John Maeda and team released the 2017 Design in Tech report. Observations include lessons from Chinese design tech principles and practices; the value of inclusive design; and writing as a must-have skill. The early promise of social media as proxy for inclination to purchase has not been realized. HBR explores the marketing value of social media, and highlights …
Friday 5 — 1.6.2017
Paul Ford gave online donations to 33 charities, and you won’t believe what happened next. Actually, you would — he found a number of opportunities to improve the user experience in online giving. The headlines remind us that artificial intelligence is coming, and we’re all at risk of losing our jobs to the machines. Consider these four factors …
Friday 5 — 11.4.2016
LinkedIn is putting user data to work with a new Salary tool, now included with Premium membership. LinkedIn Salary provides filters like industry, location, and title, as well additional compensation elements like signing bonus. If you’re convinced you’re underpaid, use this newfound information symmetry to make the case. Harvard Business School profs figured out why you dropped your iPhone 6 in the toilet the week …
Friday 5 — 10.7.2016
Chatbots still have a long way to go, but Duolingo has identified a great application: bots for language learning. You might be embarrassed to try a new French word with a colleague, but a robot won’t judge. Not yet, anyway. A recent release of the Facebook Messenger app has enabled end-to-end encryption, which is a fancy way …
Friday 5 — 3.25.2016
Scott Brinker has released the 2016 marketing technology landscape diagram, mapping 3,874 solutions into six capability categories (shows above). The slide shows that “one platform to rule them all” has not yet emerged — middleware is enabling greater integration among them. When building a digital product, it’s easy for teams from marketing to development to get atomized and …
Friday 5 — 9.18.2015
A survey of >4,000 designers revealed the most commonly used design tools, from brainstorming to wireframing to project management. As a big user of different project management platforms, I found it interesting to see the fragmentation of the market. In a similarly complicated arena, Growthverse is an interactive visualization of marketing technologies, a tool for marketers who have a …
Friday 5 — 5.1.2015
Facebook is up to 4 billion daily video viewers, and some think it may unseat YouTube as the go-to video destination. Not much of a present for YouTube’s 10th birthday. Instead of bucketing content referrals by each social network, BuzzFeed launched a new technology to track content shares across social networks. Dubbed Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion …
Friday 5 — 1.30.2015
Snapchat aims to become a force in mobile news with this week’s launch of Snapchat Discover. Here are some tips on how to use it. If you’re like 82% of people, you have forgotten a password for a website. Luke Wroblewski has a thoughtful piece on password masking, security, and our one-touch future. Because we’re …
Friday 5 — 10.17.2014
Twitter has enabled streaming audio to a limited number of partners via Audio Cards using Soundcloud. Now users can listen, like and share audio content on SoundCloud without leaving Twitter. This feature will be big for music, and useful for finding new audiences for public radio programming. Audio excerpts might also serve up interesting teasers for online learning content. With …
Friday 5 — 9.5.2014
Wondering why your iPhone app was rejected from the app store? Apple has revealed the top 10 reasons that submitted apps don’t make the cut. Placeholder copy is among the offenders, which provides good fodder for longtime foes of Lorem Ipsum. A common first step toward finding out what your website users value is to …