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If it’s walking like a duck, it should quack

Skeuomorphism is often rejected on the grounds of taste (“it looks tacky”) or generates despondence from its shackling of digital interfaces to old metaphors. The latter offends for two reasons: the resulting interfaces are limited by their chains, and the approach is inherently backwards-looking. I can imagine similar views being expressed in architecture and art quite easily.

How Google’s Designers Got the Company on the Same Page

In 2007, designers from multiple Google products put together a set of unified redesign proposals code-named Kanna (Icelandic, meaning to explore, examine or investigate) that was never released.

Among other reasons, the designers think Kanna failed because they presented then-CEO Eric Schmidt and other leaders with a set of four different concepts, with themes like making Google more like desktop clients, or differentiating products by color. It sounded like there were too many options and not enough conviction.

Cognition & The Intrinsic User Experience

Even when experiencing the same stimulus at the same time, many users will have completely unique experiences. That doesn’t mean an experience can’t be architected that utilizes knowledge about cognition to increase goal conversion. We create experiences to illicit a response from users; those users’ responses are either extrinsic (e.g., subscribing to a newsletter) or intrinsic (e.g., developing brand loyalty).

Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer Relationships

Rather than examine the role new technologies and platforms can play in improving customer relationships and experiences, many businesses invest in “attendance” strategies where a brand is present in both trendy and established channels, but not defining meaningful experiences or outcomes. Simply stated, businesses are underestimating the significance of customer experiences.

Handling Keyboard Shortcuts Within Modular JavaScript Application Architecture

Yesterday, when using Gmail, I started to think about keyboard shortcuts. Specifically, I started to think about how keyboard shortcuts get routed within a modular JavaScript application architecture. If I have a module that can respond to the keyboard – but, that module is not supposed to “know” about the document at large – how does it listen for key-based events? I can think of two ways: 1) Either the application listens for keys and then directly invokes methods on encapsulated modules; or 2) the application listens for keys and then announces key events using an intermediary sandbox. While my gut tells me the former is more effective, I’ve never really used a sandbox bridge; as such, I thought I’d experiment with the latter.

Finding the Perfect Icon Set

As a designer, I use iconography in nearly every project I work on. Whether it’s just one arrow icon, social media icons or an entire site filled with badges – icons are something I could never live without. I tip my hat to the illustrators who create such invaluable resources for the rest of us to use.

There are endless amounts of free and paid icons all over the web, but finding a set with a large quantity of icons that that are customizable, scalable, and of high quality can be hard to come by.