Industry News

Dominic Basulto wrote an excellent summary of a recent McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute report called What the world’s best cities will look like in 2030. The main point the report makes is that people in cities are aging, and we’re not really paying attention to that. There are, however, several things we can do to make sure that older people can live comfortably in our cities:

First, the city of the future should have the infrastructure and transportation links to address the...

Daniel Zacarias has some tips for How to Deal with “Sinatra” Stakeholders—those people (usually HiPPOs1) who only want to design and build things their way. At the end he makes an important point:

These stakeholder attitudes don’t come out of the blue or from malfeasance. They result from misalignment and even when you can’t change your entire organization, you can definitely affect change around your product.

This is something I constantly have to remind myself about. If someone...

Craig Mod’s essay on doing design ethnography in Myanmar is so far my favorite piece of writing of the year. In The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar he shares some notes about the team’s visits and interviews:

There is a phrase repeated over and over again during my time in Myanmar: From no power to solar, from no banks to digital currencies, from no computers and no internet to capable smartphones with fast 3G connections. It is the mantra of consultants working in these emergent...

Matt Cutts of Google who is still on leave as far as we know, was on TWIG #336 and he spent about 15 minutes going through the core updates, Penguin...

Google is organizing more and more things in its index based upon entity numbers. I have a couple of examples for you that show how they are being used.

It’s possible that you may have missed a reference to Freebase Entities in a Google...

Melissa Perri in Changing the Conversation about Product Management vs. UX:

Product Management with no User Experience Design creates functional products that don’t make users excited. User Experience Design with no Product Management produces delightful products that don’t become businesses.

I have a few quibbles with this article (including the idea that the role of UX is to make users excited…), but I like this quote because it ties in with a common theme I write about: the...

Emma Brockes wrote an essay for The Guardian called In praise of being alone on our smartphones, together:

The act of being with someone—or better yet, a group of people—and on one’s phone is just the modern iteration of a key pleasure of family life: to be among those whom one is sufficiently comfortable with to drift in and out of communication. Like doing homework at the kitchen table, it is the state of doing your own thing while others do theirs around you. The point is, whatever...

After having a very unstable past couple weeks in terms of Google updates, this weekend was relatively calm. Last week we have a large core update and the week before massive fluctuations that were confirmed as core algorithm related as well...

Cortney Harding makes some good points about the behaviors of different music buying personas in Is There a Streaming Ceiling?

The future is beginning to look like it will be a two tiered system — the top group of music fans will pay for streaming and everyone else will buy a handful of albums a year. Think of all the people you know who bought the Adele album, and I’ll bet that for many of them, it was the only album they bought this year. Many of these consumers aren’t all the...