The microcopy in a user interface — the words that go on the buttons, appear in error messages, and guide you through wizards — is too often neglected or left for the developer to fill in. Nick Babich provides guidance on effective writing for your user interface. No more shopping for snake oil: the best search …
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 — 7.1.2016
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 — 4.29.2016
Product Hunt delivers nine tools and resources that tell you everything you wanted to know about Snapchat but were afraid to ask. These tips may prevent your head from exploding when you try to understand Snapchat’s user interface. New axiom: Anything can be GIFed, will be GIFed — thanks to this new tool from Giphy. Is it …
6 ways to create findable, useful website content
Search engine optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and increasingly, paid social media placement can achieve remarkable results. Using smart keywords and accessing segmented, up-to-date user data troves like Facebook’s can produce the kinds of attention that drive revenue, and occasionally even “go viral”. But sometimes these tools lead people to believe they can omit the first, essential step: creating …
Friday 5 — 7.31.2015
Optimizing your business for local search starts with working through the fundamentals. Brush up on your tactics with the ultimate guide to local SEO ranking. Looks matter. An experiment revealed that news site homepages get more pageviews and user engagement when they have contemporary image-rich and modular layouts. Modular pages have discrete blocks of customizable and portable content, …
Friday 5 — 2.27.2015
Medium has expanded it focus from elegantly formatted longform content to dive headlong into the stream. Now users land on a page featuring an open, simpler editor up top, which lowers the barrier to entry and ideally attracts more users. Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are often presented as competing rather than complementary disciplines. Here’s …