Industry News

Jason Kottke wrote what I guess can be described as a review of Apple Watch reviews. He makes a particularly interesting point about the common assertion that we’ll start using our phones less because of the watch. From Apple Watch and the induced demand of communication:

In the entire history of the world, if you make it easier for people to do something compelling, people don’t do that thing less: they’ll do it more. If you give people more food, they eat it. If you make it easier...

My daughters love the Toca Boca apps—especially Robot Lab. Ingrid Simone’s article on their approach to gender is great. From Gender in Play: How Toca Boca Creates Apps for All Kids:

Toys have a large impact on how kids play together and relate to other kids. But kids of today are fostered into watching different shows and playing with different toys according to their gender.

We know that when a toy reaches a child a choice has already been made for them, someone has picked a...

Alina Senderzon defends realignment strategies in Resist the Redesign:

Yet, designers are quick to jump on redesign opportunities—after all, it’s exciting to start anew. In reality, however, a redesign isn’t always the right solution to the problem. The roadblock for users may lie in the pricing of your product, which could be discovered through customer development. Or your messaging isn’t compelling and could be saved by some clever copywriting. Or maybe customers feel compelled to...

If I link to a listicle, it has to be good enough to overcome my unnaturally strong negative feelings about those types of article. Alas, Mike Fishbein’s 4 steps to make experimentation a repeatable process in your business is that good. It’s a great overview of the importance of hypothesis testing over “requirements gathering” in product management:

Most new products fail, and most frequently because they do not meet user needs. Running experiments helps product managers validate...

Can you believe, the last official Google Panda refresh/update was Panda 4.1 on September 25, 2014? We've seen updates to it since, but those updates stopped around October 24, 2015, which is 5 months and 2 weeks or so ago.
I asked John Mueller of Google in a Google+ handout

In 2009, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web recorded the following TED Presentation about Linked Open Data. This video describes his next idea for a use for the Web, where Data is shared and can flow freely, published by people...

There has recently been a lot of confusion around the Panda algorithm, specifically if it is running monthly, in real time, or still manual. The answer, at least today, is that not only is the data for Panda manually updated but also Penguin...

So a question many folks have been thinking about in regards to the April 21st mobile-friendly Google algorithm was what if a brand is not mobile-friendly and someone searches for them after April 21st on their mobile device...

Scott Sehlhorst wrote a really good defense of good product roadmaps in Features do not a Product Roadmap Make:

If your roadmap says “Will include update quantity control in shopping cart” you’re doing it wrong.  Your roadmap should say “Improved shopping experience on mobile” or “Better shopping experience for spearfisher  persona.” […]

When a roadmap is being used to communicate “what” the product will be, it should be in the language of describing which problems will be...