Lately, at work, within our department we’ve been discussing company culture. A while back, we read Delivering Happiness, the book by Tony Hsieh about the history of the company and culture of Zappos. A few months ago, a Googler accidentally posted an internal memo on Google+ that showed the world a lot about Google culture, especially with the fact that it was allowed to be left public and did not receive any negative repercussions (as far as we know). We’ve also been mulling over the Netflix culture presentation over the last few weeks. I love what I do and where I work, especially the team I work with and the department I work in. I’m always encouraged with a discussion about how we can improve workplace culture, so I was very interested to dive into a study of workplace culture and how the corporate presentation of culture and actual practice line up.
Instagram and Android, Together at Last!
Via an Androinica article, I just found out that Instagram is finally available for the Android OS. So now, finally, all of us Android users can find out what you iPhone users have been raving about for years. I guess because of the history of Instagram-like apps in the Google Play store, the actual Instagram app doesn’t show up in the first two app results when you do a search for Instagram. I gave up browsing through the 494 app results and went back to the original article, which conveniently had a link to download Instagram for Android from the Google Play store.
Having not used Instagram before, I found the installation and setup simple and following iPhone users I know who have Instagram accounts to be an easy process. Having used a couple of Instagram-like apps for Android, my favorites being Camera ZOOM FX and Pixlr-o-matic, I have a suspicion (based on what I’ve read so far) that the camera and filter features aren’t necessarily better than other camera apps, but the Instagram community is what makes the app so successful.
I wanted to use Google Chrome to create this post, but I had to use Safari
I started using a MacBook Pro a few months ago and haven’t had many issues with the transition. I’m finally getting used to the differences in how the operating system works and all the differences that you find out about as you go. Overall, it has been a good experience with the exception of all of the problems I have had with fonts. I have a font manager installed with way too many fonts and so I’ve been trying to pare them down to something more usable, but keep running into issues.
WordPress Font Messed Up in Google Chrome on Mac
The first issue I had was with the Arial font. It was installed, but not active (or something like that) and so sites using the Arial font ended up showing a serif font instead. As a web developer, it was a little frustrating, but wasn’t a great hindrance to browsing or productivity, however. After playing with the font manager for a while, I finally got Arial to show up.
The Science of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea at #SXSW2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #Dangerous #SXDangerous
by Ben McAllister (Assoc Creative Dir – frog design)
Research is about informing decisions.
“The Research” – the data doesn’t speak for itself. Someone should interpret it.
The Science of Certainty vs. The Science of Wonder
Scientism vs. Science
The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty by William Byers
Different kinds of research are very different from each other, there is a broad spectrum.
Hard sciences have laws that predict things with a large degree of certainty.
Social Sciences have experiments.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have “looking at stuff”. In design, we don’t do a lot of real scientific studies.
Cargo Cult Science – Richard Feynman’s Commencement Speech at CalTech
Don’t Build a Power Glove: Talk to Your Users at #SXSW2012
Monday, March 12, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX
by RJ Owen (Lead Experience Planner – EffectiveUI)
The Power Glove was a video game controller made by Mattel in 1989. It was the first wearable video game controller. The glove had lots of buttons and options in addition
Nintendo released two games with the Power Glove, including Super Glove Ball.
Marketing for the PowerGlove focused on immersion in the game. PowerGlove has captured the mind of the American public. It was even on Stephen Colbert recently. Even though it was really cool. It was a commercial failure.
The PowerGlove was
- rated the 7th worst video game controller of all time
- sold $88M US (failure)
- japanese producer declared bankruptcy
It was so bad that people are still complaining about it today.
Bill Buxton – data design
Create More Value Than You Capture at #SXSW2012
Monday, March 12, 2012 at South by Southwest Interactive Conference, Austin, TX
by Tim O’Reilly (Founder, CEO – O’Reilly Media) and moderated by #sxsw #values
What companies have done is stopped taking care of our clients and customers and thinking of themselves first, even when it goes against the good of their customers and clients.
It is important to understand that monetization comes later, but the really good things come from people having fun or providing a good
I wouldn’t say I’m a first rate capitalist. I have more than one billionaire come up to me and say, “It all started with one of your books!” And all I got out of it was $35. – Tim O’Reilly
8 Design Lessons Learned from the Google Redesign
After attending yesterday’s “A Brief History of the Complete Redesign of Google” session today at the South by Southwest Interactive 2012 Conference, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the redesign process at Google translates over to those of us who also have day jobs taking care of major website brands. A lot of the things that we complain about in our corporate work were discussed in the Google panel discussion, with examples of how they were overcome in this process.
The following things stood out to me as necessary for a complete Brand redesign to be successfully completed. Hopefully, none of the terms that the panel of Googlers used were proprietary or trademarked.
- Executive Buy-In
- Take the Design Temperature
- Unique Concept Presentation
- Do the Initial Design in a Vacuum
- Ask for Help – Bring Everyone In
- Create a Bullet-Proof Prototype & Style Guide
A Brief History of the Complete Redesign of Google at #SXSW2012
Sunday, March 11 at South by Southwest Interactive Conference, Austin, TX
Google Panel Consisting of Evelyn Kim (Visual Designer for Maps), Jon Wiley (Lead Designer for Google Search), Michael Leggett (Design Lead, Google Apps & Gmail), Nicholas Jitkoff (User Experience Designer for Chrome), Chris Wiggins (Google Creative Lab)
The Evolution of Google Design
“So did Google just hire a bunch of designers recently, or were they all being kept in a cage all this time?” @tylerball
The process of this redesign is told in two stories. There is the story that you know about that happened in 2011, but most people don’t know the story of the redesign in 2007. 6 designers set out to express the Google brand that was consistent across all properties. It was called Kanna (Icelandic for “to explore, to examine”). Trying to find the balance between form and function, but mainly design and engineering. Looked at over 100 brand attributes that were narrowed down to 4 clusters.
High On Line: Applying Psychology to Web Design at #SXSW2012
Sunday, March 11 2012 at South by Southwest, Austin, TX
by Jason Hreha, Behavior Designer+UX Advisor, Applied Psychologist, www.persuasive.ly, Co-founder of Dopamine, UX Advisor @ 500 Startups
Research from the Stansfo
rd Persuasive Tech Lab
D – dopamine
Why do we need a UX Design / Motivational framework?
- Design with Intent Deck – 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design – decks
- Mental Notes – ways to bring psychology to web design.
- Influence: The Psycology of Persuation
- Gamification – instead of thinking in a step by step way, it becomes a conglomeration of incentives, but what’s the point?
Why do these tactics work? What are we changing?
Model was created by BJ Fogg (leader of the Stanford Pers Lab) – Behavior Model
What causes behavior? (What needs to come together in order for behavior to occur?
3 things need to coincide for behavior to occur
Killer App Design with Javascript and HTML 5
HTML5 and Complex Web Apps
Web 2.0 vs HTML5 apps
Web 2.0
- Dynamic content
- Database driven
- Social applications
- Stupid name
- “The Internet is more than lame dancing genies and hit counters!”
HTML5 Apps
- Interactive content
- Real-time
- Task-oriented
- Cool logo
- “You can have a desktop experience in your browser”
- Not trying to replicate a desktop software experience.
HTML5 – New Markup (separating functionality and presentation in the DOM with data-* attributes)
Amazing JavaScript APIs
Application Architecture
Lots of tools available that will allow for a more robust application development process.
- Moving state to the client
- Wep app Kool-Aid: MVC/MVVM, pub/sub and the module pattern
- Your application as an API
Don’t do it alone
Toolkits, precompilers, boilerplates, and more
For the enterprise-y among you
Testing, IDEs and other developer tools
