On the final evening of its first week open to the public, the Amazon Go store still drew lines of eager customers. The lines were staffed by employees in orange parkas, who cheerfully engaged with shoppers and handed out high-quality, reusable bags. And the wait was short: no more than five minutes in the Seattle drizzle.
Friday 5 — 4.7.2017
YouTube TV has launched in select U.S. cities. Despite a relatively slim initial offering, the mobile-first sensibility and shared accounts seem designed to on-board millennials, and a way for the platform to build relationships with — and gather data on — its massive user base. In a world of specious and incomprehensible data visualization, this article pinpoints …
Friday 5 — 1.20.2017
Within a week, all Slack users will have threaded messaging, an improvement designed to reduce the noise of the non-hierarchical discussions. And they spent a lot of time getting the feature design just right. Only ~3% of apps still have active users 30 days after download. Brian Solis lists 25 ways micro-moments can lead to more useful …
Friday 5 — 12.23.2016
Do you have 49 other people you’d like to video chat with over the holidays? Facebook Messenger can help you out, with up to six people streamed simultaneously, and up to 50 in a carousel-style display. Remember the good old days when digital experience meant only an html webpage? Scott Brinker explains how digital proliferation — from …
Friday 5 — 12.9.2016
Is Snapchat’s somewhat impenetrable experience design a feature and not a bug? Josh Elman explains the difference between intuitive design and shareable design. The latter reflects the deeply social nature of how humans learn, and capitalizes on people’s desires to learn and to teach. Just when I finally mastered NYC’s Whole Foods color-coded checkout lines, Amazon Go opened in …
Friday 5 — 10.14.2016
Amazon is taking another swing at streaming music, but this time with Alexa as its not-so-secret weapon. Will the hardware that’s insinuating itself into our home lives (and turning our tots into tyrants) make the difference? Alexa’s already done a good job making Siri seem dumb. No one ever sits you down to teach you how …
Friday 5 — 3.11.2016
When are people on Facebook, Reddit, or Gmail? This data dive by Medium’s head of Product Science discovered that the times of day when people read tend to follow consistent patterns each week. Design thinking has been all the rage for a while. It’s one thing to understand the overall concept, and yet another to change an …
Friday 5 — 2.12.2016
How does content make it to the front page of Reddit? The Datastories team analyzed 4 million data points to find out. This article gives a number of practical pointers, including the value of posting images, and timing your posts for 9:00 am PST. I’m a little obsessed with my new Amazon Echo, an internet-connected speaker that lets me …
Friday 5 — 8.29.2014
It didn’t take long for Hyperlapse, a new, stand-alone app for time lapse videos, to reach the #3 spot in the app store. Created by the team at Instagram, the app has a sleek, simple user experience that belies the sophisticated capabilities under the hood. At right, my first attempt to magically speed up traffic in Harvard Square. …
Friday 5 — 6.20.2014
Email subscriptions can be pernicious — almost every online interaction bullies you into adding another. Try Unrollme to clean up your inbox by unsubscribing from the mail you never quite get around to reading. What will wearables mean for the workplace? Salesforce releases code libraries to inspire app development, with potential impact on both in-office productivity …