Industry News

I like the work Growing Agile does, so I clicked on Karen Greeves’s Agile & UX: What’s wrong with working one sprint ahead? with great interest. I’ve been struggling with this issue myself, but I’ve just never come across a better way to integrate UX and Agile, so I was very interested in their viewpoint. The post definitely got me thinking, but I have some issues with their objections. In the interest of letting you in on the thought process, I’m going to take some lines from the post and...

I really like the James Buckhouse explains in is article Story Map:

Halfway between a storyboard and a treasure map, it bundles the value and functional flow of your product with the delight people might feel at each step in your product. It sketches the UX flow without locking it down, and it delivers the gist of an idea and the emotional gestalt without prematurely belaboring the details.

A story map depicts how your product works and why it matters—but crucially—it does not...

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about a new patent from Google that was the first Google patent granted to Navneet Panda as an inventor. The patent described a complicated way for Google to judge the quality of websites, and my post was...

Google announced early this morning that they are now using SSL/HTTPS as a ranking signal in their Google search algorithm.

The signal is incredibly weak and webmasters should not go crazy about it...

Claire Evans discusses how much more awkward break-ups have become in the age of social media. From Luddite love:

It’s time to end it online. I’m not just talking about the pedantic tick-box of Facebook ‘relationship status’: there are images to untag, emails to delete, an ‘unfriending’ to coordinate. There is the careful unravelling of the social web.

In a sense, every relationship now exists on two levels. The moments we spend in one another’s company, the neurochemical buzz of...

Some smart thoughts from Scott Sehlhorst in Classifying Market Problems:

Many teams struggle with backlogs or roadmaps which appear to be a collection of “a bunch of stuff.” Most teams try and address the problems that manifest from having a giant list of stuff by getting better at managing giant lists. This is treating the symptom, not the cause. If you’re trying to juggle hundreds of requirements, the problem isn’t that you have hundreds of requirements, the problem is that you don’t...

In December 2011, Google launched author stats, a way to see how your content, across sites, based on your Google Authorship profile, fared. That is now gone...

Just when we think authorship and publisher is dead, because Google dropped author images back in June - we see signs of maybe rel=publisher making some headway...

Around November 17, 2012, MetaFilter got nailed by a Google update that back then Google denied.

As we explained in March, Google was working on a way to fix the algorithm that hit them back in November 2012...