Industry News

I’ve been seeing more and more scams like this one in my Facebook News Feed:



You only have to think about it for 4 seconds to realize that making a comment on a photo on the web will result in you watching and seeing absolutely diddly-squat (“P.S.: This is not Insane after all!”). And yet, in this particular case, 259,304 people thought about it for 3 seconds or less, commented, waited and saw nothing, and then moved on to the next thing.

The question is, why do Page admins do...

Francisco Inchauste did a great interview with MIT Technology Review about the user experience challenges of gestural interfaces. From Does Gestural Computing Break Fitts’ Law?:

I think there are a lot of usability/UX rules and laws that will come into question as we move forward into more of these experimental kinds of interfaces. I know many of them already have been retested/validated by other researchers.

A lot of newer interaction paradigms aren’t naturally intuitive as we...

There’s a strange bug on Google where search queries that should return no matches are instead turning Google into a porn search engine, almost as if an “anti-SafeSearch” feature is being enabled. Impossible Queries = Porn!

The Verge highlighted a Quora post about the bug, where doing some searches for “contradictory” or impossible to solve queries brings back porn listings.

For example, queries like the ones below currently do this (and be forewarned, you’re going to get porn results at...

Rus Yusupov talks about the design process at Vine in Design at Vine: Everyone needs an editor. I love these kinds of posts because I always learn something — either confirmation that we’re not the only ones doing things a certain way, or that we’re doing something wrong and need to change.

One of Vine’s key design principles got me thinking about the “invisible design” debate again:

Strive for simplicity. An interface should get out of the way. People should be able to focus on...

If you login to your Google Webmaster Tools and go to the Index status report, then click on advanced, you will see Google removed the "not selected" option and replaced it with "removed."
Not selected was a very intriguing option within the report.

For ages now, Twitter has only allowed you to search for tweets back for about a week. Looking for a tweet older than that? You were out of luck, at least using Twitter itself. But now that’s changing.

In a post today, Twitter says that some older tweets are now going to be available. How far back? That’s not said, but it seems like tweets that are particular popular or notable. From Twitter’s post: As we roll this out over the coming days, the Tweets that you’ll see in search results...

Joaquin (no last name?) talks about ad banner blindness in The non-click generation:

See, the point is, I know this ad is always in that space, I know what it does, I know its intentions, and I know the methods. It’s invisible to me because I know so much about it.

That’s nothing new, of course, but the article did remind me of Mike Lacher’s extremely funny I Am the One Who Clicks Banner Ads:

While you check the weather, I find out why California dermatologists hate the one...

For weeks now, top level Google AdWords advertisers were rumbling and kicking their feet about an upcoming change they have been hearing about from their Google reps. That was officially announced yesterday, called Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns.
In short, it is suppose to make it easier for business owners to create ads that target both desktop and mobile users. The goal is to simplify the ad creation and management process for the "multi-device world."

Richie Siegel in Facebook Isn’t Worth It:

With Facebook acting as the gauge of social worthiness in the twenty-first century, it’s time we realize that a lot of what we hoped Facebook could accomplish was unrealistic and impossible. Facebook is not going to keep your friendships going, no matter how much effort you put into it. Only humans, talking and being with other humans, can develop meaningful, lasting bonds. You can have all the friends in the world on the internet, but once you...