I hope you spent a good bit of summer staring at the sun-soaked scenery rather than a screen. Product Hunt can catch you up on what you’ve missed, with the 44 most loved products of the summer. Try Duolingo Tinycards for learning made fun, Snappa for crafting great graphics easily, or Great Apps Timeline for a nostalgic look at popular …
Friday 5 — 8.19.2016
Google Duo, a clean, simple mobile video calling (and soon, audio calling) app launched this week to take on Facetime. The jury is still out whether its simplicity will carry the day, or it will become the latest failed Google social tool (Buzz, Wave, Plus). Here’s a UX secret that will ruin apps for you: artificial …
Friday 5 — 8.12.2016
Jasmine Friedl suggests how to make your not-so-great visual design better. More importantly, she shares the process that can help a designer get better: asking questions and guiding rather than issuing prescriptive statements. Connie Chan explains why stickers are more than just a frivolous gimmick: they are an emerging visual digital language. In messaging platforms like WeChat and Line, stickers …
Friday 5 — 8.5.2016
Consider optimizing your analytics implementation for more lightweight use cases — e.g., monitoring and reporting, rather than exploration and data mining . Alex Couch captures a frustration I’ve experienced with all kinds of software projects—a great deal of energy is expended designing for what might end up being the rarest and most involved use case, neglecting the lighter weight, most common use cases. …
Friday 5 — 7.29.2016
Nieman Lab shares insights about the progress and user adoption of Stela, the New York Times’ in-house analytics platform. As publishers adjust to living in a world of distributed content and to using analytics data to drive decisions, there’s value in more than aggregating the data: make it approachable, simple and fun to use. Make your buttons look like buttons. Nick …
Friday 5 — 7.22.2016
Keeping up this weekly newsletter relies heavily on a single Chrome extension, Pocket. Throughout the week, I use the productivity tool to capture the interesting articles that fly by and read through them all on Thursday evening. Product Hunt promises that these seven Chrome extensions will similarly change your internet life. AI is coming to marketing through capabilities as diverse as website design, …
Friday 5 — 7.15.2016
Pokémon fever struck this week with the release of Pokémon Go, an augmented reality app that allows players to catch virtual characters populating physical spaces. Here’s how it works. Om Malik points out that the app has heightened expectations for how we can access information, acting as a kind of gateway drug for broader applications of AR. …
Friday 5 — 7.8.2016
A case for using paper rather than a purely digital approach underpins this article on how to get the most value out of wireframes. The goal is to focus your energy — and your stakeholders’ attention — on providing feedback that is high-level and conceptual rather than aesthetic and over-specific. This insider’s guide to Google docs at work …
Friday 5 — 7.1.2016
This is the year I began to rely on voice commands in the same compulsive manner that we all reach for our mobile devices. Try this helpful catalog of over 150 questions and 1,000 variations you can ask Google. My favorite Easter egg: “askew.” Just when you thought it was safe to count on your distributed content strategy, Facebook tweaks the …
Friday 5 — 6.24.2016
Slack has launched Buttons to ensure you never leave, advancing the platform from a discrete messaging app to a productive work hub. Now you can pay back a colleague, resolve a tech alert, update a project management task all from within Slack, thanks to some new APIs.