Industry News

Buzz Usborne’s “God is in the details” is a great reminder that spending just a little time thinking things through a bit more that usual can have a big impact on user experience:

But it’s those little things, the tiny minutia of detail, that ultimately make beautiful products, and beautiful houses.

Unfortunately, when I refer to the “details” in product design, I’m not talking about obvious design things; like colours, drop-shadows or placement. Instead I’m referring to...

It looks like there is an algorithm update taking place at Google search now - it is hard to say if it is Panda, Penguin or something unrelated - right now...

Last night, Bloomberg reported that Twitter and Google struck a new deal to give Google access to their firehose of Tweets again...

In January, Microsoft introduced a new build of Windows 10, which it will be giving away for free for non-enterprise users running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. One of the features on this update is a personal digital assistant that goes by the name...

Michael Andrews brings up some interesting concerns about cards in Are UI Cards good for content? However, I’m left thinking that most of the “cons” in the article are actually Information Architecture problems, not problems with the card metaphor:

UI cards can contribute to content usability problems that may not be immediately evident.  Users often like UI cards when they encounter them, and don’t notice their limitations.  They see tidy cards often with colorful thumbnail images. ...

Debbie Chachra wrote a great essay on our current obsession with the word “Maker”, and how that devalues other professions like educators and caregivers. From Why I Am Not a Maker:

When new products are made, we hear about exciting technological innovation, which are widely seen as worth paying (more) for. In contrast, policy and public discourse around caregiving—besides education, healthcare comes immediately to mind—are rarely about paying more to do better, and are instead mostly...

In November, we documented how Google began sprucing up their Google Answers boxes with answer action links. But the catch was, it only worked for Google specific content. I said...

I’m currently working on the design of a native app for Jive Software, and we really wanted to do some usability testing on a prototype before development starts. There are, of course, a multitude of reasons to do usability testing on prototypes, but we had some very specific issues we wanted to address: We are a distributed team. Product Management is in Palo Alto, Product Design is in Portland, and Development will happen in our Tel Aviv office. So we knew from the beginning that a...

There is so much wisdom in Paul Adams’ Lessons learned from scaling a product team, but my favorite part is the clear articulation of accountability. All companies should have something like this:

If the analysis of the problem to be solved is incorrect, it’s on the PM. Ensure appropriate research is done.

If the design doesn’t address the problem, it’s on the Designer. Ensure you understand the research and problem.

If the design solves the problem, but doesn’t fit with...

In a Google+ webmaster hangout from a couple weeks ago, Google's John Mueller was at the GooglePlex and had a hangout with two of his colleagues.

Josh asked at 26 minutes and 3 seconds in, why does Google use links for ranking at the level they do...