Industry News

Kate Crawford wrote a very good critique of Big Data methods in The Hidden Biases in Big Data:

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

Kate uses some interesting examples from Hurrican...

Google announced on Google+ twice that you can now use an animated GIF for your profile photo. What does that mean? Google has told us that our authorship headshot has to be of some quality. We know that Google

Over the weekend there was some chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread of some shifts and changes in the Google rankings. Here are some comments from Webmasters...

Jordan Moore wrote a very level-headed post about giving users the ability to switch off the breakpoints of a responsive design to show the “desktop” site1 instead. From Claustrophobia:

This is my overriding concern — there’s no way out. There’s no way out of a bad design, an incompatible plugin, a browser bug, missing content, the endless list of potential issues someone could potentially encounter with a website whether it is responsive or not.

That’s an excellent point, and...

Today is one of the most celebrated days of the year for Christians, Easter Sunday. And while search engines like Bing and Ask.com have special themes up for Easter, Google has a logo for the birthday of Cesar Chavez...

Kenton Kivestu defines the difference between accuracy and precision, and then discusses what it means in the context of product decisions:

There is a significant opportunity cost in consistently prioritizing precision over accuracy. Accuracy is about launching what the market needs, precision is about optimizing and delivering relentlessly on it. Unless you’ve nailed the former, material effort on the latter is going to be wasted because you’re optimizing something too far from the true...

Flipboard 2.0 was just released for iOS, and with it came a feature called Flipboard Magazines. From the blog post announcing the new version:

For the first time, you can collect and save articles, photos, audio and video by organizing them into beautiful magazines. These can be private, or if you want to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, you can make them public and share them on Flipboard and beyond. Now everyone can be a reader and an editor.

I’ve been playing around with...

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...