Responsive design

Funny pic. But it does raise a relevant question; how many devices do you test your website out on?

The short answer is 3: mobile, tablet, and desktop. Go for 320px, 768px, 1024px and adjust screen size by percentage for a fluid responsive layout.

But, if you're a company like The New York Times or Wordpress, then you'll be testing your service across every device out there.

Draw your own videogames

Pixel Press - Pre-Release Gameplay Footage November 2013 from Pixel Press on Vimeo.

Really awesome app that lets you draw and design your own videogames.

More here: http://projectpixelpress.com/product/sketch-kit/

Youtube user experience fails

In this fantastic video from YouTube user NanoBite, titled YouTube is a Completely Functional Site Programmed by Competent People, the latest interface design is picked apart and revealed to show some pretty fundamental flaws in the user experience design.

What's great about this video is that it runs like the highlights reel from a usability testing session and shows you exactly the type of thing that happens when those that build an online service get so comfortable with using it that they forget to think of their users who may not know all the intricacies of the design.

Microsoft Viral Search

What does it mean for online content to “go viral”? An analysis of almost a billion information cascades on Twitter news, videos, and photos has produced the first quantitative notion of whether something has indeed gone viral, thereby enabling further research into topic experts, trending topics, and viral-incident metrics.



Read more at Information Aesthetics.

Automated Storytelling

We live in the era of Big Data. Never in modern human history have companies and individuals had more (and more complex and reliable) numbers, statistics, and metrics at their disposal: from box scores to earnings reports to housing prices to placement-test results, we are at sea in an ocean of numbers and awash in spreadsheets. As artificial-intelligence pioneer Kris Hammond explains in this film, the great challenge in the Big Data era is understanding the stories those numbers tell and, just as important, connecting the right people with the right stories.



“This is what Hammond and his company, Narrative Science, do: create fluidly written, micro-targeted news stories from massive amounts of raw data—and do it hundreds of thousands of times, and slightly differently for each reader or listener. The recipient could be a fast-food franchisee seeking to understand what menu item sells best at what moment of the day, at what time of year, even in what weather, so he can optimize point-of-sale strategies. “

“Our entire job,” says Hammond, “is to humanize data. It is to be a communication bridge between the numbers and the knowing.”

Read more on the Future of Storytelling.

Sorry, that username is already taken

That classic online problem; finding a username that's both memorable and not already been taken.

This is a fantastic collection of (often hilarious and ridiculous) user names that have already been taken.

sorrythatusernameisalreadytaken.tumblr.com

Reinventing Payphones

Reinventing Payphones - NYC I/O: The Responsive City

There are 11,412 pay phones in New York City that are almost never used.

So what happens when New York City runs a competition to redesign them into something practical and that uses modern technology?

This is Control Group's winning entry.

UX is not UI

Interesting 'infographic' from Erik Flowers on the common misconception that being classed as a User Experience Designer can be incorrectly understood as someone who focusses just on user interface design. The interface is not the solution and a good user experience does not stem directly from a good user interface, there are many more factors involved (as illustrated below).

Music in 2012

This panel from a 1972 Archie comic about music in the 'future' of 2012 is excellent.

Globaia - The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene = "A period marked by a regime change in the activity of industrial societies which began at the turn of the nineteenth century and which has caused global disruptions in the Earth System on a scale unprecedented in human history: climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution of the sea, land and air, resources depredation, land cover denudation, radical transformation of the ecumene, among others. These changes command a major realignment of our consciousness and worldviews, and call for different ways to inhabit the Earth."

This video is an illustration of map experiments that demonstrate the Anthtopocene, and it shows several features of our global civilization: cities, built environment, transmission lines, pipelines, main paved and unpaved roads and railways.



This is essentially really intense mapping, but once you've got your head around the rather weighty text introduction (after the link), the true scale and meaning behind it will blow your mind.

via Globaia

The access code from hell

Creating yet another password for yet another new website is already a years old problem. Most people tend to go for the less secure option which is either numerical variants on the same password, or just stick with the same one for several similar websites. We've all got our own methods, and since it's not something that is taught to users, it is learnt organically and by trial and error.

"Through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess."

This is because password length matters so much that a random string of English words is actually more secure than a shorter password that follows the stupid rules of containing at least one number and one upper-case letter.

Either way, think you've got a secure password to your online accounts? Think again..

Data locks out the rest of the Enterprise crew by imitating Picard, and entering the ACCESS CODE FROM HELL!

Connecting

Excellent documentary on how the relationship with digital devices and human interaction is merging to the point that our devices fade into the background and enable the user rather than interrupt them. Interaction design is now about providing a platform for the user to mould and shape into something they find useful.

The 18 minute "Connecting" documentary is an exploration of the future of Interaction Design and User Experience from some of the industry's thought leaders. As the role of software is catapulting forward, Interaction Design is seen to be not only increasing in importance dramatically, but also expected to play a leading role in shaping the coming "Internet of things." Ultimately, when the digital and physical worlds become one, humans along with technology are potentially on the path to becoming a "super organism" capable of influencing and enabling a broad spectrum of new behaviors in the world.

Connecting (Full Film) from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.

OrgOrgChart – the evolution of a company’s structure over time, visualized.



The OrgOrgChart (Organic Organization Chart) project looks at the evolution of a company's structure over time. A snapshot of the Autodesk organizational hierarchy was taken each day between May 2007 and June 2011, a span of 1498 days.

Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm.

From day to day, there are three types of changes that are possible:
- Employees join the company
- Employees leave the company
- Employees change managers


Read more here

How Bad Online Shopping Experiences Look Like In Real Life

Google Analytics has produced a trio of excellent videos to help E-commerce sites improve their customer service by pointing out what not to do.

By putting the common mistakes and bad practices that online merchants make into a real life shop, the videos show how alienating bad user experience design and marketing can be for potential customers by ruining the experience of shopping online.

For instance, one of the videos highlights how frustrating it can be to check out online when there are too many security measures and hidden costs for customers to get through.







via Google Analytics

A map of the universe

A map of the universe by René Descartes from Principia philosophiae, 1644, one of many fascinating depictions in the visual history of mapping the cosmos.

Read more over on Brain Pickings.

In politics, the era of big data has arrived

This is a really interesting article from Time about the quantitative data analysis that was carried out to ensure that Obama won the 2012 election.

It explores a previously secret department of Obama's campaign team that was tasked with number crunching on a phenomenal scale. By first merging all the data sets the campaign team had on Obama's voters (a task which took 18 months) they were then able to create models of Obama's potential voters, see what type of person was likely to donate to the campaign, assess when was the best time to screen campaign ads on the television, and even simulate the election night to see where they had to spend their budget to increase their chances.

On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.

Read the whole article here: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

Understanding star ratings

Slightly snarky but pretty accurate cartoon on how star ratings are compiled online.

via XKCD

Doing stuff

VW - The Original Click

VW Auto parts have found an innovative way to use YouTube to get people thinking that there’s something wrong with alternative part suppliers; that imitations are poor quality.

Advertising people on advertising

Great series of shorts on what advertising people think about advertising. 1/3 of agency workers plan on leaving this year, and these are a series of promos by Deutsch LA's talk at Cannes this year on Ending the Agency Talent Rotisserie.


What creatives think




What producers think




What account people think