The Design of People

HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, responsive design, mobile first, content strategy: keeping up with technologies, design patterns and trends matters, but it does not guarantee success. In this talk from From The Front 2013, Nishant Kothary, cofounder of Minky and formerly an evangelist and strategist at Microsoft, argues that designing and building software exposes our humanness and our imperfections.

Your ability to understand and work with other people, including your project team, stakeholders and users, often decides both the success of your work and how you feel along the way. It is also the skill most people spend the least time on: the “soft skill” that is really the hardest to learn.

Kothary works through some of the most irksome dilemmas in project work using case studies and research from behavioral economics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. The aim is a more technical understanding of how to work with and influence other people.