Link tags: discoverability

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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.

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.

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.

Hueniverse: Beginner’s Guide to Discovery – Part II: People vs. Machines

A great explanation of how open technologies like microformats and OpenID enable greater discovery of data.