Industry News

Vijay Sundaram takes the concept of technical debt and applies it to User Experience Design:

You know you’re a subprime borrower when your team decides to “clean this up next release”. But the next release has a backlog of critical bug fixes, must-have feature requests, and of course plenty of new design shortcuts that emerge in the process. What’s more, the usage data for the last release is showing great engagement and no one has complained yet about the shortcuts you took. Fixing those...

I recently downloaded ExactTarget’s 2014 State of Marketing, and found the data extremely compelling. Here’s what they had to say about methodology and respondents: The 2014 State of Marketing survey was conducted online from October 24, 2013, until November 1, 2013. The survey was sent to more than 48,000 marketing professionals and a total of 2,651 marketers started the survey, with 1,959 surveys completed (74% completion rate).

Interestingly, Moz’s own industry survey was sent around the...

Kenichi Suzuki notified me via Google+ that Google has updated the link schemes guideline page. Specifically making the widget links section more specific and less general...

It took me a while to get through Michael Pepi’s The Postmodernity of Big Data. It’s dense, and the premise seemed so far-fetched that I wasn’t sure it would be worth the time investment:

But beyond economic motivations for Big Data’s rise, are there also epistemological ones? Has Big Data come to try to fill the vacuum of certainty left by postmodernism? Does data science address the insecurities of the postmodern thought?

Yes, I know, that sounds like a bit of a stretch. But I’m...

Jeffrey Zeldman in a strong defense of web standards:

While many of us prefer to concentrate on design, content, and experience, it continues to be necessary to remind our work comrades (or inform younguns) about web standards, accessibility, and progressive enhancement. When a site like Facebook stops functioning when a script forgets to load, that is a failure of education and understanding, and all of us have a stake in reaching out to our fellow developers to make sure that, in...

I am seeing early signs of a possible Google update underway today. The WebmasterWorld thread started to get some chatter yesterday of people noticing shifts in the search results.

One WebmasterWorld senior member said, "Jez...

I’ve spent the last five years in the trenches writing, testing and optimizing copy for a multitude of clients in a wide variety of industries.

In this article I’ll give you what I consider to be the most effective and actionable tips for writing copy that has real impact on conversions.

If you want to become a better conversion copywriter in 2014 this one is for you!

1. Balance your creative and analytical sides

There is no doubt that the creative process of crafting copy and...

I recently switched from Reeder to Mr. Reader as my default RSS app on my iPad1. The main reason is that I wanted an easier workflow to post article snippets to my text editor so that I can either post it to the site, or come back to it later and expand more before posting. Mr. Reader allows for the creation of custom workflows, which makes this possible.

The ultimate article on using Mr. Reader’s custom workflows is Federico Viticci’s characteristically insightful Mr. Reader And The...