Industry News

Sheila Marikar wrote a very interesting piece for Bloomberg called The Race to Disrupt Your Tedious Treadmill Workout Is Heating Up. It talks about the mind-numbing boredom of running on a treadmill, with a focus on their design:

Today’s electric machines absorb shock better and look sleeker, but the ones in most gyms retain a certain quaintness, with their last-gen phone-charging cables and omnipresent menu of Calorie, Heart Rate, Manual, Random, Hill.

It then discusses how...

Ok this is creepy:

Over the past few years, Spotify has been ramping up its data analytic capabilities in a bid to help marketers target consumers with adverts tailored to the mood they’re in. They deduce this from the sort of music you’re listening to, coupled with where and when you’re listening to it, along with third-party data that might be available.

And they’re not alone:

Spotify is far from the only platform helping brands target people according to their emotions;...

I enjoyed this interview with Anna Charity, the head of design at Headspace. Here she explains designing the product specifically to make meditation feel more inclusive:

One of the main things that we considered when we created the brand was that meditation should feel like it’s for everybody, and it should feel accessible and inclusive. More importantly, we try to show meditation in a really everyday way — we show it in contexts that people can easily imagine. And one thing that all...

I am seeing some chatter, nothing too insane, around a Google search algorithm update around September 19th or so. There is 100% some chatter in the SEO communities and some of the automated tracking tools are showing fluctuations as well. I don't think this is too big or maybe something is brewing?

I know there were tons of sites that got notifications that their sites migrated to the mobile-first indexing process this week. But Google is far from done. Google said currently sites being migrated are pretty equivalent on the desktop compared to mobile page side.

In that CNBC article, Google told them that in 2017 Google ran 31,584 side-by-side experiments with its raters and subsequently launched 2,453 search changes. Of course, the "2,453 search changes" can be small design tweaks and such. Google does not disclose the number of algorithm changes.

Since 2010 we knew that using Google Translate or other automatic machine translation services to convert content from one language to another and to rank it in Google was against Google's guidelines. But recently some are saying with Google Translate getting much better, it has been harder for Google to discover what is machine vs human translated.

Scott Colfer writes about product roadmaps in this article, but it includes what I think is a pretty valuable overview of the core role of a product manager:

Product management makes promises to solve problems over commitments to specific solutions. We take the human tendency to specify the means of doing something, rather than the result that is wanted, and redirect it by specifying what is to be achieved, rather than how to achieve it. Product managers are usefully agnostic about...