Things that Cecilia thought were interesting:

“ The worst thing you can do as a new designer is go work at a startup where you’re the only designer. That’s a bad situation. Or to go work at some corporation where you’re the only designer there. I think that’s just a recipe for your career to stagnate, and your skills to stagnate, and for you to feel very frustrated. I think new designers, and throughout people’s careers, it’s good to work both in-house and at agencies. ”

“ I do most of that work with a tool called Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails does for web developers what a toilet-installing robot would do for plumbers. (Web development is more like plumbing than any of us, perched in front of two slick monitors, would care to admit.) It makes tasks that used to take months take hours. And the important thing to understand is that I am merely a user of this thing. I didn’t make it. I just read the instruction manual. In fact, I’m especially coveted in the job market because I read the instruction manual particularly carefully. Because I’m assiduous and patient with instruction manuals in general. But that’s all there is to it. ”

“ You can imagine what it does to the ego, to be courted and called ‘indispensable’ and in general treated like you’re the one pretty girl for miles. When a lot of your contemporaries don’t even have jobs. When work, for most people, has a Damoclean instability to it, a mortal urgency. To be this highly employable is to feel liquid, easy, as if you can do no wrong. I know that I have a great job guaranteed in any major city. And it’s hard not to give a thing like that moral heft. It validates you is what I mean; it inflates your sense of your own character. ”

“ Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy (that’s tech-novel-gee!) - over 2,325 are available. Use the Timeline of Science Fiction Invention or the alphabetic Glossary of Science Fiction Technology to see them all, look for the category that interests you, or browse by favorite author / book. ”

“ Here at Zappos we just re-did a product page that does some things that are out of the e-commerce norm, and InVision played a huge role in the research we did. Based on the research, we found it made more sense to almost hide the product description. It is not the first thing you see because we learned that is not what our customers want. We had to ask ourselves, “Why are we trying to push this description piece when really a huge percentage of orders happen without a person even looking at it?” So we developed a hierarchy of what our customers want: they want images first, then they want to look at videos, and then they’re looking at reviews. And all of these things were higher importance level to the user than the product description, which doesn’t seem like a norm among other e-commerce sites. A lot of that stuff you just need to be open-minded to. ”