The Daily Report
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This year more than ever, Blue Beanie Day matters
AT FIRST GLANCE, November 2016 has bigger fish to fry than a small, cult holiday celebrated by web developers and designers. Each day since November 8, 2016 has brought new, and, to some of us,…
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Do Not Go Gentle into that iTunes Store
AT HOME, sick with a cold and bored, my daughter buys a single packet of “My School Dance” in a freemium iTunes game. The manufacturer charges her (well, charges me) for ten packets. This same…
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State of the Web: Evaluating Technology | Jeremy Keith
We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there’s more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…
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Val Head: Web Animation in the Design Process
Val Head spoke at An Event Apart San Francisco last week. Her session, Motion In Design Systems: Animation, Style Guides, and the Design Process, led us through everything designers and developers need to make web…
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Jason Grigsby on Design Beyond Touch
12 LESSONS from An Event Apart San Francisco – ? 4: Jason Grigsby was the 10th speaker at An Event Apart San Francisco last week. Jason’s session, Adapting to Input, presented designers and developers with…
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From climate change to Swedish hip hop
A few years ago, my Swedish friend Peyo cofounded a start-up that brought affordable solar power to rural villages in India—profoundly poor villages where, until that time, folks had relied on dirty gasoline-powered generators to…
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Solve the Right Problem: Derek Featherstone on designing for extremes
12 LESSONS from An Event Apart San Francisco – ? 3: Derek Featherstone was the 10th speaker at An Event Apart San Francisco, which ended Wednesday. His session, Extreme Design, showed how creating great experiences…
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Identify “stress cases” and design with compassion: Eric Meyer
12 LESSONS from An Event Apart San Francisco – ? 2: Eric Meyer was the 11th speaker at An Event Apart San Francisco, which ended Wednesday. His session, Compassionate Design, discussed the pain that can…
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Measure Customer Time, Not Organization Time: Gerry McGovern
We need to manage speed on the page, not just the speed of the page load. Manage the customer’s time on task. We won’t become customer-centric until we change our metrics—focusing on customers’ time to…
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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity
MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as…
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News of the World
OUR UBER DRIVER must be hard of hearing, because he plays his right-wing talk radio morning show LOUD. It’s not your erudite, intellectual morning show. It’s hosted by Morning Zoo-type personalities: braying, hyper-testicular fellows, as…
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Spotify to music subscribers: drop dead
Since at least 2010, subscribers to Spotify’s paid music service have asked the company to include the ability to sort playlists alphabetically in the desktop player. It’s the sort of drop-dead obvious feature that should…
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web…
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Speaking Most Clearly When Not Speaking At All
Writing brain and speaking brain verbalize differently for me, I have found. I’m considered a passable conference speaker, and, from friendly conversations to client meetings, I’m rarely at a loss for words. But the ideas…
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Sometimes a cigar is a penis
MANY NIGHTS I have these dreams where I lose my daughter while traveling. We’re about to board a flight, and suddenly she has vanished. In other parts of these same dreams, still traveling, I’m doing…