Industry News

Nick Bilton quit his Nest Thermostat because a software malfunction left him unable to heat his house for a while. In Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold he extrapolates to concerns about what happens when connected devices stop working as they should:

We’ve seen this before, with wireless fobs for keyless cars. They are supposed to make life easier by letting us do away with car keys, but they also make it easier for thieves to break in (by using a simple radio...

Sarah Kessler sets out to treat an unproved disorder with an unproven form of therapy, and lived to tell the tale. From What I Learned In 12 Weeks Of Therapy For Social Media Addiction, about using online chat therapy provider Talkspace:

Though everyone says they’re addicted, [Roni Frank, co-founder of Talkspace] says, they aren’t necessarily motivated to solve the problem. She compares it to cigarettes. “In the early years, people were smoking like crazy,” she says, “and at some...

As I keep trying to get the answer to what's the difference now that Google added Panda into the core algorithm...

As we continue to try to understand the Google Panda changes as it is now part of the core algorithm...

Amit Singhal. Credit: Google

You’ll often hear the mantra of “mobile first” with technology companies, but the head of Google search isn’t just saying it. He’s been living it, doing almost all of his searches for more than a year on mobile devices.

Amit Singhal is Google’s senior vice president of search, overseeing all of the company’s search products, a role that he’s had since he joined Google back in 2000. I’ve interviewed him many times over those years. One of those times was a...

Courtney Martin’s essay on The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems really got to me. She makes the case that instead of traveling all over the world to solve social problems in other countries, we should focus on the problems at home:

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems is dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve avoided. While thousands of the country’s best and brightest flock to far-flung places to ease unfamiliar suffering and tackle foreign...

I was lucky enough to see Sha Hwang‘s brilliant closing keynote at UX Burlington 2015 about his work on Healthcare.gov. So I was excited to see that Sha just posted a recent talk he did called Digital Materiality, a short reflection on gifs and gif culture:

gifs are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are  important: they do not belong to anyone. because of their constraints they become a design material, to be played with, challenged, and explored....

The Google Dance is back.

Don’t know what the Google Dance is? Sure, it’s the nickname given to when Google’s search results dance around after an algorithm update. But it’s also the name of an annual gathering for search marketers that Google hosted at its Googleplex headquarters from 2002 through 2008.

Now the Google Dance is back. It’s happening again in conjunction with our SMX West search marketing conference that runs through March 1 to March 3 in San Jose. The History Of The...

Back in my eBay days, when Net Promoter was just becoming a huge deal, there came a time when we were asked to include the measurement in our user research. Even then I was extremely uncomfortable with the simplistic nature of the measure, but I just didn’t have the experience to speak up about it. It seems that NPS is finally getting the wind taken out of its sails. The latest takedown I read is Matt LeMay’s excellent On Net Promoter and Data Golems:

This very ubiquity is a huge part...

Leigh Alexander wrote a very interesting essay on how Facebook is getting a little… “intimate” with its users lately. She extrapolates that to a growing trend in The New Intimacy Economy:

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals. Start counting how many times platforms, services and websites entreat you in human voices, with...