Journal 2023-05

May 2023 journal

Monthly retrospective

ToDo

Journal

2023-05-12

At Google I/O 2023, there was a demonstration of AI writing email for you. Asked to make it longer to be more persuasive, it did that too. Interesting how closely this resembled the opening of Avogadro Corp, a novel I read in 2015.

2023-05-04

Read a piece that Alan Cooper, who devised the concept of personas, wrote the year before last. mralancooper.medium.com/defending-personas-2657fe26dd0f

His recollection of visiting Microsoft in the past (the late 1990s or early 2000s?) and finding personas misused in exactly the opposite way is interesting. Personas should be created from user research, and design should be based on those personas. At MS, engineers instead invented personas to justify features they had already built.

He also mentions that a persona book written by two former MS employees deepened the misunderstanding. A search suggests he probably means “The Essential Persona Lifecycle.”

As I remember it, MS was still regarded as particularly bad at design until the mid-2000s. I recall noticeable improvements beginning around the arrival of the Office ribbon UI (Result Oriented UI).

2023-05-01

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for almost two years. The proportion of code I write myself is gradually shrinking, while the proportion I review from Copilot’s suggestions is growing. Reading and analyzing code feels a little more important now. Copilot is already useful in many ways; how could I use it to support learning even better? 🤔