Industry News

Ben Melbourne’s UX Designers: Why are we Wasting Time? is a great post on lean methodologies and Lean UX in particular. Of course, I especially like this point:

No amount of text or slides will ever replace the richness of observing your target audience first-hand. Take your client/team out in the field with you, or you’re greatly reducing the value of your research. Seeing a user point out the flaws in your product is the quickest way to convince a CEO to drop his pet feature.

For years, Google has said there is a demotion for sites that are incredibly slow to load. Heck...

Yesterday, Google's John Mueller posted something very abstract on Google+ saying, "Alright, who's playing with links again...

I’ve been thinking about the topic of my latest A List Apart column for a while, but I was just too scared to write it. I mean, what right do I have to talk about work and privilege? But I ran the idea by my amazing editor, and since she was really supportive and enthusiastic about it, I went for it.

So I wrote Why?:

Why we work—and what kind of work we do—is a function of our privilege and our history as much as it is a function of our choices and our dedication.

I hope you...

The figures are in, and once again, search marketing is a powerhouse. According to the IAB, search made up 50% of all digital ad spend last year.

Over on Marketing Land, we have the full-breakdown of the figures: Digital Ad Spend Hits New $49.5 Billion High In 2014; Mobile & Social See Greatest Growth. While channels like social and mobile saw more growth, search remained the biggest spend overall.

I’m still working up some figures on the search growth story. It’s complicated, because...

It seems like after waiting 24 hours, Google may have just started to change the mobile search results to factor in the mobile friendly update...

Aaron Shapiro makes some interesting observations in The Next Big Thing In Design? Less Choice:

Technology has revolutionized the way we live our lives and do business, but it has done a terrible job reducing the stress of so many decisions. Industry by industry, great digital design has eliminated middlemen from the economy and put users in control, making it fast and easy for us to determine what we want and purchase it directly, whether on a computer or over a phone. Now, with...

Chris Baraniuk looks at the futility of things like traffic signal buttons in Press me! The buttons that lie to you:

Some would call this a “placebo button”—a button which, objectively speaking, provides no control over a system, but which to the user at least is psychologically fulfilling to push. It turns out that there are plentiful examples of buttons which do nothing and indeed other technologies which are purposefully designed to deceive us. But here’s the really surprising...

Google will begin rolling out the mobile friendly update today, as they confirmed yesterday. Despite Google telling us you may not notice the image until the update rolls out over the course of a few weeks, SEOs and webmasters are manually...