iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

I hosted a watch party tonight which I feel like is kinda the best of both worlds. You don’t have to travel far but you still get to talk about the new features with other nerds

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Many teams tend to treat user stories like nothing more than a funky way to format a JIRA ticket summary. Instead of “add refresh button” they’ll write “as a user I want a button that lets me refresh the app”

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

I’m a huge hater of disabled component states and will proselytise about it any chance I get. At the same time I’m trying to collect examples of when a disabled element was actually the best tool for the job. I currently have one (1)

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Agreed. And in general that using a design system in which each individual component has been usability tested doesn’t mean you’ll build a usable application.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

The thing with genAI is that everything is flawless but also incredibly mid. My mother (bless her heart) sent me a picture of my cat “in the style of Van Gogh” knocking over a vase. Wasn’t even briefly tempted to chuckle. Meanwhile I still laugh every time I think of this post

Screenshot of a tumblr post by user “orjasm”. The caption reads “had the worst toast-buttering experience today”. They then credit user “theindomitablerioghan” for their “artist rendition”. The image is a crude drawing of a person bent over a counter and squinting at a piece of toast they are trying to butter with one hand while keeping a cat from getting at the toast with the other hand. The captions read “no glasses”, “using arm to hold plate”, “cold butter” and “cat likes butter”.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

I cancelled my subscription last year when they essentially suggested Harris throw trans people under the bus as a low-effort sign of goodwill towards Republicans.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

LLMs are trained on nearly unfathomable amounts of human-made data. It really makes you wonder about the motives of many of the people behind it – instead of framing it as accessing a never-ending wealth of human wisdom and ideas it’s “machine” learning and “artificial” intelligence.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Was just in a meeting where someone said “I guess we can hit this whole thing with the UX/UI bat too” … what does that even mean

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

“In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” Bertolt Brecht

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

“This is the best design book ever” can occasionally also mean “I finally managed to read one (1) design book and I just have to tell people about it”

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

After you recently added the ability to sort modes, there’s one one variables feature I long for desperately – please let us add opacity to referenced variables. It’s all I’ve ever wanted 🙏

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Honestly I breathed a real sigh of relief this morning when I got a message about our company-internal “diversity month”. I didn’t think it was going to be cancelled, but this year I extra appreciate the thought and effort going into it.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Thanks for all the input! That’s the site we were using for reference in our evaluation (which, side note, absolutely wild UI going on there), and I did think APCA performed better for dark mode. I guess the safest bet is to define colour pairs that satisfy both calculations.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Yeah, goes to show that while it’s good to look ahead it’s bad to jump the gun. 😅 Don’t want to be in the alternate universe where we overhauled our entire contrast system for APCA

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

That’s wild, thanks so much for alerting me to it! We tried to evaluate the impact on our design system last year and decided to put it off until it became unavoidable. I’m surprised bc I felt it did look “more readable” without my glasses, but I’ll definitely keep reading.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

I also do so wish they’d offer APCA as well.

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Reposted by Vincent Schlothauer

Brad Frost @bradfrost.com · 04/04/2025

CSS IS GENUINELY AWESOME in a box where the words "genuinely" and "awesome" are overflowing the box

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

I shouldn’t have posted a comment that could potentially be read as mean-spirited to someone I don’t know, even in joking. My bad 🙂

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Reposted by Vincent Schlothauer

sylvia @svillegas.com · 03/04/2025

Me, to designers, constantly: Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good. Just because it's common, doesn't mean it's good.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Oop, sorry if it came across the wrong way! I was going for a joke 😅 I have a lot of non-design coworkers who would probably assume they can “vibe design” anything they need with AI

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Same I was about to write a strongly worded skeet

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

I don’t love the squirrel – I had been thinking we’d probably replace it with something that better illustrates the purpose of the app – but it gives people a moment of joy amidst a stressful work day. Anyway @figma.com please don’t take our pals 🥲

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

I create interfaces for B2B/B2E contexts, and you’d be surprised how important these little islands of joy are, especially in the workplace. While doing user research for a redesign, we had multiple people explicitly ask us to please not take their squirrel away.

A row of icons/illustrations from a user interface. They’re all pretty colourful, some of them are silly. The first one is a squirrel. Several of them depict trucks or stores.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

We’ll all have the opportunity to observe something interesting when Figma inevitably removes their April Fools FigPals – what happens when you *take away* moments of delight?

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

My head is so full now, but so is my heart. What a great event! 🙌

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Spoke at a Friends of Figma event today and had an absolute blast. Community is so important, it’s easy to forget that.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

The terrible thing is that at first I thought you were making a genuine suggestion. I’ve seen things man

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

This question fits well with the gradual rebranding of “user experience” as “product experience”, away from the “user story” as in the story of the user and their needs and towards The Story™️ as in the story of the product and its significance in the world.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

Just watched a snippet from a BBC programme about the early internet from 1994. Wish that thing was still worthy of the name “information superhighway”

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

Then an innocent designer will be like “hey our team would really like to make interactive badges, is that cool 😇” and you’re like, blood was shed for these badges to not be interactive. Absolutely not

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Very cool, I’m hoping it’ll eventually offer APCA values as well!

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Ages ago when our design system team was ready to commit murder-suicide over the difference between chips, tags and badges there was a video about someone flipping on their devs for wasting their entire budget on buttons. I’ve never been able to find it again

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

This was my first computer! I’m sure it sucked, but I was 10 and didn’t have anything to compare it to.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

This should be a segmented control with a multi-select option

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

I’m not even arguing that LLMs can have their uses. But why is it that people say “I asked ChatGPT” with the same kind of childlike conviction of a 5-year-old explaining that Santa has to be real because “that’s what dad said”?

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

That’s such a cool resource! I work with a lot of teams that don’t have access to their own designers let alone researchers but are still trying to get a handle on user requirements. This seems like it could really help them.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Duolingo renaming “User Experience” to “Product Experience” accurately reflects the changes the app has gone through in the nearly 1500 days I’ve maintained my streak. Couldn’t help but notice that the announcement never wrote out what “UX” stands for, because “We’re over User Experience” sounds bad

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

TO BE FAIR, if someone had absolutely no knowledge of technology and was looking for settings for “a lot”, “a little” and “none”, these would still do a decent-ish job.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Had a discussion about web accessibility with someone who came into it already angry because of the cost for small businesses (also “the free market will take care of it”), and when I told them I wasn’t interested in an argument with someone who was already angry had the gall to call *me* dogmatic.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

buT tHe aeStHetIc-uSaBilITy efFecT (Really interesting take btw! I too have been mulling over the increasing absence of references to physical spaces in UIs)

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Perhaps nostalgia for the really really old times

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Some old people: A period is *preceded* by a space

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

A good read! Pretty bleak, but pretty honest too. www.late-review.com/p/the-eterna...

late-review.com

the eternal present

or: we need to destroy phone

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Fair point. I also have weirdly long eyelashes so sometimes they brush dust or pollen on them from the inside

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Except for glasses! The smudges are always on the outside where you touch them

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

My wife and I are vegans and 9/10 YouTube commercials we get are for shelf-stable milk. Been trying to figure out where it comes from but it’s a mystery

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

The other day someone asked me if my car’s lane change assist was also giving me trouble when trying to change lanes without the turn signal. They were shocked when I said I wouldn’t know because it wouldn’t occur to me to change lanes without signalling

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Reposted by Vincent Schlothauer

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

UX design is in disarray. The idea of design-for-use has been replaced with design-for-sales, and its incentives (make more features so that you have more shit to sell) don't align with user-centered work. In this issue, I investigate the ground-level view of how this happened and how to stop it.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

Why design goes wrong and how to set it right, part 1

At the root of design's crisis is an incentives crisis throughout tech. But we have tools that let us cut through the magical thinking of feature factories - if we're willing to use them.

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Vincent Schlothauer @vince-schlothauer.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

As a design system person Figma hell is when I find 27 detached components with random stuff interjected and swapped around

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