Having lived through 1990s website with visit counting tickertapes and dancing babies, and then the 2000s with endless moving carousels, I’m skeptical of movement for movement’s sake. But Nick Babich explains three valid use cases for animation in mobile user interface design. If your email open rates are flagging, consider using emojis. New research finds that …
Friday 5 — 2.24.2017
Amazon celebrated Alexa reaching 10,000 skills with a new musical game called Beat the Intro. The fast rise of Alexa skills invokes the inevitable comparison to Apple’s app store, and with it the associated growing pains of discovery. Is that really Michael Flynn on Twitter? Before you retweet or reply, take these steps to determine if a Twitter account is legit. How do leaders make the …
Friday 5 — 1.20.2017
Within a week, all Slack users will have threaded messaging, an improvement designed to reduce the noise of the non-hierarchical discussions. And they spent a lot of time getting the feature design just right. Only ~3% of apps still have active users 30 days after download. Brian Solis lists 25 ways micro-moments can lead to more useful …
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 — 10.28.2016
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 — 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 — 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.
Friday 5 — 3.4.2016
My mild obsession with work hacks is gratified by this list of 32 of the best productivity tools. I’ve also observed that my habits have changed over time — I use overarching to-do and project management apps like Evernote less, and little tools like Momentum more. When might it make sense to have a digital alter ego rather than …
Friday 5 — 2.19.2016
Can’t find the right words for your tweet? GIF search is rolling out to Twitter users for both tweets and direct messages. Giphy’s new $55M funding round seems to confirm that GIFs are taking over the world. In mid-April, Facebook will open up Instant Articles, a format that loads articles within the app more quickly than traditional links, to all …
Friday 5 — 1.15.2016
Mobile apps versus native web is a false dichotomy, per Luke Wroblewski. Brands need both: the former offers rich experiences, while the latter provides greater reach (including in-app browser views). We have a longstanding, love-hate relationship with email, where gratifying immediacy for the sender often means notification hell for the recipient. The Atlantic explains how we got here, why email …