Visual content is everywhere, and measurement and optimization are starting to catch up. Netflix already knows which pictures you’ll click on and why, and blogged some lessons learned — including the value of regional nuance, and of recognizable, polarizing characters. As a travel geek, I loved this compilation of 16 apps that will help you travel the world. Some …
Friday 5 — 3.25.2016
Scott Brinker has released the 2016 marketing technology landscape diagram, mapping 3,874 solutions into six capability categories (shows above). The slide shows that “one platform to rule them all” has not yet emerged — middleware is enabling greater integration among them. When building a digital product, it’s easy for teams from marketing to development to get atomized and …
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 — 11.20.2015
Google just made a big improvement to finding in-app content on mobile. On Android devices, Google will now launch the app if you have it installed, or stream the content to you if you don’t. This is an important step forward in a world where 50% of all online time — not just mobile time — is spent in-app. …
Friday 5 — 11.13.2015
Who are your top 9 — the people who appear in that mysterious box on your Facebook profile page? Turns out it’s not the people whom you stalk (or who stalk you). Instead, Facebook’s algorithm displays these people on your profile page as subtle encouragement for you to interact with them. Benedict Evans has a new post on mobile as the …
Friday 5 — 8.21.2015
A new report from Pew delves into mobile messaging for the first time, and updates social media trends. Mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat continue to grow, with 49% adoption among 18-29 year old internet users. Also of note: 59% of Instagram users reported using the app daily,and 35% several times per day. Giphy doubles down on its bet that GIFs will …
Friday 5 — 8.7.2015
Smaller color palettes, large fonts, and meaningful microinteractions are among the trends highlighted in this article on the current state of mobile UI/UX. A recent Pew report highlights ways video games, social media, and mobile phones play a role in teens’ friendships. Interesting findings include: Boys are more likely than girls to make online friends: 61% of boys …
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 — 6.12.15
Cancel all your meetings today and read: “What is code?“ Finished with item number 1? Then turn your attention to the Nieman Lab’s elegant explanation of Apple’s news initiatives announced this week at WWDC. Here’s why we should stop designing for millennials as if they were an entirely homogeneous generation, alien to the ones that preceded it. Instead, …
Friday 5 — 4.24.2015
If you are responsible for a high-volume brand homepage, be sure to read this Nieman Lab take on the Atlantic re-design. I particularly like this framing from Bob Cohn: “In an age of social traffic, a homepage is less about traffic triage — directing lots of direct visitors to the content of their choice — than …