Industry News

Mark Boulton’s How we work is a great post about their design process. I particularly like his point about personas, a method that I have defended before as well:

The tool is not the important thing here, [what's important is] how you can use something to help people think of other people. To help an organisation to think of their customers, or designers to think of the audience they’re designing for, or the CEO to think in terms of someone’s disability rather than the P&L.

What...

Jeff Atwood wrote a glorious rant about the proliferation of unnecessary mobile apps called App-pocalypse Now1:

The more apps out there, the more the app stores are clogged with mediocre junk, the more the overall noise level keeps going up, which leads directly to this profligate nagging. Companies keep asking how can we get people to find and install our amazing app instead of the one question they really should have asked.

Why the hell are we building an app in the first place?...

Duane Forrester from Bing strongly implied on the Bing Webmaster Blog that having poorly written content with poor grammar will have a negative impact on your search rankings within Bing...

One of the many things I do that prove that I need to get out more is collect examples of placeholder text that ends up in a final interface. But I’ve also noticed that the issue happens more and more in the offline world as well. As I looked through my folder this morning I realized that, in the interest of science, I should post some of my favorites here. If you have any other good examples, please let me know!

Let’s start with a very common one. Even though error messages are extremely...

MG Siegler in Going Against The Grain:

We’re seeing over and over again now that the behemoths can’t simply add a startup’s funtionality into their own app as a feature and kill said startup. But it’s equally important to note that if you are able to establish your startup, especially those in apps form, it may be hard to get your users to do anything other than what they originally came to do. Especially if the new funtionality is against the grain in any way.

This comes back to...

Life decisions are never one-dimensional. Yet we often simplify the decisions others make to squash it into a context that’s easy to understand, because human nature. The problem is that trying to make other peoples’ decisions fit into our own neatly-defined boxes of understanding leads to something that’s poisonous for the soul: judgment.

We hear about someone’s decision to quit their job, or move somewhere, or marry someone, or drink tea instead of coffee, and we judge. Oh, how we judge. I...

It’s definitely not what you expect to make the top of a Google News section, a crappy article promising that you can watch The Lego Movie online for free, not when the film is still in theaters. But that’s what Google is delivering up.

The screenshot above shows the situation, which reader Vishvesh Agrawal of DhanInfo tipped us to, after coming across it when reading Google News. The “story” appearing at the top of the Google News entertainment section is all types of bad. Supposed News...

When I’m looking for something at a search engine, I will often start out with a particular query and then depending upon the kinds of results I see I often change the query terms I use. It appears that Google has been paying attention to this kind...

Google has updated their Google Places quality guidelines once again this time to clarify how you can name your business within Google Places/Google Local/Google Maps.

Jade Wang from Google pulled out the changes and posted them in the Google Places Help forums...