.

They must exist though, right?

So I’m hoping for your help, dear reader. What email design systems have you seen lately? I’m looking mostly for public documentation sites or repos. Reply to this email or message me on Twitter 🙏

Climate

I’ve noticed a few products that show customers how they’re reducing their carbon footprint by using certain features. Video conferencing app Crewdle and debt card Tred are two examples. It’s a small touch the raises climate awareness.

Screenshot of modal from Crewdle showing the CO2, water, and energy savings from a 3 person 30min meeting.

Screenshot from Tred's site showing a notification to see your carbon footprint after a debt card transaction.

Granted these apps focus on being “green” apps, but anyone can use this approach, but we don’t all need to be climate experts, we just need to care about solving climate change.

With that in mind, any job can be a climate job. As a web worker, a few ideas come to mind:

Move websites to a sustainable web host to reduce the energy required to keep them online.
Add a “How does this impact our carbon footprint?” section to the company’s project brief template to raise awareness.
Build a dark mode theme to demand less energy from our users’ devices.

Everybody has something to contribute, regardless of industry or job title. I’m gonna start thinking of little ways to pollute less or waste less energy in my own projects.

Fun

‘Tis the season for ugly holiday sweaters and Microsoft is offering some great ones this year. The Clippy sweater is already sold out, but there are some other bangers like an Age of Empires sweater on the XBox store.

Thanks for reading, I truly appreciate it. Hey if you liked this newsletter, please share it with someone you like!

See you in 2023 ✌️
- Ted