Industry News

Steve Barnett makes some great points on long-term planning in Plans, Details, Dates, and The Future1. I especially like the point about how user research fits into planning:

Before development starts on a new bit of work, you should be building prototypes and doing user testing with them. This always results in some changes to the plan, and often results in rather large charges. You can’t plan what these changes will be: you don’t know until you’ve done your user testing....

The SEO community is buzzing heavily around a paper (PDF) published by Google named Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources.

The paper describes how Google can rank the most factually accurate web pages higher in the search results...

People outside the United States may try to reach Google.com for a variety of reasons rather than use their own country-specific versions. But Google has made reaching Google.com more difficult than in the past, a change that may help the company with both advertising and legal issues. How & Why Google Has Redirected Away From Google.com

For many years, those outside the United States who tried to reach Google.com were usually redirected to their own country-specific version of Google....

Erika Hall speaks so much truth in her post On Surveys:

If you are treating a survey like a quantitative input, you can only ask questions that the respondents can be relied on to count. You must be honest about the type of data you are able to collect, or don’t bother.

My first role at eBay, years ago, was as a quantitative user researcher1. We ran surveys to measure satisfaction with different areas of the product over time. If that period taught me anything, it’s that surveys...

An old topic of web design by or site credit links - should you put them on web sites and if so, should they pass link juice?

So if I design a web site for you, can I put "site designed by Barry" and link that to my site...

Yahoo’s share of search in the United States has dropped for the first time since it signed a deal to be the default search engine in Firefox. The drop follows two months of impressive gains. The loss suggests that a “high water mark” has been reached for gains the deal can produce for Yahoo and that “switchback” by Google users may now slowly cause Yahoo to give back share. A Small Drop For Yahoo

In the middle of last November, Yahoo because the default search provider for Firefox users...

To no ones surprise, Google announced mobile-friendly is becoming a ranking factor in the mobile search results in the near future. Google said it will happen on April 21...

The Paradox of Empathy is such a great post by Scott Jenson that I pretty much want to quote the whole thing. But I’ll stick with just this one gem, and encourage you to read it in full. It is a fantastic exploration of empathy in design, and includes a framework for making empathy part of our everyday work in a very practical way:

Designers will be the first to admit that not every empathic observation leads to a miraculous insight. However, it’s called “Design Thinking” for a...