Industry News

I’m as fascinated with Slack‘s rise to prominence as most people, so I really enjoyed From 0 to $1B – Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy (no byline). It’s full of fantastic product strategy advice, including on the importance of user feedback:

As much information as Slack put out to customers, they learned even more themselves. Butterfield and his cofounders are voracious readers of user feedback, and they attribute much of the company’s rapid traction to this skill....

Photographer Tanja Hollander wanted to find out what online friendships are really about, so she set out to visit all 626 of her Facebook “friends” at their homes to take formal portraits of them. The first part of How Real Are Facebook Friendships? describes the project, and then it goes into some other research about social media and friendship:

In fact, the distinction between online and offline may be less relevant than it seems. Thinking about social media as a kind of place you...

Yesterday we covered that Google seems to have done a major update the other day and Google actually responded to us saying "as usual, we're continuing to make tweaks...

Twitter and Google have once again reached an agreement to provide Google with access to Twitter full stream of tweets.

Commonly called the Twitter “firehose,” the news was formally announced on today’s Twitter earnings call by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Costolo was sparse on the details. He didn’t announce it during the formal presentations but rather as part of an answer to a question not even specifically about Google. He confirmed there was a deal, apparently to address reports...

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...