Wow, @sprintly looks amazing. Alternative to backlog/kanban style apps. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. https://sprint.ly/
Three of my fav things. Raw wood tables. Eames side chairs. Tight logos. If the shells were fiberglass I may have fainted. (Taken with Instagram at Rdio Office)
Love the new UI. Loads of great new features. A nice middle finger :) to Safari’s “reading list.”
(via Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone – Marco.org)
Posted with Percolate
I am salivating over Bank Simple… AND they are moving to Portland. Neat. It is going to be funny to watch them out run Mint. Oh Intuit.
“ Most scientists also scoffed at Mr. Ettinger’s vision, but his manifesto came as the world was adjusting to the atomic bomb, Sputnik’s robotic spacecraft and a host of other sci-fi-seeming technologies. To many at the time, Mr. Ettinger’s optimism seemed appropriate.”
-Robert Ettinger, founder of the cryonics movement died July 23rd at 92.
He believed death was for the unimaginative and unprepared.
“ foresight used to be called futurism, but that futurism has increasingly become associated with the idea of predicting the future. Foresight is not about predicting the future, it’s about minimizing surprise. The second way I usually put it is that foresight is not about predicting the future; it’s about designing the future.”
Some nice thoughts about futurism, foresight, design fiction and science fiction from someone in the trenches. And I thought explaining IxD was hard.
-How We Build Features
A very practical user & data centered framework for bringing features to life. Be sure to flip through the slide deck at the bottom.
(via Ash Maurya)
“ Cross-channel offers a different stance from both multi-channel and cross-media: the single channel might or might not offer a complete entry point into the ecosystem, but the fact is that most of the users / customers will not stay in that channel from point A to point Z. In other words, it might very well be that in a ubiquitous ecology some channels do allow users to complete their experiential journey without resorting to other channels, in contrast to cross-media, but that is not going to happen very often (or at all, in contrast to multi-channel). This is where the specific nature of cross-channel lies, and where the challenges for design reside.”
Some hair splitting thoughts on wrangle multi-touchpoint experiences from an Information Architecture perspective. Im not sure I agree with or understand the points fully, but the idea of a task arching across multiple channels is certainly an interesting design challenge for multi-touchpoint experiences. The description of multi channel experiences uses concrete examples, while the description of cross channel devolves into ambiguity. It does make me want to read the book.
The Neilson report on low Hulu/Netflix usage on iPads and iPhones is not surprising, but I can’t wait to see what these numbers do if Airplay works on all these apps and Apple actually finds a better way into the living room than the current incarnation of AppleTV. Its a tall order. I always forget how badly Apple is buffing the living room.
“ It is the emphasis on user-centered design that has made American interface design so successful and difficult to replicate or export outside of the United States. As a nation of technology users, we are designing for ourselves better than others outside our culture could. As a result, American interface designers have an advantage in creating more effective technology interactions for Americans than their international counterparts can.”
-UI Design: An All-American Product That’s Changing The World (via FastCoDesign)
From a historical perspective celebrating the USA’s contributions to UI is sound. But in this day and age UI and IxD is a global effort and a global community. This isn’t a soccer team. I call total BS on UCD being the key to our success (Jared Spool has thoughts on this). Interestingly enough, the author mentions designing for ourselves in the following sentence. How about people solving real human problems in third word countries with design? That is something to really celebrate. To say UI is American is to say Beer is German. This piece would have been better if it focused more on history than our supposed leg up on the rest of the world. We have a global design community, talking about which country won the world cup of UI is totally pointless.
Kevin Kelly summarizes Geoff West’s Long Now talk about the parallels between cities and companies and organisms and ecosystems. It was an amazing talk and Q/A session.
“”The NSF has announced the Innovation Corps – a program to take the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and turn them into startups. It will train them with a process that embraces experimentation, learning, and discovery. The NSF will fund 100 science and engineering research projects every year. Each team accepted into the program will receive $50,000….
…The insight the NSF had is that we just need to teach scientists and engineers to treat business models as another research project that can be solved with learning, discovery and experimentation.
