Notes on a talk from Philip Bloom
- Are the tasks in your team’s workflow things that are essential to their creative process, or are they “boilerplate” that they have to get through to get to the real work?
- Reduce configuration, or at least Allow saving options or sharing them
- Simple tools and processes
- Best case: zero steps!
- Move it outside of something people have to pay attention to
- Predict intent so that you can do the setup and configuration automatically
- Keep the focus on the creative aspects
- Even better than manually triggered with no configuration: just run it automatically
- Best case: zero steps!
- Examples:
- Automatically prepare to run while still developing
- E.g., build automatically as you touch code
- Live updates when editing art, design, etc.
- Need to prepare your tool chains to compose
- leverage OS and service events (e.g., file system changes; one tool signals the next in the tool chain)
- May need extensive control over dev environment
- Support disabling steps in the tool chain when they aren’t needed
- Learn from metrics: when are people turning stuff off, why—improve your predictions!
- Summary:
- Many: understand what’s there
- One: simplify to enable acting on intent
- Zero: remove from concern entirely
