Industry News

I try not to overwhelm you with posts about the product management book I wrote recently, but I do think this deserves a post. After a few hiccups, Making It Right is now available in paperback on Amazon, through CreateSpace Independent Publishing.

If you like papery things and margins, I’m sure you will like it.

Buy ‘Making It Right’ on Amazon.

Peter Morville’s Creating a Cultural Fit: Using ethnography with users and stakeholders is one of the most useful UX articles I’ve read in a while. He talks about the importance of understanding the cultures of both users and companies to create good products. He concludes:

In short, the right design is one that fits the company and its customers. A mismatch on either side results in fatal error. We must use ethnography with our users and stakeholders to search for a bi-cultural fit....

Revisting the Subscribed Links Patent Five Years Later and Finding the Rich Snippets Patent I first looked at this patent five years ago, but called it the Subscribed Links Patent. At the time, Google had a Subscribed links program, where site...

Google has updated their change of address tool, the first major update since it launched back in 2009.
The new features make it easier for novices to go through the process of using the tool correctly.

A couple weeks ago, Google pushed out a large update to the Google Panda Algorithm, version Panda 4.1.

A weekend later, we saw major traffic shifts in Google, which Google said was likely Panda 4.1 still in the process of rolling out 1.5 weeks later.

But now, almost 2...

Earlier this month, we reported Google began testing mobile friendly icons in the mobile search results, again. They did this back in August as well. But now...

A Google patent application explores how Google may answer factual questions from Web pages rather than more structured sources such as Freebase or Wikipedia. The processes described in the patent are pretty interesting, and they avoid a problem...

I’ve decided that it’s time for something of a change at SEO by the Sea, and so I am introducing Patent Free Fridays to the blog. Patent Free Fridays do not always have to happen on a Friday, but they do have to be patent free, at least if they...

Sophie Shepherd introduces some new deliverables in Rethinking Our Prototypical Process, including this one:

HTML prototypes have the potential to confuse some clients. In addressing feedback, I’ve answered questions like: Are we tied to this layout? (No.) Is this real content? (Ideally.) Is this what our website will look like? (Probably not.) The content outline strips any potentially distracting elements from the prototype: no layout, no typography, no links, no things remotely...