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jenson.org
Personal blog · jenson.orgdesignhardware
jenson.org is a personal blog at jenson.org about design and hardware. Since 2012, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “The Future Needs Files”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- The Future Needs Files6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-09-01
- The Invisible problem: why mobile text editing is worse than you think4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-09-22
- A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-30
- The Simplicity Shift [pdf] (2002)3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-08-04
- Hype Is a Business Tool3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-15
- The Timmy Trap2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-08-13
- How video games inspire great UX (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-21
- Reactive Haptics2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-12
What Hacker News says?
Scott Jenson is great. It’s sad that he got so trolled. I hope the folks at Tesla paid attention. He’s one of the top UX people in the world. His book, The Simplicity Shift [0], was one of the seminal UX books in my career. I still use many of the insights that I gleaned from it. It’s a real short read (and a free download, now). It was written when everyone was still using flip phones, and was very useful in doing…
Comment linking /The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
on “A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar”Submitted A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar as a story · 906 points
HN discussionThis same link was submitted 2 days ago. My comment there still applies. LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base" "LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t." https://jenson.org/timmy/
Comment linking /timmy/
on “AI is different”Submitted Boring is good as a story · 319 points
HN discussionThat's why things like this PDF are so important. It applies especially to areas in which we may not have learned "common sense" (like typography, or even basic Usability). One of the seminal books in my canon is "The Simplicity Shift,"[0] by Scott Jenson[1] (who used to run Google's Mobile UX team). He wrote that in the era before smartphones, and it was all about brutally triaging UX priorities for a limited mobil…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: I wrote a book about UI [pdf]”Submitted The Timmy Trap as a story · 181 points
HN discussionOT: Since the author is a former Apple UX designer who worked on the Human Interface Guidelines, I hope he shares his thoughts on the recent macOS 26 and iOS updates - especially on Liquid Glass. https://jenson.org/about-scott/
Comment linking /about-scott/
on “Boring is good”Submitted The Future Needs Files as a story · 168 points
HN discussionComputers are not a kitchen. They are clay, they are Lego, they are jungles of imagination. It's true that our current trajectory devolves their universality to a set of discrete isolated applications == multiplexing a set of appliances on one device. That's an economic win sure, but it's tragic if we fail to unlock more of their flexibility for "end users"! IMHO that's the biggest unsolved problems of computer scie…
Comment linking /files/
on “Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]”Submitted How video games inspire great UX (2019) as a story · 135 points
HN discussionIt basically was inspired by Scott Jenson's The Simplicity Shift. https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (Downloads a PDF).
Comment linking /The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
on “Ask HN: How does your company handle late running projects?”Submitted Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019) as a story · 106 points
HN discussionAnyone remember this HN submission, from awhile back? https://jenson.org/tesla/
Comment linking /tesla/
on “The 1986 Oldsmobile Incas Dashboard (2020)”Submitted A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar (2021) as a story · 73 points
HN discussionThe “Three Bucket Model” is something that I learned by reading Scott Jenson’s excellent The Simplicity Shift [0]. This was a book about mobile UX design, written before the advent of smartphones. It is all about prioritizing features, as the real estate back then was bad . I call it “Front of the Box/Back of the Box.” The Front of a box on the shelf has two or three major eye-catchers, in huge text. The Back of the…
Comment linking /The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
on “How to build great products (2013)”Submitted Hype Is a Business Tool as a story · 30 points
HN discussionI'm unwilling to accept the discussion and conclusions of the paper because of the framing of how LLMs work. > socio-emotional capabilities of autonomous agents The paper fails to note that these 'capabilities' are illusory. They are a product of how the behaviors of LLMs "hack" our brains and exploit the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of our equipment as a social species. https://jenson.org/timmy/
Comment linking /timmy/
on “AI-induced dehumanization (2024)”Submitted The Simplicity Shift [pdf] (2002) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRelated writing: https://jenson.org/tesla/
Comment linking /tesla/
on “Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens”Submitted The Future Needs Files as a story · 5 points
HN discussionScott’s blog: https://jenson.org/
Comment linking /
on “Scott Jenson: Are we going to use the same Desktop UX forever? [video]”Submitted Hype Is a Business Tool as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base" LLMs do none of those things. "LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t." https://jenson.org/timmy/
Comment linking /timmy/
on “AI Is Different”Submitted The future needs files (2021) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy technique was to always schedule the important (not difficult) things first. That meant, that as the inevitable schedule crunch arrived, the things that were tossed in the skip were not important. I call it "Front of the Box/Back of the Box." I basically got the idea from The Simplicity Shift [0]. [0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
Comment linking /The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
on “"Collaboration" Is Bullshit”Submitted The Paradox of Empathy (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJust FYI. I had a bit of a watershed, in my life, when I read Scott Jenson's The Simplicity Shift [0] It was written in Ye Time Beefore Ye iffowne, so mobile UI was really limited. It's all about compromise. How to prioritize, and how to develop UI that was usable and affordable, while still maintaining some design integrity. It also talks a lot about how to work with others, and come up with compromises that work w…
Comment linking /The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
on “Design Is Compromise”Submitted The future needs files (2021) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOne of the most important [to me] books, was The Simplicity Shift [0], by Scott Jenson. It was written pre-iPhone, when phones had seriously limited screen real estate. He talks about how important it is to “weight” features, and order them by importance. I am wrestling with this exact type of issue, right now, with a screen of my app. [0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (a PDF of the entire book. It’s a…
Comment linking /The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
on “If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)”Submitted Jeeves must go as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
