Your product briefing
Product strategy - How innovative should your ideas be?
Novelty is a risk. Too much of it, and you’re almost certain to fail. But too little of it and you’re just a redundant copy of someone else — which is also a recipe for failure. What’s needed is a balance of both.
Design - The ABCs of design systems
You can spend months crafting brilliant symbols in Sketch, writing guidelines, and partnering with engineers to build everything in code. But have you stopped to think about what the experience is like for people using the system? How easy is for them to receive updates? Is it a manual process or do changes get synced automatically? Good distribution starts with great encapsulation. Most modern design tools have disruption tools built right into them. But how might a Sketch plugin replace your need to use a Sketch Library that has to be manually download each update? For engineers, how might you improve their need to copy-and-paste raw values and/or HTML?
Skills - Five pieces of terrible advice Product Managers get
There is an abundance of great advice offered to new/aspiring Product Managers. There is also some easy to spot bad advice doing the rounds. The most dangerous type, however, is advice that looks good at the surface but is actually bad. I like to call such advice as, ‘terrible advice’.
New product features - Google Nest Doorbell adds delivery detection
Being able to tell when a delivery person comes to your door with the package you’ve been waiting for is one of the perks of owning a video-enabled doorbell. But most doorbells can’t alert you if someone drops off a box; at best, it’ll sense that someone came by, and you’ll need to review a video clip to see more. Google addresses that limitation with this update, giving its camera an edge on competitors.
UX - How to create a UX workshop agenda
UX workshops can drive projects forward and build consensus, but are only a valuable use of time when the agenda is defined from the goals you want to achieve. Here's a 3-step process for designing a useful workshop agenda in UX projects.
Opinion - Why are products for older people so ugly?
Lots of designers have had similar “aha!” moments after talking to their older users. Take Nick Baum, who created StoryWorth, a subscription app and website that allows family members to prompt each other to tell stories about themselves. Launched in 2013, the site has collected well over one million stories, Baum says, the vast majority of them from people over 60. During the early years, Baum handled a lot of the customer support himself and often fielded phone calls from older users. Once, an unanticipated problem popped up.
Product process - How to collect, analyse and prioritise customer feedback
Unprompted feedback deserves special attention. Here’s one key reason why. The customer issues that aren’t on your radar, that you’re completely unaware of, can be the most important things you need to hear. You’re more likely to hear those left-field issues via unsolicited feedback or from open-ended questions rather than, say, a short survey with multiple choice answers. There’s a reason doctors ask if there’s “anything else you want to talk about?” at the end of your appointment. It often triggers the patient to talk about their most important issue.
New product launch - YouTube for kids
Detailed in a brief post this week, YouTube Kids will be heading to the web in the very near future. While no specific date is provided, YouTube says the new experience will be live “later this week.” We’ll update that post once the new YouTube Kids for the Web site is live.
Interview - Automaticc CEO on the Tumblr acquisition
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg thinks the future of Tumblr is bright. He wants the platform to bring back the best of old-school blogging, reinvented for mobile and connected to Tumblr’s still-vibrant community, and he’s retaining all 200 Tumblr employees to build that future. It’s the most exciting vision for Tumblr in years.
Product ethics - What drives our addiction to social media
Time on device pinpoints something crucial about addiction. Traditionally, casinos have blocked out daylight and banned anything that conveys the sense of time passing: there are no windows or clocks and, rather than timed meals, there is a constant supply of refreshments. Some gambling-machine addicts today prefer to urinate in a paper cup rather than leave the device. Pubs and opium dens also have a history of blotting out daylight to allow users to enjoy themselves without the intrusion of time. The sense of dropping out of time is common to many addictions. As one former gambling addict puts it: “All I can remember is living in a trance for four years.” Schüll calls it the “machine zone”, where ordinary reality is “suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process”. For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing. Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist and former heroin addict, describes how even after kicking the drug, he couldn’t face “a day without a change of state”.
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