Industry News

Yesterday at SMX West in the How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer's Story session Gary Illyes of Google was asked about the Penguin 4.0 update...

Charles Duhigg has a long feature in the New York Times called What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. It includes a summary of really fascinating research on the core elements of a healthy, productive team:

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution...

Kevin Slavin’s Design as Participation is one of those articles that stays with you for days. There are multiple ways to read it, but I view it as a thoughtful critique of my primary field of focus: user-centered design (UCD). There have been other discussions on this topic, most notably Cennydd Bowles’s excellent Looking Beyond User-Centered Design, and Mike Long’s Stop Designing for Users. Kevin’s is a worthy addition to the debate.

Kevin’s main thesis is that UCD is selfish (since it...

In the past 24-hours or so, I've been seeing some early signs of a possible Google update. It might be impacting a limit number of sites or it might be the start of something...

There are two things everybody in business (say they) hate: email and meetings. So the past few years have seen a great many startups that try to re-invent, revolutionize, and strategerize the crap out of email and meetings. However, recently we seem to have come to a disappointing realization: email and meetings are the worst ways to get things done, except for all the other ways.

In Meet Is Murder Virginia Heffernan goes deep on the topic of meetings: why we hate them, what people have...

Ryan Schilling noticed Google showing a phone icon and phone number under some of the organic mobile search results. He posted a screen shot of it on Twitter. I was not able to replicate it on any of my devices...

The traditional way of building software focused on requirements, driven by a competitive view of the market, and responded to perceived needs with additional features and functions. Our new way of developing products focuses on people first: on spending lots of time with them in order to build an almost intuitive sense for their emotional journey. We design with that journey and those emotions in mind, and as a result, we can produce great products that people love.

—Jon Kolko,...

As you know, Google launched AMP in the mobile search results this week.

Back in December...

In late November/early December of 2015, I ran a survey of consultants and agencies asking deep questions about their structure, fees, employees, projects, and more. Thanks to responses from over 400 folks around the world, I’m able to share what I hope will be some of the most useful data from that project. Survey takers were primarily founders, owners, and presidents/CEOs of consultancies & agencies

To start, some brief disclaimers: All of the participants of the survey have been...