jjmelendez

[jjmelendez]

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[jjmelendez]

“How are you?”

If your answer to

“How’s it going today? How are you?”

is something like “Good. Fine. OK.” 

You’re missing out on life. 

Parts of you have died and whisked away.

You are literally living at half of your level. Let's say 52%. 

Unless you’re actively trying to avoid talking with somebody, the tyranny of “Good Fine Ok” 1.) censors your truth, and 2.) is just plain boring. 

Here’s how to answer that question like you got red ripened blood pumping through your veins:

When you get the question, check-in with yourself. 

Look at your surroundings. 

At what you’re wearing.

At what’s actively on your mind. 

At what you were just doing before the person—that beautiful social creature (who by the way, didn’t have to ask you) popped the question. 

Chances are you may have been:

Catching up on your messages 

Looking out of your window 

Watching the clock

Stretching 

Avoiding a meeting playing Tetris on your mobile.

Tell them what you're actually doing.

You can reinterpret the question of how you are doing to express yourself and give the other person something to relate with, all in one. 

Have a ferociously lovely (Mon)day. 

Art by The Magic Future Jungle

[jjmelendez]

Memento Mori

Death isn’t something we readily discuss openly and regularly.

It’s the thing we are all scared of, but death isn’t ever-present in our society, the thoughts of the death of what our own death might be like.

We see death in movies, death counts on the news, and in articles, but ruminating and meditating on our own mortality isn’t fun, and it even seems like a waste of time.

But I think there is value in practice the Seneca the Younger and stoic mode of life: that of making death something that we always are conscious of so that every decision we make throughout our day is in that context.

I might die eating a lunch-time hot dog. Hot dogs are the most dangerous food, dying would absolutely suck all the way through until you lose consciousness.

I think your mind would go from the narrative in your head of “Oh shit I am choking on a hot dog,” to “Damn it—I can’t breathe” to “No way I am dying on a hot dog” (all in the span of 1 second), and when the adrenaline kicks in and you fight for your life—doing everything you can to not die eating a hot dog, I suppose that chatter in your brain stops, and you’re left with natural impulses, looking beyond the veil of your habituated automated self, and see a meat machine, fragile and ending.

All thanks to a rubbery fatal hot dog.

You lie on the floor, no longer thinking, what was you is now not.

And what of your ‘life?’

What was your life anyways?

As you got on with it, who saw you do ‘life?’

That day-to-day "you" is gone, forever null and void.

That’s the alternative to whatever the fuck you’re doing at this moment.

[jjmelendez]

Showing Up

Lonelystreams.com drops a spotlight on a Twitch stream with no viewers.

Every day, thousands of people show up to stream and entertain others regardless if somebody is watching or not.

I find this incredibly inspiring.

Showing up for yourself, showing up even if nobody else does...

Do you know what's scarier than playing to a small audience? Playing to no audience.

I have talented friends who stream working for the dream of “getting paid to play," but hitting it big takes more than hard work and showing up in the streaming economy.

Showing up every day is already difficult, to do it consistently with no crowd, no external support or group cheering you on requires an extreme level of discipline, not just a whim or a want.

[jjmelendez]

Design your habits

My television is taking a timeout right now. Going forward, it will be in time out during the week and only allowed to entertain me and my guests during the weekends.

What this looks like in practice is this: my TV is unplugged and facing the wall, it's literally in a kindergarten style “timeout.”

There are burgeoning hard and fast rules when it comes to habits.

I like to frame “Habit design” like this: its all about using your System 2 critical thinking faculties to design the actions of the automatic and reactionary System 1. You do this best by designing your environment.

You can Google "how to design habits" and get endless breakdowns and videos by people like James Clear or BJ Fogg on how to do this for free. I also recommend familiarizing yourself with the four quadrants of operant conditioning.

Here are the ideas and concepts that have empowered and worked for me the most:

1. Making the habit stick: Do some form of the habit no matter what Often times when we set a goal, let's suppose the classic: "lose X amount of weight" or "exercise more" we get sold on the idea, some intense work out regiment that may or may not be adequate to our body in the beginning. Habits take time, I don't believe that they ever 'stick' (like the age-old adage "It takes x amount of days to form a new habit). There's something to be said about familiarizing your body with the environment and the actions you ideally want to take.

2. Make it harder to do the thing you don't want to do You can do this by removing the 'trigger,' (I am bored and have nothing to do) or even eliminating the thing that enables the bad habit (my megalith of a TV).

3. Self-talk, celebration, and sustainable rewards I saw a video once of a fitness trainer instructing his trainee who was exasperated and breathing heavily on a treadmill to tell himself thoughts like: "This is the easiest thing you'll do all day" and "Just think: These miles are nothing! You could do this all day!"

Part of making habits 'sticky' is the reward at the end of the habit. Here you must tread carefully, unsustainable rewards such as the endorphins from eating a bag of chips can become fastidious and hard to kick. Personally, when I finish my 2-hour mini biking marathon, no matter how many or what kind of 'tired' signals my body is sending to my brain, I make myself dance. I boogie. I get down, I Walt Whitman myself. I celebrate myself and the accomplishment, because 1.) it's fun to dance duh, 2.) it helps to put me in the mindset going forward that this is what I do for fun, and 3.) overtime the “self talk” becomes automatic, choose the most helpful thoughts.

That last bit might sound far fetched, but this is a case where believing it first helps it come to be in the future.

[jjmelendez]

You and you

When you're down and out or 'not having your best day/week/year' it's easy to feel disrespected, unappreciated, unwanted, disregarded, humiliated, stupid, incompetent, like an imposter, low-esteemed, it's easy to feel as if you're opinion doesn't matter, like you don't matter. Even amongst your peers, or should I say especially amongst your peers.

Personally, my learned defense mechanism in this situation is as follows:

Retreating into my past success and

Finding fault in everybody else

"Just get over it" is not the best advice, but it's also not the worst advice.

The harder path still is creating what you want to feel.

"Emotions are data, not direction," -Susan David.

Imagine allowing those destitute feelings to sit and make sense of what they are and why there are present.

Thanks to my mediation practice, I can catch myself saying "I feel so f-ing incompetent right now," and recognize it as a thought that I am having, not as who I am or what is true.

But my brain and body don't know the difference between a thought that is true and one that is total horseshit, they just react in accordance to whatever I am thinking.

The best action forward is to instead imagine how you'd want to ideally feel and practice that feeling because the feeling will inform how you react and respond to developing situations.

It's not always going to be the opposite e.g.: incompetence vs competence. Sometimes it's going to be more like incompetent vs learning, incompetent vs creative.

What you tell yourself whether good or bad is all the same kind of instructional data to your body and brain.

Close your eyes and imagine your ideal. Eventually, you might open them to find yourself living that truth.

[jjmelendez]

How to get better at crafting beautiful UIs

Tracing.  Copywork.  Why not UI work too?

Tracing my favorite cartoons and comics is how I developed the mechanics in my hand for drawing (shout out to Goku's hair). This made attempting larger original works easier. People thought I had a natural knack for art and drawing (and maybe I do, but that’s beside the point).

Copywork is the same principle but applied to the practice of writing. The idea is: you look at someone else's work, and painstakingly copy each word, along the way noticing sentence structures and word usage.

Why not do this with UI?

Developing your user interface skills

User Interface skills are often outsourced to agencies and off shore designers for price and convenience, but a paradigm of product design has always been: Form follows function.

Having a strong foundation in interaction design is like having access to a mental library of interaction patterns, tried and true solutions you can use to test and eventually deploy.

The Challenge

Find yourself some UI that just dazzles you on Dribbble, Awwwards, or Behance (or Instagram for that matter) drop it into Sketch and give it a go.

I set a goal of copying 10 in a week within Sketch. 

My takeaways:

This was a great opportunity to practice hotkeys and short cuts

I think through what the interactions might do and improve my familiarity with patterns I don't regularly use

I learned how to do neumorphism 

If you are new to UI design in general this is also a way to develop a sense of balance and typography skills.

Have at it!

Here are my examples: 

[jjmelendez]

Availability Heuristic

The Availability Heuristic states that whatever comes to mind the first and the most is what is true.

Let me give you an example:

Several days ago, my buddy, Steven asked me:

“What did you think of the King of Staten Island Movie?”

In generating an answer for Steven my mind served up:

The main character’s battle with depression

Fights

The aimlessness of young adulthood

And I said:

“Oh it was alright, funny but kind of depressing.”

Steven:

“Really? I thought it was hilarious!”

Me:

"Oh yeah, there was that one ☝️ scene with action Bronson getting shot!"

Steven:

“Yeah that was fun, do you also remember the part where he tattoos a random tapestry on Bill Burr's back, and also that one where he gives a kid a tattoo, and...”

On and on he went and by the end he had me cracking up.

Somehow, I had only remembered the sad parts of the movie.

My brain “served” those parts up to me first with less effort.

And I didn't even think of the enjoyable parts.

The availability heuristic is unique to all of us in that whatever we find the most novel is what our mind will bring to light.

It was first discovered like many heuristics by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

It helps us most when we need to make quick decisions.

My intention in writing about these biases and heuristics is to learn about them and explore their relationship to user experience and interface design.

Here is how the availability heuristic affects your user’s experience in an app or website:

Recalling their experience: People will not remember specifics about your service, experience, app, etc. Much like me reviewing The King of Staten Island, when thinking back to your experience, whatever comes to mind first whether an emotion or otherwise is all they remember as “true.” Some scenarios to consider: When they found your site, was it easy for them to understand what it was? Where they were? Where to go next?

Focusing on the broader journey your users take and how your site or app fulfills their needs is the best way of observing this heuristic in your work.

Delight your users from the get-go. As a thoughtful user experience designer you can do this by clearly identifying and solving for your user's needs, here are some pointers:

Nailing their worries or fears with succinct copy

Thinking-ahead for them, e.g.: what might be their preferred payment options? Is there a way you can make it so that they don't have to bust out their credit card?

TLDR: Perhaps Maya Angelou said it best:

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

[jjmelendez]

What did you learn today?