Evie Nagy did a fascinating interview with danah boyd about her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. On how teens use Facebook and Twitter:

They’re also more likely to have protected accounts, and use it to talk to a small group of their actual friends. To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they’ve locked down to just a handful of people they care about — which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

A lot of the teens I talk to, they’ll have like 30 followers. It’s a small world for them, as opposed to trying to grow large followings. There are teens who are themselves microcelebrities, which is a different game. There are also a lot of teens who use Twitter around interests. An obsession with One Direction, and just talking to other One Direction people. That becomes Twitter, and then they’ll use Instagram with another group of friends. This one girl I talked to said, ‘Yeah, if you’re not into the things that I’m into, don’t follow me on Twitter.’

I’ve long been a fan of danah’s work, so I just bought the book and can’t wait to read it.

Related, Kayleigh Roberts wrote a very interesting article on how teens try to get celebrities to follow them on Twitter. From The Psychology of Begging to Be Followed on Twitter:

It’s not rare for a teen who is spamming to reach what is known as the tweet limit, something that the average user of the site might not even know exists. The tweet limit is 1,000 tweets per day, and many teens reach it regularly, especially when seeking the attention of a celebrity. It may seem excessive, but celebrities with millions of followers receive so many tweets, that it’s easy for even 1,000 to go unnoticed. Reaching the tweet limit can happen by accident, but it’s often a premeditated decision.

This is a world I didn’t even knew existed. I feel pretty old right now.

The small screens are coming, and we’re going to have to adjust our design processes accordingly. Emily Schwartzman does a great job of exploring how they worked through some of this complexity in Cooper, Augmedix and Google Glass: No Real Estate? No Problem:

Designing for Google Glass made us rethink the way we do software design. Many of our projects devote a significant amount of time to defining the framework of an application and developing the detailed design of key screens. When designing for Glass, we discovered that these phases needed almost no time, given the restrictive framework and visual language defined by Google. For future projects we might devote more time to refining personas and scenarios. We might even name the project phases a little differently—instead of “detailed wireframes” it might be “detailed scenarios.”

In general, Glass design projects will be focused more on flows than screens, and spending time on scenarios will help crystallize the flows.

Mark Boulton’s How we work is a great post about their design process. I particularly like his point about personas, a method that I have defended before as well:

The tool is not the important thing here, [what’s important is] how you can use something to help people think of other people. To help an organisation to think of their customers, or designers to think of the audience they’re designing for, or the CEO to think in terms of someone’s disability rather than the P&L.

What I find generally useful about running a workshop like this is that it exposes weaknesses in an organisation. If a client pays lip-service to a customer-centric approach, it will soon become very evident in a meeting that that’s what’s going on.

I also like his view on agile in an agency environment: “We make things and then fix things as we go.”

Jeff Atwood wrote a glorious rant about the proliferation of unnecessary mobile apps called App-pocalypse Now¹:

The more apps out there, the more the app stores are clogged with mediocre junk, the more the overall noise level keeps going up, which leads directly to this profligate nagging. Companies keep asking how can we get people to find and install our amazing app instead of the one question they really should have asked.

Why the hell are we building an app in the first place?

He makes some other really great points about the current state of the app ecosystem as well.

One of the many things I do that proves that I need to get out more is collect examples of placeholder text that ends up in a final interface. But I’ve also noticed that the issue happens more and more in the offline world as well. As I looked through my folder this morning I realized that, in the interest of science, I should post some of my favorites here. If you have any other good examples, please let me know!

Let’s start with a very common one. Even though error messages are extremely important, they’re often forgotten about:

I have a feeling that this was done very late one night:

Speaking of disgruntled employees:

Placeholder text shows up surprisingly often in newspapers. And another line.

At least we know what the font size should be:

Pull quotes are optional:

I often feel the same way about sportsball:

Who cares about these people:

But I think my all-time favorite is still this teaser that went up all over Cape Town one morning:

And finally: here you go, have a glass of Lorem Ipsum-inspired wine:

Yes, it’s funny, but these examples also prove a very important point: the consequences of thinking about content after the design process is completed can be pretty embarrassing. Content-first design is where it’s at.

MG Siegler in Going Against The Grain:

We’re seeing over and over again now that the behemoths can’t simply add a startup’s funtionality into their own app as a feature and kill said startup. But it’s equally important to note that if you are able to establish your startup, especially those in apps form, it may be hard to get your users to do anything other than what they originally came to do. Especially if the new funtionality is against the grain in any way.

This comes back to understanding what job users hire your product to do for them, and realizing that it’s very difficult to convince them to use the product for a different job.

In The Dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee talk about some of the good things that are coming out of the Artificial Intelligence community:

A user of the OrCam system, which was introduced in 2013, clips onto her glasses a combination of a tiny digital camera and speaker that works by conducting sound waves through the bones of the head. If she points her finger at a source of text such as a billboard, package of food, or newspaper article, the computer immediately analyzes the images the camera sends to it, then reads the text to her via the speaker.

There are a few more interesting, feel-good examples in the article.

Jeremy Keith writes about the challenges of turning large, established desktop-centric sites into responsive sites in Climbing Mount Responsive. This method remains my favorite:

Rebuild the mobile site, using it as a seed from which to grow a new responsive site. On the face of it, having a separate mobile subdomain might seem like a millstone around your neck if your trying to push for a responsive design. In practice though, it can be enormously useful. Mostly it’s a political issue: whereas ripping out the desktop site and starting from scratch is a huge task that would require everyone’s buy-in, nobody gives a shit about the mobile subdomain. Both the BBC news team and The Guardian are having great success with this approach, building mobile-first responsive sites bit-by-bit on the m. subdomain, with the plan to one day flip the switch and make the subdomain the main site.

I also really like Brad Frost’s illustrations of this approach in Planting the Seed for a Responsive Future.