Industry News

Back in 2012 I wrote the following about a blind spot I’ve noticed in Agile development:

Problem solving involves not just iteration, but also lots of variation. This often requires time to get it wrong a few times, which doesn’t fit comfortably with the concept of release dates. See, the problem with integrating Agile and UX is not that designers want to hang on to “slow and heavy documents,” “big upfront design”, or whatever you want to call it. The problem is that each iteration...

Elea Chang takes on the “full-stack employee” idea in a great critique called The Full-Stack Employee and The Glorification of Generalization:

Hidden inside that “full-stack employee” manifesto is the idea that tech equals work and work equals life. Despite all the talk of learning and growing, the full-stack employee is primarily focused on conquering domains within the tech industry. But there have always been ways to impact the world outside the workplace. Unfortunately, the...

As you know, Google launched the first part of their mobile friendly algorithm in February, which meant Android searchers would see Android apps they installed come up in the mobile search results higher for content within the app that matched their query...

Google announced last night that the mobile search results are no longer going to display the site's URL in the search snippet...

A Google patent granted this week describes how Google might try to understand Entities that appear on Web pages, and how that awareness might influence the search results that the search engine shows off in search results. An Entity is a...

Two recent articles made me think again about how weird journalism and publishing has become because of the internet and social media. In Instagram’s TMZ Jenna Wortham describes a very successful celebrity gossip “site” (what should we call these things now?) that exists primarily on Instagram:

Angie explained to me that Instagram perfectly suited her vision for The Shade Room: image-centric and interactive. For her purposes, Instagram was the equivalent of WordPress. When she started...

Benedict Evans wrote a characteristically brilliant analysis in What does Google need on mobile? Here’s a taste of his conclusion about Google’s challenge going forward:

The key change in all of this, I think, is that Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity—a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home—to one of perfect complexity—every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other...

After years of investigation, we finally have a formal EU antitrust complaint against Google in search. It’s narrow — all about shopping search. Here’s a look at the specific charges and what they might mean for the search engine.

The EU is issuing a “Statement Of Objections” to Google outlining its concerns, where it will back these up with what will be pages and pages of evidence. The public won’t have access to this, but there’s an excellent change it will leak. Until then, all the...

As you know, there has been a lot of contradictory statements from Google around how Penguin and Panda are run, is it real time, is it manual, how long does it take...