People thinking about forming good habits often get stuck. They get preoccupied with a question that feels hopeful. But it’s actually hollow inside. In particular, looking for the answer to: How many days does it take to form a habit?There is no point.If you want to know how many days does it take to form a habit, here’s what the experts say:According to a study done by the European Journal of Social Psychology. For a person to form a new habit, and for this habit to become a kind of automatic behaviour, it takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days. Commonly, the number is 66 days

The Duration Of Habit Formation

According to productivity experts, if a person commits to doing something – anything – for 21 days straight. This thing will supposedly become automatic behaviour that doesn’t require any effort. This is not true. For example, if you want to lose weight, you should focus on exercising and carefully considering what you eat, not that if three weeks are over!

The 21 Day Myth

<ul><li>There's something powerful about knowing an end exists</li><li>Having a particular end date where things will supposedly become easier means being able to convince yourself that you can push through that number of days</li><li>If our initial conviction was that things will now be easier - automatic even - when we hit a particular date, we'll be quite disappointed when things remain hard</li></ul>

The Incentive Behind How Many Days Does It Take to Form a Habit

In a famous book from the 1960s, Dr. Maxwell Malt said: "These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell."21-days seems reasonable. Easy. Tweetable. Doable. Pretty much everyone can persist in doing something for 21 days.

How The Myth Took Formation

<ul><li>Your value system takes a drastic turn when you keep practising an activity you want to form as a habit.</li><li>Embarking on a habit-formation journey gives you the opportunity to figure out what you really value.</li><li>Persisting in doing something allows you to see which things are important to you.</li></ul>

The Real Value: Get Started

<ul><li>The essential thing is figuring out what tasks are worth keeping and what aren't.</li><li>When you stick to a certain activity for 21 days or more, you give yourself the opportunity to find if this new thing is valuable enough - for you - to keep doing it.</li><li>Regularly hitting the gym allows you to see how this activity can positively impact your body, mind, and life in general.</li></ul>

The Bottom Line

Asking how many days does It take to form a habit is focusing on the wrong things. It's not about days. It's about figuring out what you value.

Stashed ideas

Don't Ask How Many Days Does It Take to Form a Habit - Do This

Conventional career advice overwhelmingly teaches that office-politicking extroverts are best set up for success. As a result, if you’re offbeat, you’ve probably felt that the parts of your personality that seem out of sync are weaknesses you need to overcome.  What companies really need are passionate, original thinkers. Businesses need “disruptors” — Silicon Valley’s favourite word — and they need employees who are too odd to understand the ways things are “supposed to work.” Fellow misfits, do not fear: You do not have to change your fundamental being in order to thrive in your career.

Embrace Your Weird

<ul><li>Your unique point of view is a strength, not a weakness. </li><li>Your sensitivity is what allows you to read a room and, ostensibly, play to it. </li><li>Your emotional intensity/curmudgeonly nature/crippling social anxiety/outsider status means you’re not constantly trying to curry favour with an uninspiring boss or your phoning-it-in co-workers. </li></ul>Having the courage to celebrate your differences and communicate your ideas will help you succeed in nearly any vocation. So keep at it. Push yourself to share ideas or fixes to long-standing problems. Propose your big, wild dream project. Embrace your quirks.

Your Quirk Is Your Strength

The impulse to want to fake it, to be more poised, polished or more like what you perceive all those #bosses on Instagram to be, is powerful — especially if you’ve spent a lifetime feeling odd. But pretending to be something you’re not in a new job, faking skills or contorting yourself to gain recognition, is a short-sighted strategy with little return.Your best work will come when you can be open, accountable, curious and fully who you are — not by performing some outsize version of who you think you should be.

Don't Fake It

Focus on the value and strengths you bring in this moment, even with all of your perceived flaws. Identify what it is about work that makes you feel anxious. Learn to push through this anxiety instead of running away from it. A daily meditation practice may help with this; so could a simple 10-minute walk.Pinpoint the triggers that make you feel ashamed or insecure and begin the process of overcoming them. Journaling, therapy, and confiding in friends are all potential ways to cope.

Sharpen Your Hidden Strengths

<ul><li>Many of us have been told that confidence is a fixed state — once we have it, it doesn’t go away. But confidence is actually fleeting: One day you will be swaggering around a conference room fired up to give a presentation and the next you’ll be eating your feelings in the office kitchen paralyzed by a full panic. </li><li>Most people — misfits or not — experience this sort of indecision. We think confidence is a requirement to be successful. </li><li>But instead of focusing on confidence, set your mind to developing your competence — and becoming better at what you do. </li></ul>

Confidence Is Overrated

For many of us, the biggest obstacle in the way of our success is the noise we create in our own heads: psyching ourselves out, telling ourselves we can’t do it, distracting ourselves with problems that don’t necessarily exist outside our minds. For those of us who experience these thoughts, learning to control our overthinking — and anchor ourselves back in reality — is critical. Remember that what we perceive as failure is often an opportunity.

Stop Overthinking

So you hate networking, the small talk gives you hives and you find yourself in a state of panic over professional events. All of this may make you may feel like you’re alone at work. You aren’t. You just haven’t identified your people yet. The awkward moments you experience on a regular basis can be an opening for a conversation with someone who also struggles with feeling like they don’t fit the mould. Look for these moments of honest rapport, and seek out the people at work who behave in a way you admire and whose work you genuinely respect.

Misfits, Unite!

<ul><li>Focus on building genuine connections and relationships, not transactional relationships based on what other people can do for you.</li><li>Ask questions that have nothing to do with work.</li><li>Give heartfelt compliments. </li><li>Be a person your new colleague-friends can trust. </li><li>Actively support your co-workers, back up their ideas, offer help when you can and celebrate their successes. </li><li>Set boundaries and stick to them. You are not obliged to socialize with co-workers outside the office if you don’t want to, nor do you have to take on their personal problems to be a good colleague.</li></ul>

Networking Tips For The Misfits

For all the square pegs out there who are not able to fit the round holes of corporate culture.

It's possible to survive — and even thrive — as a misfit without forcing yourself into a round corporate hole. Here's how to embrace your weird and successfully navigate the workplace. 

A Misfit’s Guide to Navigating the Office - Guides

The most persuasive argument I ever gave for UX research was a piece of paper pinned to the hallway next to my office. I had created an organizational map to understand how the organization grouped different teams and had stuck it to the wall on a whim.But because of that, people stopped by to study the chart and asked me many questions about UX, User Research, and more. As a result, I probably had more conversations with various members of internal teams than if I had sent out a company-wide e-mail.This example shows the importance of visibility of user research.

The Piece Of Paper On The Wall

The heuristic states that the design should always keep users informed about what is going on through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time. But this heuristic can relate to much more than just UI design. <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visibility-system-status/">At its core, it’s about communication and transparency</a>.

Making UX more visible 

The more information we have, the better our decision-making is.Knowing the system’s current state helps us assess where we are and if we need to change anything to reach our goals. So let’s take that logic and apply it to the ‘system’ known as your organization.

Transparency And Communication

One of the most visible and visual things that people see UX professionals doing is creating screens, prototypes, and more. While this is true, if the team thinks this is all you do, it can cause many misunderstandings (and the quote mentioned above). Fortunately, this viewpoint is commonly paired with another.

The Visibility of UX Design and Research: UX designs screens

User testing is another big part of our job, and fortunately, one that is pretty visible. From recruiting, testing, facilitating, and analyzing, there are many ways for stakeholders to hear about, if not directly observe or interact, with user testing. If most people in your organization have this takeaway, you might not have issues getting people on board with users. However, the last section is where you may run into problems.

UX tests with users

If people aren’t 100% familiar with UX, then this is where people may struggle. You might think that user research goes hand in hand with user testing, but there’s one major problem that user research faces:Research is localized, while the design is organization-wide.

UX does user research

Visuals are quicker than words.The problem is that user research tends not to be conveyed in that manner. Design exists as visuals like screens and prototypes, easily visible, shareable, and immediate. Research lives as Powerpoint presentations, usability reports, and other things that aren’t as easily shareable. This may suit your projects, but it might not travel as far and wide as Design prototypes.

The different reach of UX Design and UX Research

The best approach is to make UX (and user research) more visible to your team so that they consider you.Doing so involves two things:<ul><li>Making UX Research more visible to the larger organization through design artefacts.</li><li>Providing an open communication channel to the UX team.</li></ul>

Solving The Visibility Problem

Brief research summaries, along with design artefacts created through user research, are often great ways to engage your organization. In addition, things like journey maps, personas, or organizational charts can be easy to share, view, or otherwise printed in the hallway and looked at. Some Tips:<ul><li><a href="https://uxdesign.cc/Create%20research%20summaries%20and%20publish%20them%20in%20the%20company%20newsletter/create%20a%20quarterly%20UX%20Newsletter:">Create research summaries and publish them in the company newsletter/create a quarterly UX Newsletter</a>.</li><li><a href="https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/97-things-every/9781492085164/ch14.html#sonia_weaver">Send out visualizations, metrics, or other things of interest to hands-on operators</a>.</li><li>Keep an open real-time communication channel (with design artefacts visible).</li></ul>

User research findings don’t have to be boring

Some examples of things that might pique user interest include:<ul><li>Organizational maps (How different teams are grouped)</li><li>Journey maps (The process users go through with experiences and touchpoints in a broad sense)</li><li>Experience maps (The Experiences and touchpoints across a specific experience)</li><li>Ideation (Going from paper prototype to wireframe to high fidelity prototype)</li><li>User quotes</li></ul>

Show Them What You Have Designed

Let me be clear. I’m not advocating that UX seeks attention, especially when our job involves collaborating with both users and stakeholders.But providing a greater awareness of user research and making sure that we’re not known as the ‘design screen/prototype guys’ can often be incredibly helpful in making our lives easier.It’s one thing to convince your stakeholders of the importance of user research to understand users, test prototypes with them, and develop design recommendations.

Shout It Out Loud: Greater Awareness For UX

The most persuasive argument I ever gave for UX research was a piece of paper pinned to the hallway next to my office. I had created an organizational map to understand how the organization grouped…

How making UX more visible can save you a whole lot of effort

You never get a second chance to make a first impression

The average smartphone user has 40 apps installed. Getting a user to download your app is a small part of the problem. On average, 25% of all apps are abandoned after the first session. So having a strategy to keep your mobile users' attention (and retention) means making every moment count.

Understanding the mobile app experience

Many onboarding experiences ramble on about everything about their app to try and keep users, but it really pushes users away. Think critically about what things users have to do in their first session—the lighter this experience, the higher your success rate. Solution: Determine what actions successful users take that are retained. Or see what actions unsuccessful users do and change the experience to avoid those actions.

Identify what you expect users to do

Many users will default to using their main go-to-apps. It can be really challenging to distract users away from them. The average session for a mobile app is less than 5 minutes. This means you have less than five minutes to shine and integrate yourself into a user's life. Solution:<ol><li>Don't stray away from your CTA. Be tasteful about how you display your CTA.</li><li>Allow users to skip most of the onboarding if they want to.</li><li>Ensure your app loads quickly. 70% of mobile app users will ditch an app if it loads slowly.</li></ol>

Design for distraction

With all things in life, there is give and take. With your app, users should sufficiently understand what they will get in turn for personal information. The "create an account" prompt should rarely be part of a first experience. Ensure you're giving value to your user before expecting much from them. Solution:<ul><li>What is the "ah-ha" moment about your app? Try to deliver this by asking as little as possible.</li><li>Ask, "why should a user give me this right now?"</li><li>Ask your users questions to engage them, such as their goals with your app or their experience level with certain topics.</li></ul>

Give more than you take

How to create an effective onboarding experience.

An average smartphone user has 40 apps installed on their mobile phone, taking just two taps to pull your users away from your app and into another. The truth is that getting a user to download your app is only a small part of the battle.

Lessons from onboarding mobile-app users

Journey mapping is one of the most powerful tools designed to map how users reach their goals.&nbsp;&nbsp;When done properly the value of journey mapping is immense:<ul><li>Understanding process: journey mapping forces you to think about the experience in a more structured and holistic way.</li><li>Building empathy: when you relive customer experience in story format you relive emotions and feel the pain and frustration users felt.</li><li>Define the pain points: If you have an understanding of pain you are empowered to improve the experience.</li></ul>

Why customer journey mapping?

<ul><li>As-is vs To-be journey maps. The as-is state of a process is the “current” state. It’s how the process operates before we make any changes or improvements. The to-be process is the future state.</li><li>User journey vs Customer journey maps. Sometimes your user can be a customer, and in other cases, customers are a completely different group of people</li><li>Journey map vs Service blueprint. Where journey mapping focuses on exposing the end-to-end of your customer’s front-stage experience, blueprinting focuses on exposing the surface-to-core of the business that makes up the backstage and behind the scenes.</li></ul>

Journey maps variations

Journey mapping is one of the most powerful and commonly used tools designed to map/describe how users reach their goals. When we combine storytelling and visualization we immerse ourselves into the…

The ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

<ul><li>Delete the word that. For example, "You believe that I'm lying."</li><li>Delete the words, I think. For example, "I think this is a good sentence."</li><li>Avoid words that end in -ing. For example, "The experiences we're seeking end up being underwhelming." becomes "The experiences we seek often underwhelm."</li><li>Write short sentences and paragraphs. Keep paragraphs to less than three sentences.</li><li>Shorten your opening sentence. Make it short, compelling and conversational.</li></ul>

Improve Your Writing Forever

Each week I share helpful ideas in my For The Interested newsletter. Sign up here to get next week’s ideas. Following are the simplest tips I can give you to easily — and forever — improve the…

The Two Minutes It Takes To Read This Will Improve Your Writing Forever

There are many ways to use an interceptor, and I’m sure most of us have only scratched the surface. In this article, I will present my ten favorite ways to use interceptors in Angular.&nbsp;

Find out which interceptor superpowers you can start using today

Manipulating the URL. Sounds a bit risky when I say it out loud but let’s see how easily we can do it in an interceptor.We could, for example, want to change HTTP to HTTPS.It’s as easy as cloning the request and replacing http:// with https:// at the same time. Then we send the cloned, HTTPS request to the next handler.

Everyone wants to see the spinning wheel of fortune when we are waiting for a response. What if I said we could set it up centrally in an interceptor so that we show a loader whenever there are active requests.For this, we can use a loader service that has a show and a hide function. Before we handle the request, we call the show method and through finalize we can hide the loader when done.

Loader

When the API returns a format we do not agree with, we can use an interceptor to format it the way we like it.This could be converting from XML to JSON or like in this example property names from PascalCase to camelCase. If the backend doesn’t care about JSON/JS conventions we can use an interceptor to rename all the property names to camelCase.

Converting

We can do a lot by manipulating headers. Some things are:<ul><li>Authentication/authorization</li><li>Caching behavior; for example, If-Modified-Since</li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery" target="_self">XSRF</a> protection</li></ul>We can easily add headers to the request in the interceptor.

Headers

Here we have many different cases where we could show messages. In my example, I show “Object created” every time we get a 201 created status back from the server.

Notifications

There are two use cases for errors that we can implement in the interceptor.First, we can retry the HTTP call. For example, network interruptions are frequent in mobile scenarios, and trying again may produce a successful result. Things to consider here are how many times to retry before giving up. And should we wait before retrying or do it immediately?

Errors

Because interceptors can process the request and response together, they can do things like time and log an entire HTTP operation. So we can capture the time of the request and the response and log the outcome with the elapsed time.

Profiling

A mock or fake backend can be used in development when you do not have a backend yet. You can also use it for code hosted in StackBlitz.We mock the response depending on the request. And then return an observable of HttpResponse.

Fake backend

Since interceptors can handle requests by themselves, without forwarding to <code>next.handle()</code>, we can use it for caching requests.What we do is use the URL a the key in our cache that is just a key-value map. And if we find a response in the map, we can return an observable of that response, by-passing the <code>next</code> handler.

Caching

It is just so fundamental for many applications that we have a proper authentication system in place. This is one of the most common use cases for interceptors and for a good reason. It fits right in!There are several things connected to authentication we can do:<ol><li>Add bearer token</li><li>Refresh Token</li><li>Redirect to the login page</li></ol>

Authentication

There are many ways to use an interceptor, and I’m sure most of us have only scratched the surface. In this article, I will present my ten favorite ways to use interceptors in Angular. I have kept…

Top 10 ways to use Interceptors in Angular

B2B2C is a model in which business A sells to business B but interacts directly with business B’s customers under their own brand.B2B2C is by no means some panacea. If it’s hard to build a product that enterprises or consumers love, building one that is loved by both is more than twice as difficult.&nbsp;

B2B2C

<ul><li>B2C is a gamble while B2B is (more) within your control.</li><li>B2B Customers know what they want, while B2C products are a shot in the dark</li><li>B2C consumers are irrational and trend-driven, while B2B clients are more predictable.</li><li>In B2C, it is hard to know if things are working, while B2B has a clear execution path</li><li>Iterating in B2C is hard, while B2B has clear follow-up steps</li><li>B2B Customers will actually pay for your products: Consumers are price sensitive while “businesses make decisions based on cost-benefit analyses.</li></ul>

B2B and B2C: arguments

<ul><li>If you want a predictable growth trajectory and high odds to build a sizeable business, go for B2B.&nbsp;</li><li>If you’re aiming for the groundswell, B2C is your ocean (but know statistics indicate a likely belly-flop!).&nbsp;</li><li>If you’ve accomplished the incredibly hard task of building a product that is 10x better from both a business and and consumer's perspective, the reward is that B2B2C lets you have the best of both models.</li></ul>

B2B vs. B2C vs. B2B2C

Last month, Justin Kan — former YC partner and co-founder of Twitch (B2C) and now Atrium (B2B) — published a piece titled “Why I love B2B over B2C.” My first instinct as a consumer investor was to…

Node.js is a Javascript Runtime built on chrome’s V8 Javascript engine. It uses an event-driven, Non-Blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. It can be anything ranging from Reading/Writing local files to making an Http request to an API. I/o takes time and hence blocks other functions, such as printing.

Why Node.js?

In the blocking method, user2's data request is not initiated until user1's data is printed to the screen.

Blocking I/O

On the other hand, using a non-blocking request, you can initiate a data request for user2 without waiting for the response to the request for user1. You can initiate both requests in parallel.

Non-blocking I/O

Otherwise, here’s a quick step-by-step explanation of how the JavaScript Event Loop works. <ul><li>Push main() onto the call stack. </li><li>Push console.log onto the call stack. This then runs right away and gets popped. </li><li>Push Settimeout onto the stack. Settimeout is a Node API.</li><li>After registering it in the APIs, setTimeout gets popped from the call stack. </li><li>Now the second setTimeout gets registered in the same way. We now have two Node APIs waiting to execute. </li><li>After waiting for 0 seconds, setTimeout gets moved to the callback queue, and the same thing happens with setTimeout . </li><li>Only one statement can execute at a time. This is taken care of by the event loop.</li></ul>

The JavaScript event loop

These are libraries built by the awesome community which will solve most of your generic problems. npm (Node package manager) has packages you can use in your apps to make your development faster and efficient.

Require does three things: <ul><li>It loads modules that come bundled with Node.js like file system and HTTP from the Node.js API . </li><li>It loads third-party libraries like Express and Mongoose that you install from npm. </li><li>It lets you require your own files and modularize the project. </li></ul>

Require

A Node module is a reusable block of code whose existence does not accidentally impact other code.

Node Modules

Something that has happened in our app that we can respond to. There are two types of events in Node. <ul><li>System Events: C++ core from a library called libuv.. </li><li>Custom Events: JavaScript core. </li></ul>

Events

We have to do this, don’t we?&nbsp;

Writing Hello World in Node.js

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment. Sounds great, but what does that mean? How does that work? The Node run-time environment includes everything you need to execute a program written in…

What exactly is Node.js?

‘UI Animation’ is typically thought of by designers as something that makes the user experience more delightful, but overall doesn’t add much value. Thus, UI Animation is often treated like the red-headed stepchild of UX.What most designers think of as ‘UI Animation’ is in fact the execution of a higher modality of design: the temporal behavior of interface objects during realtime and non-realtime events.

It’s not about UI Animation

It is important to distinguish between ‘state’ and ‘act.’ The state of something in UX is fundamentally static, like a design comp. The act of something in UX is fundamentally temporal, and motion based. An object can be in the state of being masked or it can be in the act of being masked. All temporal aspects of interaction can be thought of as happening in realtime or non-realtime. Realtime means that the user is directly interacting with the objects in the user interface. Non-realtime means that the object behavior is post-interactive: it occurs after a user action, and is transitional.

Realtime vs non-realtime interactions

These four pillars represent the four ways where the temporal behavior of user experiences supports usability.<ul><li>Expectation: how users perceive what an object is, and how it behaves. </li><li>Continuity speaks both to the user flow and to the ‘consistency’ of the user experience. </li><li>Narrative is the linear progression of events in the user experience that results in a temporal/spatial framework. </li><li>Relationship refers to the spatial, temporal, and hierarchal representations between interface objects that guide user understanding and decision making.</li></ul>

Motion supports usability in four ways

Principles are the underlying premises and rules of function giving rise to any number of techniques. From there, we can imagine a hierarchy with principles at the top, techniques further down, properties below that, and values at the bottom. I think of technique as akin to ‘ Style.’properties are the specific object parameters that are being animated to create the technique. Values are the actual Numeric property values that vary over time to create what we call ‘ animation'

Principles, Techniques, Properties, and Values

Easing and Offset & Delay relate to timing. Parenting relates to object relationship. Transformation, Value Change, Masking, Overlay, and Cloning all relate to object continuity. Parallax relate to temporal hierarchy. Obscuration, Dimensionality and Dolly & Zoom both relate to spatial continuity.

The 12 Principles of UX in Motion

The following manifesto represents my answer to the question — “As a UX or UI, designer, how do I know when and where to implement motion to support usability?” Over the last 5 years, it has been my…

Don't Ask How Many Days Does It Take to Form a Habit - Do This

A Misfit’s Guide to Navigating the Office - Guides

How making UX more visible can save you a whole lot of effort

Lessons from onboarding mobile-app users

The ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

April Oneill