SXSW Interactive Is Big Business And That's A Good Thing (David Armano)

It's been exactly a week since I returned from SXSW. I would have written something sooner, but this delayed post is a great representation of where things stand in life for me these days. Writing for "personal" purpose takes a second seat to direct business building and running which is ironic because that was kind of the vibe at SXSW Interactive and that's not a bad thing. (typepad.com)

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Wikipedia’s Gender Gap Persists: Why Don’t More Women Contribute To The Online Encyclopedia? (Christopher Zara)

Wikipedia’s women problem isn’t going away. Speaking in Hong Kong at the annual Wikimania conference on Aug. 9, Jimmy Wales said that the vast majority of Wikipedia contributors -- 87 percent -- are men, according to the Wall Street Journal. The number is frustratingly high, given recent grassroots campaigns by Wikipedia users and efforts by the website itself to encourage more women to create and edit articles. (ibtimes.com)

Yahoo to Release New Flickr App and Web Design, Replacing Previous New One (Kara Swisher)

In December of 2012, just six months after Marissa Mayer was hired as CEO of Yahoo, the company released version 2.0 of its Apple iPhone and iPad app for its photo-sharing Flickr with bigger, crisper photos, a cleaner design, filters and easier sharing. (recode.net)

Jony Ive Discusses Design Philosophy, Relationship with Steve Jobs, and Future of Apple in New Interview (Richard Padilla)

In a lengthy interview with The Sunday Times (via 9To5Mac), Apple's Senior Vice President of Design Jonathan Ive discussed a number of topics including his philosophy on design and collaboration, the strong relationship he had with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and the future of Apple along with thoughts on new product categories. (macrumors.com)

Confidence is a choice, not a symptom (Seth Godin)

The batter has already hit two home runs. When he gets up to bat for the third time, his confidence is running high... It's easy to feel confident when we're on a roll, when the cards are going our way, or we're closing sales right and left. This symptomatic confidence, one built on a recent series of successes, isn't particularly difficult to accomplish or useful. (typepad.com)

User Experience Research-Practice Interaction (Keith Instone)

Here is the presentation that I did at the Connecting Dots conference on Saturday, March 15th. The presentation was based on the paper that I wrote for the conference, plus what I learned during the first day+ of the conference. I added and deleted things once I was there. (instone.org)

Creative Ads That Are Easily Remembered (Alexandru)

Most ads out there are annoying, but given the amount of professionals working in the marketing and advertising industries, they’re bound to come up with something cool and creative sooner or later. We’ve searched the web and collected some of the most creative print ads we could find. (topdesignmag.com)

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Design products that fit your audience. Design better products by learning how to create better UX personas. (udemy.com)

Trends in mobile device use by people with disabilities (Jonathan Avila)

As the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets grows, the number and complexity or mobile websites and apps has increased. Mobile devices have also become more accessible to many users with disabilities. The most recent Web AIM Screen Reader User Survey from January 2014 indicates that mobile device usage among people who are blind or visually impaired and who use screen readers is continuing to increase — indicated by 82 per cent of survey respondents. Close to half — 44% of respondents — indicated that they use mobile screen readers as much or more than desktop/laptop screen readers. It is time for organisations to seriously address the accessibility of their mobile content. (accessiq.org)

The Value of Involving People with Disabilities in User Research (Sarah Horton)

I am a huge fan of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a means to measure progress toward accessibility. They are thorough and well considered. They are flexible. I have used them to evaluate desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile sites, websites, and web applications. They go far in removing subjectivity from the assessment process—a control either is or is not operable using the keyboard; a text input either has or does not have a programmatically associated label. (usertesting.com)

The top 10 mobile design mistakes – and how to avoid them (Dave Shea)

Dave Shea dives deep into what's wrong with the mobile web and considers how we can make it better by identifying 10 design anti-patterns. A few years ago, I spent a few weeks driving around New Zealand's south island. Public Wi-Fi seems mostly unavailable in the South Pacific, so I relied on a prepaid SIM card for connectivity during that trip. (creativebloq.com)

Mobile Emulation In Google Chrome (Thoriq Firdaus)

Simply said, we love Google Chrome. It runs smooth, looks simple, and has many useful Apps. From a developer’s point of view, Google Chrome is always one step ahead in terms of supporting the latest Web standard, which is great. (hongkiat.com)

Google: Keep URL Length Shorter Than 2,000 Characters (Barry Schwartz)

SEOs obsess about the smallest things, even how long is too long for a URL. A Google Webmaster Help thread has SEOs and webmasters asking how long can they go for a URL. Google actually answered the question. (seroundtable.com)

My Advice to Young Designers and Developers (Andy Budd)

I meet them on a regular basis, tech-savvy teens who’ve been coding websites from an early age. They’ll often seek my advice about breaking into the industry. Should they continue their studies or jump straight into the labour market? I usually tell them that ability trumps education and I don’t put much faith on the current raft of tech degrees. So I’d prefer to see three years of experience than three years of study. (andybudd.com)

7 Facebook Marketing "Tips" and "Tricks" That Don't Actually Work (Ginny Soskey)

People will go to all sorts of lengths to get attention from a small subset of Facebook's 1.23 billion monthly active users. Sometimes it's good -- people focus on creating more compelling content or integrating Facebook with the rest of their marketing strategy. Though it takes more time, their Facebook Page grows steadily and actually delivers results. (hubspot.com)

Debunking the myths of web typography (Benjie Moss)

Typography is, put simply, the arrangement of type in order to facilitate communication. As a craft, it’s been around for hundreds of years, but the web form is still very much in its infancy—no doubt typographers in a decade’s time will gasp at our lack of soft hyphen, or half space. On the Web, typography is largely defined by its limitations. We simply don’t have the control that print typographers take for granted. To produce good web typography you have to get the basics right—because basics are all we have available. (webdesignerdepot.com)

Five Tips for Letting Collaboration Fuel Innovation (David McGaw | Zachary Jean Paradis)

Innovation is hard, but less mysterious than you've been led to believe. We wrote a book peeling back the veil of design-led innovation, called Naked Innovation: Uncovering a Shared Approach for Creating Value. It’s roughly based on what’s taught at the the IIT Institute of Design and we’re thrilled that it’s being used by Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, government agencies, and academic programs around the world. But we also believe the book hasn't quite reached its full potential. (uxmag.com)

Iconion: New Tool Converts Icon Fonts To Icon Files (Dieter Petereit)

Icon fonts are the new craze lately. The advantages are clear. Instead of working with a load of files in different resolutions or large sprites to be controlled by CSS, we simply embed a special font. This font contains all the needed icons. Each icon looks crisp no matter the resolution. Everybody’s happy. But in prototyping things are less nice. Of course you can get desktop font variants of most popular icon fonts, yet the handling is not so easy, nor is it to edit them. Iconion is a new free tool, that converts pictograms from icon fonts into files. You can even edit them… (noupe.com)

Your Guide To 'First Kiss' Parody Videos (Bryan M)

​If you've laid eyes on the Internet this week, you're already familiar with the runaway success of Tatia Pilieva's "First Kiss" video, which is close to racking up 50 million views in just four days. But what quickly became unnavigable is the deluge of parody videos aching to pick up some stray clicks. We've already seen too many of them, and unfortunately we'll probably see more before the week is out. But here they are — most of them anyway — ordered for your viewing pleasure. (digg.com)