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 — 1.6.2017
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 — 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 — 10.21.2016
The Harvard Business Review launched a Slack bot to deliver insights from more than 200 best-practice articles, neatly chunked into do’s and don’ts (an editorial feat I don’t envy.) The bot will send you daily articles, and serves up related case and article links. What are the ethics around creating ever more addictive new digital experiences? The Atlantic explores …
Friday 5 — 12.4.2015
Nike shoes, Star Wars droids, and hoverboards were among the popular products shopped for on Black Friday. If you were shopping from the comfort of your couch, you were in good company: Smartphone sales nearly doubled year over year, from 9.1% to 15.2 %. Read the full report PDF, and ignore Wired’s snark that Cyber …
Friday 5 — 12.5.2014
We’re all producing more video, but who’s watching? Unlike written content, where a strong open may draw a reader in, there is a divide between those who press play on a video, and those who don’t. This post suggests that video consumption may not be evenly distributed across your audience — and you may have a very specific segment that forms …
Friday 5 — 3.28.2014
This week, Facebook acquired virtual reality purveyor Oculus Rift for $2B in cash and stock. This purchase gives the social networking company, which was only two years ago struggling to get its arms around mobile, a leg up in virtual reality hardware. What will they use it for? Gaming’s an obvious first use case, but …