Industry News

Joe Tullio has some good tips for remote teams in Distributed UX teams: Early lessons learned. This part, in particular, is something I think many teams ignore because it can feel like busywork:

At Google, we have an internal “snippets” tool for posting regular updates on our work, typically at a weekly cadence. Snippets serve to share the latest mock versions, research reports, study plans, hiring updates, and anything else that feels noteworthy.

To be fair, snippets are a...

It has been almost a month since we reported Google ranking changes, which is rare and it looks like many folks are seeing changes in the core web search results as of early this morning. This is unrelated to the major local ranking changes I reported this morning...

Looks like we got a big update going on, this one in the Google local pack results. The local SEO community is going pretty hot...

Des Traynor shines a light on the unglamorous side of the PM role in Q&A: What does a product manager do?

If you look at how actual product managers work in any company there’s a lot more nitty gritty work. There’s a lot of spreadsheets, wireframes. Google Docs, emails, and oh-so-many Slack channels. And they all exist to research, collaborate, dictate, and document consensus on a direction the product is going. But I think if the role was titled “Direction and Consensus Manager” you...

Tom Dart wrote a really interesting piece on how we change our accents when we talk to machines. From Y’all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be slowly killing it:

“Most people have what we would call a telephone voice, so they actually change away from their local family accent when they’re speaking on the telephone to somebody they don’t know,” said Alan Black, a Scottish computer scientist who is a professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon...

Aaron Bradley spotted and posted on Google+ that Google has opened up a pilot for the search live coverage carousel...

As you expected, Google was going to drop the mobile friendly label. Well, as of this morning, the mobile friendly label is officially gone.

Here is a screen shot showing the before and after...

Google has announced a new way to locate content within apps on Android phones. “In Apps” is a search tab that allows this, a new addition to the Google app for Android.

Google shared the news on its Inside Search blog today, along with an illustration of how it works:

Currently, Google says the feature works with Gmail, Spotify and YouTube. It’s promising that support for more apps will happen in the coming months, including for Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Evernote, Google Keep,...

Kashmir Hill writes about How Nextdoor reduced racist posts by 75%. Nextdoor tested a bunch of different approaches:

Some just saw the addition of new language: “Ask yourself: Is what I saw actually suspicious, especially if I take race or ethnicity out of the equation?” Some were asked to say in advance whether they were reporting an actual crime or just “suspicious activity.” Others actually had their posts scanned for mentions of race (based on a list of hundreds of terms Nextdoor...