Perry

Hewitt

Tag: mobile

Friday 5 — 11.28.2014
1. Technology surrounds us, but what do most internet users understand about it? A Pew survey on web and digital technology found that only 23% of adult users are aware that “the Internet” and “the World Wide Web” are not the same thing. And while 83% of those surveyed could correctly identify Bill Gates, fewer than half knew that Facebook started at Harvard. Take the quiz for yourself before you read the report.
2. I enjoyed this post reframing strategy as less of a blueprint, which was better suited to a predictable analog world, but more of an algorithm (rule) that helps you manage for exceptions. As digital marketers operate in an ever-changing mix of channels, tools, and audiences, it’s essential to rely less on a plan and more on an agile approach that enables flexible, distributed decision-making.
3. Twitter is launching a new feature called “app graph,” which tracks all of the apps a user has installed on their mobile device. The goal is to serve users more applicable suggestions for accounts to follow, and add relevant content (including better-targeted ads) to their feeds. Here’s how to disable it.
4. Alex Breuer gave a thoughtful interview on responsive design at the Guardian. The interview provides insights on ways mobile can influence editorial, the evolution of prototyping, and why speed is considered an integral component of design.
5. WhatsApp is emerging in some contexts as a major traffic driver for news sites — and the rise of messaging apps in the West ensures this trend will continue to grow. Site owners should start gathering data on messaging referrals, and evaluate when it’s time to add a button for WhatsApp sharing.
Weekend fun: Here are Richard Scarry’s Busy Town inhabitants cleverly re-imagined with modern-day professions, like “content aggregator” and “tech start up executive.” Beware the pathos casting of Lowly Worm.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
November 28, 2014
Friday 5 — 11.21.2014
1. Google is now clearly identifying mobile-friendly sites in its search results. While Google’s search algorithm remains a well-kept secret, it’s not a stretch to infer that sites that perform well on mobile will index better for its search.
2. Wasting time on Facebook at work is a popular pastime, even if you have to access it stealthily on your smartphone. Quartz reports on a new project called Facebook at Work. This would put Facebook head-to-head with LinkedIn for professional networking, and gain a foothold in the coveted productivity and collaboration space.
3. Planning and delivering effective client presentations isn’t as easy as it looks. Watch out for these 13 ways designers can screw them up.
4. Early Twitter adopters beware: now you can search every tweet ever sent. The demise of many popular link shorteners means you may not, however, be able to follow all those links.
5. Although Wikipedia remains the 6th largest site on the internet, a daunting bureaucratic culture around the rules make it a black box for prospective contributors. Communications professionals are particularly flummoxed on what’s fair game and what’s not — this free ebook aims to change all that.
Weekend fun: A book on computer engineer Barbie, who used her subpar coding skills to make cute puppies, was not Mattel’s finest hour. However, the responses brought out the best of the internet.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
November 21, 2014
Friday 5 — 10.31.2014
1. Benedict Evans demonstrates how mobile is eating the world. It’s worth reading for the astonishing growth metrics, like 80% of all adults in the world owning smartphones by 2020. One larger point is that tech is rapidly moving beyond the tech sector to transform all industries. And for now, that starts mobile first.
2. Product managers are critical in the software industry — and this discipline is spreading as every company develops a software capability. We need more ways to educate people into becoming product managers, as well as to provide ongoing professional development opportunities.
3. Reddit added a crowdfunding capability to allow community members to raise money and support causes they care about. Already an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, Redddit is expanding the suite of services that keep community members happy and engaged on the site.
4. Google now surfaces a sitelinks search box to branded search results — a box that allows you to search a website directly from the Google results page. Here’s how you can disable it.
5. MOOC 1.0 has emerged from its first hype cycle a little worse for wear. How can we ensure that next generation MOOCs will deliver effective and compelling online learning? Here’s a great roundup of lessons to be learned from other online experiences from commerce to social networking.
Weekend fun: Dancing with drones? Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 31, 2014
How to lead a responsive web design

Web thought leaders and authors Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte now publish a popular responsive web design podcast. Each episode features an interview with the people who make responsive redesigns happen, and covers the various complexities from change management and organizational readiness to design optimization and monetizing mobile.

You can see my interview here, which talks about the current content strategy shift toward mobile, and a recent responsive redesign at Harvard.

October 14, 2014
Friday 5 — 9.19.2014
1. Facebook is updating its News Feed, again. This set of changes focuses on putting more weight on trending topics, so your feed reflects more discussion of what’s going on right now. Now the recency of the likes and comments on posts will matter more, perhaps reducing the frequency of those odd moments when a friend’s heavily-liked wedding post resurfaces in your feed as they’re celebrating their third anniversary.
2. Compared with the emphasis most organizations put on growing a house email list, it’s surprising how little effort is spent to re-engaging those subscribers when open and click rates falter. Here are some tips on how to clean and re-engage your list.
3. Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik makes a compelling case for better mobile site analytics (and throws in some fighting words about responsive web design for good measure). If you are working with Google Analytics to measure mobile, his comprehensive post provides useful examples from implementing Google Tag Manager to advanced Cross-Device Tracking.
4. Wired delivers with 15 insanely great tricks to master Apple’s iOS 8. Word to the wise: don’t make your first trick downloading iOS 8 on your iPhone 4S.
5. That said, there are some clear advantages to downloading iOS 8 on a newer device. Do you spend too much time swiping through your emoji keyboard to craft a perfect, visual response? Then, you might need Keymoji, a downloadable keyboard that converts your text into emojis as you type.
Weekend fun: Tough week? Nervous about going long on today’s Alibaba IPO? Go ahead: watch some puppies playing with a GoPro.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
September 19, 2014
Friday 5 — 8.22.2014
1. Brands are active on social networks to reach engaged audiences, and the networks are finding creative ways to monetize their involvement. SoundCloud this week announced a new advertising platform, just as Instagram rolled out its analytics tools for brands. Both SoundCloud and Instagram have afforded brands huge organic growth; the challenge will be to offer them new business tools without alienating individual users.
2. We’re all suffering from The Stream, a deceptively gentle term for the firehose of ideas and links aimed at us every day by well-meaning friends, colleagues, and social network connections. Can radical scarcity improve quality? That’s the premise behind This., a social network incubated at the Atlantic which allows users to share a single link each day.
3. Twitter is addressing onboarding issues to make the platform more compelling, but both the 140 character limit and a longstanding, insider-y community can mean that new users encounter daunting jargon. If you’re struggling to tell your RT from your MT, here’s an illustrated guide just for you.
4. Launching a digital project can be like pulling the thread on a sweater — the more the new site/app/service makes possible, the more internal processes get disrupted and ideas get awakened. In a newly-launched responsive design podcast, Miranda Mulligan of the Boston Globe describes the politics between the newsroom and the design team, and how responsive design brought them together.
5. In far too many organizations, potentially transformative digital and social strategy is outsourced to agencies or relegated to interns. Or at least, it’s reliably blamed on the interns when it all goes horribly wrong.
Weekend fun: Take your pick: you can watch a fascinating brief look at texting and the internet in film, or while away the hours with Serendipity, a gorgeous visualization of songs played simultaneously on Spotify.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
August 22, 2014
Friday 5 — 8.1.2014
1. In less than a year Product Hunt has become an essential daily ritual for the tech obsessed. How did it get there? It identified a clear problem: “Help me find the latest new, cool things.”Then the team made a bunch of smart decisions, including launching with an early, buggy version (and improving from there!), starting a consistent, daily email driving users to the site, and conducting initial personal outreach to build the community. Read more about Product Hunt’s first year.
2. Productivity apps help you demolish your to-do list, and manage/filter information overload. Increasingly, users are starting off with mobile apps, but the real benefit emerges when the apps work across multiple screens. Supporting mobile and desktop pays off — these connected-everywhere apps drive wider distribution, and create a stickiness that promotes retention by increasing the switching cost.
3. When people picture a hot startup, they generally have in mind the latest consumer-facing technology. But developers (and their lagging indicator, VCs) are discovering enterprise tech is back in vogue: it’s a large market opportunity with a pressing need for growth and change. So maybe now it’s cool to be boring.
4. Here’s one theory why responsive design can’t be your only mobile strategy. While there’s no easy way to discuss mobile without invoking well-trodden holy wars (“can we ever say above the mobile fold?” ) there are a few good points here about cell network latency, the need for speed, and the importance of testing on actual devices.
5. As more organizations recognize and formalize the need for content strategy, how do you explain and demystify the terms of art? The content strategy term of the week has you covered: start with taxonomy.
Weekend fun: Executives at Yahoo probably lie awake nights thinking of ways to make their products and services better. You know what would vastly improve Yahoo Answers? Audra McDonald singing them, that’s what.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
August 1, 2014
Friday 5 — 7.25.2014
1. The New Yorker has updated its web presence to take advantage of the internet’s love affair with quality, longform reads. The mobile design gets it right, with smooth interactive elements like a fly-in hamburger menu. This Guardian review credits the re-design for avoiding looking “like a middle-aged man dropping the ends of his words in an attempt to be down with the kids.” One quibble: given that their goal was to increase readership, I’m surprised they buried their email signup at the bottom of the page. But the best news of all? The archives since 2007 are free for three months, so dig in.
2. The most important product design work is usually the ugliest, according to this Intercom post on The Dribblisation of Design that kicked up a kerfuffle online a while ago. It’s still a good summary of why the most interesting part of design is not the PSD, but the problem-solving.
3. Remember back when Facebook was going to die because they were too old and uncool to get mobile? Yeah, me neither. Now they’re making money, handheld over fist.
4. Reddit launched a new Live feature for unfolding news to better serve and reflect the high activity on the site when news breaks. The updated format makes the story easier to follow, and allows users to add content without starting a new thread and fragmenting the conversation.
5. Should you buy an Amazon Fire phone? Unless you’re an Amazon-loving, domestic-only-traveling, early-adopter type who adores AT&T, Engadget suggests you hold off.
Weekend fun: Emoji karaoke is a thing, and the folks who came up with the one below are undisputed masters. Read more via Nate Matias, and try it yourself.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
July 25, 2014
Friday 5 — 6.20.2014
1. 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.
2. What will wearables mean for the workplace? Salesforce releases code libraries to inspire app development, with potential impact on both in-office productivity and lifestyle/fitness.
3. Content management systems and their admin interfaces aren’t usually the sexiest of web topics. But this comes close: the Nieman Lab’s look under the hood at the New York Times’ CMS.
4. Amazon this week launched its long-rumored Amazon Fire Phone. Of note: multiple front-facing cameras to offer 3D perspective and Firefly, which enables you to scan products for additional information. The phones ship next month on AT&T at $199 (32GB) and $299 (64GB) price points.
5. A step-by-step look at Twitter’s cumbersome signup process shows why the company is struggling to grow. But on the bright side, Twitter finally supports GIFs to add a little fun to your timeline.
Weekend fun: OK, Jon Stewart! The Daily Show takes down Google Glass in inimitable style. Fear not: no Glassholes were harmed in the filming of the segment.

Heads up: Friday 5 is taking a break next week to celebrate the World Cup, and resumes on the 4th of July.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 19, 2014
5 ways Google delivers winning World Cup results
If you can’t watch every game live, you may be spending a lot of time surreptitiously tuning into the World Cup via search. Google serves up a clean, selective summary on the search results page above the organic news and web links. A search today for “France World Cup” yielded the interface below on desktop view:
1. The desktop view directs the eye to a visual view of current game score, with flags as the focal point. The timeline defaults to “Matches” tab with “Standings” tab accessible.
2. The interface offers relevant but limited additional information, like a reminder of the Group, and of other France matches.
3. There is selective use of color (‘Live 9’ in green) so you can see the game’s progress at a glance.
4. The sidebar brings in visual and text content from the Wikipedia entry, with general team information and roster.
5. The mobile view offers slightly different navigation. On mobile, the result omits the Wikipedia entry up top in favor of showing the roster via “Lineups”, and defaults to “Timeline” during the game. The scrollable interface highlights the great use of icons for elements like yellow cards, penalties, and own goals. As with the desktop view, playable video clips are prominent.
So many sports sites and television interfaces — for reasons that include both ad revenue needs and poor design choices — succumb to confusing, poorly differentiated visual clutter. Google’s clean interface does a solid job of serving up status and context at a glance for the World Cup obsessed.
June 15, 2014