Industry News

In The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill Philip Battin applies some existing ideas around progressive disclosure and Flow to tech gadgets:

User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account. But they could. Here, I present a model for how designers can use the fundamentals of video games and the psychological principles of flow to design enhanced user...

Hey, it’s time to argue about hashtags again! The Internet got all revved up about it this week when Daniel Victor published Hashtags considered #harmful:

In most searches, the quantity of tweets is overwhelming and the quality underwhelming. It’s worth questioning how many users find hashtag searches useful, but it’s hard to know, since Twitter doesn’t provide such data.

He goes on to make the argument that most blog posts and tweets about the article focused on:

I believe...

Mitch Lasky wrote a very interesting analysis of the gaming industry’s move from packaged goods to digital goods. From EA and the Future:

In my experience, the incumbent packaged goods companies clearly see mobile, digital distribution and free-to-play models as inevitable. They know what’s coming and have known for some time. But within the senior management ranks of these companies there is still a lingering perception that digital doesn’t, in their words, “move the needle”...

In How the internet is making us poor Christopher Mims asks a chilling question about what he calls the “hollowing out of the middle class” — the phenomenon where knowledge workers are being replaced by computers:

Like farming and factory work before it, the labors of the mind are being colonized by devices and systems. In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now...

I originally wrote the following article 6 years ago, and it was published on Search Engine Land on February 9th, 2007. At the time, I wasn’t sure if we would ever see Google find a way to meld together ranking signals from PageRank and Information Retrieval with relevance signals from authors and publishers and commentators [...]

The post Google’s Agent Rank / Author Rank Patent Filing appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

News publications having “sponsored content “deals are on the rise, and Google’s apparently concerned enough that it’s issued a warning today that publishers should keep such content out of Google News.

In a post today on the Google News blog, the company writes: If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it...

Last month, an excerpt from Eric Schmidt’s forthcoming book came out where he discussed how identity and authorship might be used to better rank search results. Since then, I’ve seen that widely cited as proof Google is already doing “Author Rank.” It’s not, nor was Schmidt describing a Google-specific system. But that could come, and Google’s existing authorship program may be a part of it. Schmidt On Potential Future Of Profiles & Ranking

The excerpt came from the Wall Street Journal,...

I've known Dianna Huff since at least 2007, but she's been helping B2B companies get their websites in good order since 1998. From the best way to market your content via mobile devices to how to write content that appeals to a B2B target audience, Dianna has got it nailed down.

Our beloved industry is pretty wary of buzz words. And by “our industry” I mean User Experience Designers — although we can’t even agree on what to call ourselves, so that’s another problem, I guess. Anyway. Debates over terms like skeuomorphism, flat design, and “No UI” have given us a strong skepticism for fancy words. That’s mostly refreshing, but it can also be a handicap if we end up dismissing valuable ideas because we don’t like the terms that describe those ideas.

I would argue that...