Industry News

The Transportation Research Board (TSB) recently published a 100-page PDF called Guidebook for Airport Terminal Restroom Planning and Design. If I know anything about the readers of this site, it’s that this is the kind of stuff we live for. Service design for airport toilets? Sign us up!

Ian Bogost provides a handy summary of this delightful document in The Airport Restroom of the Future:

> The TSB report ends with an appendix on the “Airport Restroom of the Future.” After a...

A couple hours ago, Google's Andrey Lipattsev a Search Quality Senior Strategist participated in a Q&A with Bill Slawski, Ammon Johns...

Jennifer Kahn’s The Happiness Code, an article about bringing rationality to self-improvement, is interesting in and of itself. But it’s Hannah Whitaker‘s photo illustrations with lettering by Luke Lucas that really drew me in. I’m sure many of you despise pithy “wisdom quotes” as much as I do. So these are like smooth balm to a tortured soul.









You can see more of Hannah’s excellent work here. Luke’s personal website with some his great graphic design projects is here.

There’s an old saying that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. But in search, that saying is often turning into something different.

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.

Acquisition search engine optimization is happening more often as companies acquire or merge, effectively taking over shelf space on search results. Why settle for having the top result on an important term when I can have the first and second result?



Should this trend continue you could find search results where only a...

I’ve seen Anshu Sharma’s Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy come up in my feeds a bunch of times over the last couple of days. I personally found the writing quite confusing, and had to read it several times to figure out what he was trying to say. I even drew a picture to help me.

If I understand the argument correctly, Anshu is saying that wherever your core business is in the technology stack, it’s easier to expand your market by going down the stack than up. Like so:...

Gary Illyes from Google did it again, he said on Twitter that he thinks the Penguin update that was expected in 2015, that was then delayed due to the holidays and now was expected this month should launch within weeks...

Most businesses don’t admit how costly things like company wide announcements, project management, interviewing, internal politics, and large scale collaboration are on productivity. They all work against flow, and should be considered a handicap on product teams. Small teams substitute process with trust, eliminating overhead.

— Kyle Neath, Million Dollar Products

Princess Ojiaku summarizes some recent research on Why sad songs can be feel-good and noise music can be nice:

Sad music might make people feel vicarious unpleasant emotions, found a study published last year in Frontiers in Psychology. But this experience can ultimately be pleasurable because it allows a negative emotion to exist indirectly, and at a safe distance. Instead of feeling the depths of despair, people can feel nostalgia for a time when they were in a similar emotional...

I’ve long held Jakob Nielsen’s Useful = usability + utility formula in high regard. The Introduction to Usability article it comes from is still one of the best intros to user experience I’ve seen. That said, I’ve recently started to wonder about the ideal ratios on the right side of the equation. What combination of usability and utility results in the most useful product? Is it a 50/50 split? 70% usability, 30% utility? It’s a purely academic exercise because there’s not way to prove any...

I hate to cover these things over the weekend but just like the massive fluctuations we saw last weekend, which turned into a core ranking update as confirmed by Google...