People do use Add to Home Screen – Firefox UX
Oh no! My claim has been refuted by a rigourous scientific study of …checks notes… ten people.
Be right back: just need to chat with eleven people.
Link tags: cover
32
Open sourcing the Product Planning Prompt Pack
This is very generous of Anna! She has a deck of cards with questions she asks in product planning meetings. You can download the pack for free.
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
A century of sci-fi book covers.
Emily F. Gorcenski: Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection
Twitter is a chatroom, and the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.
Twitter, like many technology companies, fell into the classical trap by thinking that they, the technologists, were the innovators. Technologists today are almost never innovators, but rather plumbers who build pipelines to move ideas in the form of data back and forth with varying efficacy. Users are innovators, and its users that made Twitter unique.
Robin Rendle ･ Everything that books ought to be
I’m with Robin. Hardback books are infuriating, not least because of the ridiculous business model of only publishing hardback versions to begin with, and only releasing a paperback when you’ve lost all interest in reading the damn book.
marcus.io · Making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feedspage?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
Methods - 18F Methods
A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.
A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.
These methods are categorised by:
- Discover
- Decide
- Make
- Validate
- Fundamentals
WorldWideWeb coverage
Remy’s keeping a list of hyperlinks to stories covering our recent hack week at CERN.
Defining design principles at EMBL | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton
Mark describes the process he favours for creating (discovering?) design principles, like the ones for EMBL (I must remember to add those to the collection).
All you do is be mindful of when the team repeats design desires. This could be several members of the team say the same thing in a slightly different way, or that you keep circling around and around a problem but struggle to articulate it. By being mindful at all times to this a team can quickly pull together principles that are derived from doing the work on their particular problem rather than principles which are imposed on the work. An important difference.
How to Make Sense of Any Mess
Did you know that Abby Covert’s book is available online in its gloriously hyperlinked entirety?
PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet | Infrequently Noted
Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”
Chipmunks on 16 speed
This sounds genuinely good—Alvin and the Chipmunks slowed down to reveal their true ’90s post-punk goth-grunge nature.
It Takes a Village to Save a Hard Drive
An epic tale of data recovery.
Of course Jason Scott was involved.
Don’t Be Afraid To Teach Interactions by Timoni West
Timoni tackles the tricky topic of teaching taps.
Discoverability can be hard, but that shouldn’t stop us trying out new interactions.
Springboard – Coming soon from Clearleft
The latest Clearleft product will be like having an intensive set of discovery, collaboration, and exploration workshops in a box. Perfect for startups and other small businesses short on time or budget.
It starts in Spring but you can register your interest now.
Cover-Up’s open device lab
The guys at Cover Up are great: they make accessories for tablets and e-readers, so they have lots of those devices. They’ve made them all available for web developers to test on. Like I said: they’re great!
Bargain Bin Blasphemy
I think there might be some subliminal messages hidden in these album covers.
Fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner - a set on Flickr
Magazine covers created by Tom Southwell for background scenes in Blade Runner.
Galaxy Zoo and the new dawn of citizen science | Science | The Observer
A lovely piece of mainstream news reporting on Galaxy Zoo and the other Zooniverse projects, and the broader role of Citizen Science.
Song To The Siren by Salter Cane on Huffduffer
A cover version of a cover version: Salter Cane do This Mortal Coil doing Tim Buckley. All in one take.