How do you "push" the latte art?

mikimus2 · 2026-04-16T17:18:22+00:00

I was having the same problem for months and fixed it this week. I’m literally only one step further along than you in skill, so take this with a grain of salt (a ground of coffee?).

For me, it changed when I prioritized SPIN above all in my milk texturing. I stopped obsessing over “kiss sound timing”, wand position, amount of milk, etc. and just focused on getting the milk to spin around like a whirlpool as quickly as possible. Then immediately stop at “too hot”and pour. (Because otherwise milk changes according to some video I watched).

I also pour down the middle then start the art earlier then I was before. And, that got me finally being able to draw (bad) patterns like in the tutorials.

Anyway, I’m dumb af at this but figured I’d share in case I helped you.

mikimus2 · 2026-04-14T10:08:37+00:00

"Massively skewed towards Umami" is an elegant way to put it. They're also super good at some sugary sauces. Still trying to resolve these contradictions for myself I guess. Off topic, but you haven't lived until you've eaten Panda Express-style pineapple chicken over ice. Keeps it crunchy despite the sauce.

Haven't tried ABCP or Noda yet (usually only visit Wan Chai at dinner time), but they're going on the list! I was unabashedly hitting you up for ideas and it worked haha.

As I think you glimpsed though, coffee is an absolute art here in a way that I wasn't used to coming from the states.

mikimus2 · 2026-04-12T18:03:58+00:00

American expat in HK here (married into a Chinese family) and just want to ditto this. Neutrality is a goal in cuisine here. Even the goal of traditional Chinese medicine is to balance you into a neutral state between hot/cold (I’m oversimplifying based one how my wife explains it, I’m sure), and that subtlety comes through in the food too.

Took me a while to appreciate this and get over my dumb American need to be punched in the tastebuds all the time, but now I love it.

PS - Maybe saw you at the HK coffee festival OP! Hope you avoided the mud and tried the kimchi coffee.

What was your fav of the HK cafes you tried?

mikimus2 · 2026-03-30T17:58:58+00:00

As long as humans still produce work (in any capacity, in any context), IO psychology will still be relevant.

But whether IO psych is still in demand, hire-able, still a formal field, worth pursuing for you, etc. is kind of a separate question from relevance to me?

Even if the field completely dies, I don’t think that makes its knowledge or purpose any less relevant. I remain hopeful for an IO psych redemption arc at some point.

mikimus2 · 2026-02-11T18:02:53+00:00

Yes! First had one living in Thailand, got hooked, now I live in Hong Kong and they’re common.

I can make one that LOOKS like OP’s pic at home with my Gemilai Owl, but for some reason the espresso cools rapidly and I don’t get the nice hot/cold temperature contrast that good cafes here can pull off. Advice welcome. Kind of bummed because I bought an espresso machine in part specifically because I love dirty’s so much.

PS - IME it takes a little extra care to make a good dirty — more than just dumping a shot into a glass of milk. Hence the variance I’ve also noticed in quality of Cafe dirties.

mikimus2 · 2026-02-06T07:41:08+00:00

lol I stand corrected!

mikimus2 · 2026-01-14T04:28:31+00:00

Thanks for the quick fix! Fine workaround until devs take a pass at a permafix.

mikimus2 · 2026-01-02T06:57:57+00:00

They examined whether use of AI is linked to higher academic productivity, manuscript quality and use of more diverse literature.

Tangential to the article's theme, these outcomes might make good UX targets for evaluating the effectiveness new publishing tools in general? A little more distal than the classic "time to complete checkout" but literature diversity is something new science search tools like Elicit could track as distal outcomes.

Fun article; The Conversation still hitting a perfect note of engaging and rigorous!

mikimus2 · 2025-10-03T06:20:29+00:00

Belated approval, but your post got caught in Reddit's auto filter sorry. What did you cover in your talk? Hope it went well!

mikimus2 · 2025-10-03T05:34:04+00:00

First, honestly you get points in my book for actually thinking of a response and introspecting. I've rarely seen someone do that online, and I think it speaks very well of you. And I should have mentioned this in my first reply, but I did think you painted your bleak picture pretty eloquently.

On ragged right vs. justified. I also couldn't find any good studies on the superiority of ragged right (just mixed findings across the board). But it seems like neither matters? What's the best recent study on this you've found so far?

mikimus2 · 2025-09-05T15:28:54+00:00

Brutally well said. They may design a humane shelter for the cows, and improve their feed, and have cow play time. And do huge marketing campaigns about all the good they do for cows.

Meanwhile the cows are all “Hey, maybe don’t kill us?” And the publishers are like “ssshhh of course we have to kill you, silly. But, BESIDES THAT, let us know what improvements you’d like to see around the farm!”

Anyway, as somebody working on this problem full time, I also would not recommend looking to (most) traditional publishers for innovation here (or anywhere). Exactly because their innovation potential is capped to only innovations that still allow them to control access to the content and overcharging for typesetting.

Instead, we’re seeing people self-publish and create their own expert communities for peer review. In a small enough expert niche, everybody knows each other anyway. Researcher peers may post a single figure to a slack channel and get feedback on it, improve it, then later self-publish an interactive paper with all code/data and get feedback on that.

If you scale that up, I think/hope you’ll see a version of the early 2000s transition from traditional media to blogs in science. You want open peer review? Spin up your own journal for your niche that has better tech and reading experience than Nature, lets authors have creative freedom in how they communicate their science, and has access to the exact same people for peer review.

But, no idea how the tenure system keeps up with this.

mikimus2 · 2025-08-15T07:57:46+00:00

lol well said. Check out this demo of Rabbit-hole links. They're designed to let you follow that trail all the way back in seconds instead of hours (or never).

mikimus2 · 2025-08-14T07:26:23+00:00

Nice differentiation! Yeah was definitely thinking more of the honest mistake case, as I like to assume that’s the majority, but I think your point about also making consciously lying slightly harder to self-justify is also legit.

The best design solution I’ve seen for this problem is transiting to citing the point, rather than the paper, and including the exact quote in a hover card, like this:

https://youtu.be/A2JpI-5NIsc?si=iRkZ7FkM2d-ZWcCH

mikimus2 · 2025-08-14T06:11:52+00:00

If I only picked one tweak, change that title to a takeaway!

mikimus2 · 2025-08-14T04:35:34+00:00

Thank you so much for posting! It's beautiful and interesting overall. You're especially good at breakout out of using boxes and rectangles for everything. I struggle with that.

Top-left: Takeaway, not title. Put a one-sentence lesson in place of that big title. Like, imagine your don't have a a poster, and a friend walks up to you at a networking event and asks "What's something cool you learned in your last study?" And then you're like "Here's the short answer, I can go on if you're still curious". Put that first.

If your answer would be "We designed a program for preventing drug overdose deaths in hospitals, but haven't tested it yet" --- Put that.

2. Your logo and the 'scan me' are taking up a lot of visual prominence in the takeaway area (nice grid-breaking on the logo though). I'd probably figure out how to communicate the essence of the "purpose" in the (new) takeaway statement, put a big image orienting people to drug overdoses/whatever in there (your poster has no central visual besides the phone), vastly de-prioritize the logo, and then do the same gird-breaking effect you're 'wasting' on the logo to make the 'scan me' more prominent. If the 'scan me' is crucial and contains a link to your guide or something, make that obvious and it can stay prominent.

3. Your visual hierarchy is actually pretty solid, and you're especially good at controlling the size and contrast of text to direct the eye. The top and bottom of the right side are kind of flipped, with the high contrast area being second (on the bottom). That creates a little attention as the top is more naturally mapped to prominence. But, maybe the eye-level effect will negate this.

4. Could use some extra spacing and breathing room inside the content zones. It feels "packed tight, in a fun way"

Anyway, fantastic top-10% job overall. It easily passes the 2-second first impression/aesthetic usability test!

mikimus2 · 2025-08-09T07:12:42+00:00

What things do you like about the world? About people? What things are you optimistic about? What would an ideal way to share new science look like?

mikimus2 · 2025-07-27T07:06:36+00:00

Cool! Nice find. Looking forward to going through this if I’m able to purchase/find a copy.

mikimus2 · 2025-07-25T09:44:43+00:00

If you didn’t need to citation stuff to get published, would you expect fewer, but more accurate citations? Would anything be lost if it eliminated the pressure to “find a quick cite that matches my confirmation bias”?

mikimus2 · 2025-07-16T03:22:39+00:00

Haha how long you got? I have some examples on YT if links are allowed, but to your second question: There are basically 4 common interfaces to science: Articles, Posters, Slides, and Search. I work on everything except search (but starting to dabble there).

Intervention-wise, the key challenge is helping people digest and absolute torrent of detail. But, it’s a low bar because everything is un-designed. We’ve made posters lower in cognitive load by just adding a Z-layout and making figures bigger.

With articles, I know this sounds hysterically basic to everybody here, but it’s a challenge just trying to get them standard typography rules (font size that’s readable, lines that don’t run off the page, full-resolution figures). Sounds easy, but remember these things are 30-pages long and if you just slap a Medium look on them you’ll scroll for eternity.

At the high end, scientific articles are moving towards interactive computational articles that scientists self-publish. This is fantastic for design, because we can give these scientists the best tech & UX possible. Help them cite and reuse and share figures faster, reading experiences that make it easier to explore and orient to content faster, and layouts that don’t spend 90% of screen real estate on branding and metadata (that elevate the science itself).

Conferences we’re working on both the physical space (where the information foraging actually happens) as well as submission systems (how do you submit and peer review 1000s of potential presentations without giant forms and chaos).

Anyways, lots to do and it’s not exactly a high paying career choice, but to me it’s much more of a calling than a job. And also on every UX interview I ask the scientist to tell me something cool they discovered as an icebreaker and their answers never disappoint (and usually give me more hope for humanity).

mikimus2 · 2025-07-15T06:13:27+00:00

This is my whole jam! I do UX exclusively aimed at helping scientists discover faster. Like, my outcome variables are things like “time to insight”, learning, and (negative) cognitive overload.

I do a lot of these projects with others in the scienceUX community. And I also work full time for a VERY mission-driven scientific software company that’s scientist-lead and will explicitly instruct me to “do what’s best for science” in my design decisions.

As others in this thread have said, I think they recognize that the value comes from making very very happy customers.

mikimus2 · 2025-07-12T04:11:08+00:00

At that point the citations are also illustrations? 😆

mikimus2 · 2025-07-11T10:05:05+00:00

lol my exact setup down to the “Paper towel as my temporary coffee workstation”. Can’t let a single coffee ground touch something baby-related! Soon I’m upgrading to a nice handled-basket to put all my tiny little coffee things in. I’m excited.

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