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Zero-Click content is content that offers valuable, standalone insights (or simply engaging material), with no need to click. Clicking might be additive, but it’s not required [...] but how can we get value if we can’t get trackable visits? Just like our marketing forebears did: through hard-to-measure brand lift.

Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say.

For the sugggested re-reading order:

* Thousand Autumns * Cloud Atlas * Utopia Avenue * Black Swan Green * Ghostwritten * Number9Dream * The Bone Clocks * Slade House

This popped up in my radio for the first time in many years. From Raw Digits, by Jamie Lidell and Cristian Vogel's off-kilter, millennial glitch-funk Super_Collider project.

This song got stuck in my head after a rapid unscheduled disassembly of Aeropress all over the kitchen floor and my arm.

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

Guess you had to be there.

Companies everywhere are investing heavily in paid social, websites and CRM programmes but agencies are increasingly using similar techniques, emulating each other’s functionality and using the same tonality. Done in the name of optimisation and best practice, it might deliver in the short term, but long term, brands are shedding their personality.

An open source collection of Design Principles and methods.

Takes a couple of minutes.

From the same era as Milky Disco and slots in well with that.

...use Preview.

Getting brand consistency right is tough, as it's not just about your marketing channels. It covers everything across your company – from your business purpose and mission to your culture, values and products. There’s also a slew of external factors like customer comments and ratings on Google, Trustpilot etc. Even opinion leaders, influencers, and journalists have a say, especially if you encounter bad PR for any reason.

Good tip on “free” wireframe brand.

Theme using fallback vars.

New Identity for Ayushman Bharat Wellness Centers by Lopez Design

Wow.

Somehow we forgot how to center rectangles and must find our way back

The fact that, in the span of less than year, Facebook effectively removed anything resembling news from the platform, even conservative news, and allowed AI-generated spam to take its place, and both investors and advertisers don’t care, should tell you all you need to know about what social networks are in 2024. They’re a data holding pen for advertisers to harvest and it seems like Meta has finally given up pretending they’re anything else.

Good for route-finding, particularly directs.

Database of AIs

So as you can see, building context menus is quite a bit more complicated than it looks from the outside!

Another good "UI is more complex than pictures" example.

The following is a recap of a year long research and development journey revealing a method to take semantic responsibility away from design tokens.

In the US, for example, lawsuits against companies’ weak compliance with accessibility regulations have increased every year to more than 4,500 cases in 2023, data from UsableNet has shown. That is up 13 per cent from 2022.

Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising sophistication and nuance in designing effective tables. Over the past 5,000 years, they’ve evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data. Although we argue that the mid-1900s served as a high point, the popularization and wider accessibility of computing seemingly brought us back to the simple, ancient times.

Checks SPF/DMARC/DKIM.

Good one to point clients to.

GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a move from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.

The purpose of this article is to be clear about which tokens are best used directly in the experience from other tokens that can be used for organizational purposes.

How to prepare pictograms for design systems by handling variable brand and skin colors.

Design Engineers work closely with designers to implement designs, skipping the traditional handoff process. Instead of handing off a completed design, a Designer sketches the start and iterates with a Design Engineer in Figma or code to produce the final design. Lots of technical exploration is done to push the designs.

Iain M. Banks, who died in 2013, way too young, was at the pinnacle. Here was a great writer, sure; but here was an imag­i­na­tion unmatched. He simply pushed further and thought bigger.

Frontend designers create the HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code that powers web products’ user interfaces. I see frontend design as helpful mortar that bridges the gap between design and development.

Instead of stakeholders prioritizing their perceived solutions (features and projects) and providing these in the form of a roadmap to a feature team, now the product team is assigned problems to solve, and the product team is empowered to discover a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible and viable