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What we’re reading: 14 April 2017

Things that have crossed our desk recently, and we think are worth crossing yours, too.
 
 

The Power of Experience Mapping

Jared Spool

I think Netflix is one of the most extraordinary companies in the world. From business strategy to devops, UI to front end development, these folks are as good as it gets. I’ll write more about them one day, and why I’m so inspired by the company, but in this piece, Jared Spool looks at how at Netflix (but ideally everywhere), everyone is a designer.

Everyone (for example, devops worrying about delivering those streams of video) is as responsible for the user experience as the person whose job title is “UX designer”. It’s caused some controversy, but I think it’s right on the money. The article is about much more than just this, so just go read it!

Everyone is a designer. Get over it

Dan Burka

Satirical image of Jared Spool

One of our favourite and most popular speakers over the years, Dan Burka amplified Jared Spool’s argument in this follow up piece.

Dan has played a key design role at Mozilla, Digg, and now as a design partner at GV, Google’s VC arm. In this role. he works with hundreds of companies a year to help them with their design challenges.

AI and the Future of Journalism

Soren J Nieminen

AI has so over-promised and under-delivered for so long that I think a lot of folks are under-appreciating its impact, and the opportunities it presents today.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this in coming weeks and months, but in this piece, Soren J Nieminen summarises many of the findings of the very in depth Associated Press report “How artificial intelligence will impact journalism” (a free download).

Next

Watch this space, we have a lot more around this coming up around this. Including a great session at Respond focusing on conversational UIs.

The Web-Wide World

Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce has keynoted several of our events. He’s a good friend, someone who shares our vision and values of what the web is, and its impact on the world.

He was at the first ever WWW conference 23 years ago, and spoke to a plenary session of the just finished WWW2017 conference. This is his presentation, which is also a great read. If you care for the Web, share it far and wide.

Creating Usability with Motion: The UX in Motion Manifesto

Issara Willenskomer

We’ve been on the UI animation bandwagon since before it was an oxcart. Multiple technical and design sessions across a number of years (I even conducted a workshop with Pasquale D’Silva at one of our conferences).

For many years, we’ve been seeing articles, tutorials and presentations on animation for IxD focus on Disney’s 12 principles. There’s a lot of value to be had in exploring these, but interactive app-like experiences are not animated stories, and so we need to consider our principles in this context.

Issara Willenskomer here looks at new principles for animated UX, including value change, cloning and parallax.

Next

Watch Rachel Nabors on the State of the Web Animation at Code 2015 (and she’s back at our upcoming Respond conference in Sydney and Melbourne early May).
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