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 — 8.5.2016
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 — 7.22.2016
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 — 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 — 5.27.2016
Friday 5 is taking a break to go peer at people’s internet-enabled devices in 三门峡 and 西安 — neither of which I can pronounce, but Wikipedia can teach you. Back in time for Lionel Messi’s birthday, Friday, June 24. This UX reality check presents 14 hard truths about users. Most common mistakes I’ve seen (and committed) are ignoring the fact that …
Friday 5 — 5.20.2016
Bots won’t replace apps, better apps will. Read the entire post for insights on the limitations of the conversational user interface, including too many taps and lingering skeuomorphism in chat interaction design. 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound, which is why you’ll find savvy organizations posting videos like this, this, or this — all tell a compelling story with the audio …
Friday 5 — 5.13.2016
Findings from Artefact’s recent design maturity survey indicate that your chief design officer is not your savior. Other tactics, like training cross-disciplinary teams in design thinking, may have more impact than a single, high-profile hire. There’s not a lot I love more than a good digital playbook, and NYC has just released theirs. The interface is a little dramatic …
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 …