An IDEO team combined human design talent and machine learning to create Font Map, a tool for designers to compare and find similar fonts. This started with Google’s ~750 typefaces, but can scale to many more. Explore for yourself. More and more of my searches start and end in the Google ecosystem, including those short snippets results in …
Friday 5 — 4.14.2017
Facebook’s AI assistant, M, is now rolling out in Messenger with features like sticker, polls, and payment. While some are underwhelmed, others see this start with a limited number of functions as a step to broader AI capabilities. Poor usability affects everyone, but it disadvantages older adults in particular. This excerpt from a new book offers guidelines …
Friday 5 — 3.24.2017
YouTube has released an AI-powered emotion engine that helps video creators, aka influencers, understand which elements are most and least effective. YouFirst shows the video to a segment of the creator’s audience, uses facial recognition to identify the “power moments” that resonate, and can even tell you which groups of people enjoyed different parts of the content. Anyone remember when building …
Friday 5 — 3.10.2017
Luxury brands have not been early internet adopters — I can recall 1999 meetings with Neiman Marcus execs highly skeptical of the taint of technology. Today, brands are online en masse. Some craft a unique approach to user experience, while others contemplate direct sales via WhatsApp. There’s been endless analysis of the Snap IPO and its non-voting shares this past week. …
Friday 5 — 12.16.2016
Google released its 2016 year in search, with a pretty nifty user experience. Pokémon Go was the top term globally, but you can explore by type of search as well as other facets like geography and volume. Handy eye candy as the search engine comes under fire for some terrible fake news results. This week …
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 — 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 — 9.30.2016
Black, teal, and coral: those are your color options for Snap Inc.’s new product, Spectacles—sunglasses with a pair of cameras. Your questions about how to use them are answered here. Will this be the breakthrough wearable device? Ben Thompson concludes that our wearable future isn’t here, and it’s probably not even close. I’ve often wondered how content gets into …
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 — 2.13.2015
With the rise of sideways traffic via search and social, the homepage of a news site isn’t the single navigational portal it once was. Still, it’s an important brand asset, and defines organizing principles for content. Here are 64 ways to think about a news home page. Balancing being informed with staying productive isn’t easy. It requires effort …