A weekly selection of design links, brought to you by your friends at the UX Collective.
The what → how → why cycle of every new technology wave › Every time a new trend starts to get traction amongst designers and devs — chatbots, artificial intelligence, design sprints, augmented reality, responsive design, react native, hamburger menus, design thinking, you name it — the same pattern happens.
Flow: animate Sketch designs in seconds and export production ready
Recordit: simple screen recording tool with GIF and Twitter support
JAM Stack: client-side Javascript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt markup
Forms ID: privacy-centric Google Forms alternative
Design is: Google’s monthly speaker series on the future of creativity
A year ago
Leonardo Da Vinci was the best UX Designer in history › Was he ahead of his time? Was he one of a kind? I love him and his passion to create the most beautiful and delightful things. And not only that… he was the first UX Designer that ever lived. Let’s break it down. By Flavio Lamenza
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from UX Collective – Medium https://uxdesign.cc/technology-waves-evil-a-b-testing-font-metrics-and-more-ux-links-this-week-e125e9182f05?source=rss—-138adf9c44c—4
“I want to debunk the myth that originality requires extreme risk taking and persuade you that originals are actually far more ordinary than we realize.” — Adam Grant, Originals
Hi readers. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Steph. I’m an indie maker. I also lead a remote team of a couple dozen as the Head of Publications at Toptal. On top of that, I’m a self-taught developer, a woman, and identify with many more things.
As I continue to tackle all of these in tandem, I often have people asking how I manage it all. Although it’s not a walk in the park, I believe that most people limit the dimension of what they think is possible and ultimately, limiting beliefs become more of a blocker than actual bandwidth.
Moreover, I’ve always found it strange how people like to put things neatly into boxes or associate with a single label. I think that we can and should explore a multitude of things in life and am writing this article to showcase that being a maker and having a full-time job is not only possible, but also that diversifying your available opportunities can keep you more agile, realistic, and sustainably committed.
Before jumping in, I should clarify that these views are my own and don’t necessarily represent the views of Toptal.
TL;DR
There are three key concepts that I want to tackle in this piece. The first is for those who think that they don’t have enough time and why I feel this notion is often misplaced. The second is to highlight the benefits of sticking with a job and why successful people are best at risk mitigation, not maximization. And finally, the third will isolate some improvements that I think we can all make in our approach to thinking — moving past just indie making and working full-time, these concepts will hopefully help you optimize within a bigger box or perhaps remove the box entirely.
1. “I don’t have enough time”
The average American works 8.8 hours, born out of the industrial revolution and carried through to the twenty-first century out of routine, rather than active consideration. Robert Owen crafted the saying “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”, in an effort to have people work reasonable hours, while still running factories efficiently.
Despite the world and workforce changing dramatically, this concept of “work time” and “me time” persists today. I’m not here to dispute the 40h model (there are already too many resources for that — who hasn’t heard of the 4h work week?), but instead dispute the perception of “me time”.
For many people, a long day of work means that they are entitled to this “me time” and have designed this “me time” to be as distinct from “work time” as possible. For many, it looks a lot like this: ~Netflix and chill~.
But what if we stopped imaging “me time” as relaxation time, but instead exactly as it is titled — time to focus on yourself and align with your goals. If you need rest, then rest. But if your goal is to one day become an entrepreneur, a significant portion of “me time” should be invested in getting there since it won’t happen on its own. “Me time” shouldn’t just be non-tiring activity, but anything that helps an individual get to the future state that they wish to be in.
With approximately 16 hours of the day allocated to work and sleep, every individual has approximately 8 hours to allocate to “me time” and if used appropriately, a lot can be achieved in that nearly 3000 hours each year.
Sleep, commute, work, repeat.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, but underestimate what they can do in a year.”
There is also a misconception that in order to build a sustainable business, you need to spend an inordinate amount of time to get there. While it’s true that a lot of effort needs to be delivered, what matters the most is the consistent effort over time. Most people undervalue this concept of compound interest.
The power of compound interest
Take a look at the following equations:
1.0¹³⁶⁵ = 37.8
1.1⁰³⁰ = 17.5
Consistently improving your business (or life) by 1% every day for a year is double as impactful improving by 10% each day for a month. Consistency plus compounding is powerful.
“If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.”
I think that most people operate in life by either not clearly identifying priorities or considering everything one. While I believe in ambition, one key step in being successful is identifying core priorities and eliminating the noise that falls outside of that.
Core priorities are dynamic and can change over time, but I think that you can’t really have more than 3 core foci at a given time.
Past setting these focal points, it’s about changing behavior to live by them. Once again, if most people were to objectively reflect on how they’re spending their time, they would get something like this:
A typical day.
For me, this is how my personal priorities have transformed over time:
2017: Work, Travel, Relationship
2018: Work, Learning to code, Building Side Projects
2019: Work, Scaling Side Projects, Sharing Ideas (Writing, Speaking)
In order to sustain a full-time job and creating projects, I’ve had to remove distractions. For example, I don’t watch TV. I don’t commute. I am currently not in a relationship. These were all active choices.
Of course, some of these things will be temporary (ex: relationships), but I’m also mindful of what I’m reintroducing into my life and whether it’ll contribute, take away from, or become one of my north stars.
I think this concept can also be thought of as tiered time investments. With anything you do, if it contributes to your north star, consider it a Tier 1 investment. For something that doesn’t contribute to your growth at all, perhaps label it as a Tier 4. It doesn’t mean that you can’t spend time across tiers, but the amount of time that you spend across each should be reflective of how much you care about them.
Example (this will be an independent exercise for anyone):
2. The benefits of keeping your job
Hopefully the previous section helped convince you that you have enough time to work full-time while creating side projects, or rather, fit more things into your life if you align your values → priorities → behaviours. In this section, I hope to convey why keeping your full-time job can be a beautiful thing.
Getting paid to learn
“Some workplaces are definitely broken, but the entire workforce isn’t.”
I often hear people say things like “I can’t wait to get out”, referring to quitting their jobs and eventually being their own boss. This is not a problem with them having a full-time job, but the particular job they’re working at or perhaps the particular person who they’re reporting to.
All people should strive to find work that is empowering, motivating, and allows them to grow in some dimension. Larger organizations practically guarantee that﹣it’s rare that you are the smartest person in the room and you certainly will never be the most competent person in the room across every dimension.
Working in my “day job” allows me to continuously learn from people who are smarter than me, and get paid for it. I’m also faced with challenges that I simply wouldn’t encounter with my side projects, and I often need to learn how to solve these challenges alongside others. I encourage people to intentionally design their career path to take on new skills ranging from hard to soft. Both will be important if you eventually decide to go off on your own in the future.
With the workforce becoming more dynamic, the ability to learn from others while working on your own projects in tandem is a development that many people are taking. In fact, I polled several hundred on Twitter, and found that a significant number of people are doing exactly this.
@stephsmithio@anthilemoon@makermag I love my job, so I have no reason to quit really. It also allows me experiment and really take my time with what I’m making 🙂
Outside of learning, keeping a FT job has other tangible benefits which may help you build a more sustainable side project.
Out of personal experience, I’ve found that keeping my job and side projects separate has allowed me to still find independent joy in both. Whenever I switch from one context to the other, particularly with making, it’s still “fun”.
@stephsmithio@makermag@doorbell_io Tough balancing act, and always careful to avoid burnout. I always had to remember that I’m doing the side projects for fun, so if it isn’t fun don’t force it. I’m lucky in that it was still able to grow, despite long period of borderline neglect.
I think this is particularly due to the fact that in its current state, making is not my lifeline. I hope that someday it does become something much more substantial, but for now, I can make decisions regarding my projects that aren’t influenced by the need to make cash immediately.
More importantly, I can focus on expressing myself through projects I truly care about, instead of focusing on what may generate $, and through this process, I stay close to my values. In other words, I can focus on creating value, instead of specifically on capturing it, similar to how Gumroad’s founder Sahil Lavingia pivoted to do this or how Warby Parker’s founders ensured that money would not trump their values:
“We were four friends before we started, and we made a commitment that dealing with each other fairly was more important than success.” — Originals, Adam Grant
Tied to the above, I can ditch a project or think rationally when I realize that a project doesn’t offer any value, nor do I need to take VC money or tend to investors that I don’t believe in.
“Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses.” — Originals, Adam Grant
Finally, I can invest the proper amount of time in skill acquisition. I liken this to the concept of how public stocks are focused less on creating long-term value through innovation and instead on next quarter’s revenue numbers. I am a private stock that can focus on myself and my skills, with the intention of building them for the long-haul.
In other words, the clear distinction between my expression and creativity is separated from my lifeline and I think that’s helpful in making more effective decisions.
Pilot a lot and then bet it all
“The word entrepreneur, as it was coined by economist Richard Cantillon, literally means “bearer of risk.” — Originals, Adam Grant
There is a common misconception that entrepreneurs are all “risk-takers” and that you need to go “all in” to be successful. Both of these are both proven false in Adam Grant’s book Originals; that entrepreneurs are not necessarily risk takers, but instead better at evaluating risk and hedging their bets.
“When Pierre Omidyar built eBay, it was just a hobby; he kept working as a programmer for the next nine months, only leaving after his online marketplace was netting him more money than his job. “The best entrepreneurs are not risk maximizers,” Endeavor co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg observes based on decades of experience training many of the world’s great entrepreneurs. “They take the risk out of risk-taking.”” — Originals, Adam Grant
Grant also captures another study by Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng which tracked the following question from 1994 to 2008, across over 5 thousand Americans: “When people start a business, are they better off keeping or quitting their day jobs?”.
The result? They found that those leaving their jobs were doing so not out of financial need, but instead out of sheer confidence. However, those that were more unsure — more risk-averse — were the ones that had 33% lower odds of failure.
Another study identified that entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s most innovative lists also tended to stick with their day jobs, including famous entrepreneurs Phil Knight (Nike), Steve Wozniak (Apple), and Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Knight worked as an accountant for 5 years while selling shoes from his trunk, Wozniak kept working at HP, and the Googlers continued on with their PhDs at Stanford. These are just a few of the originals in the book－Grant also cites similar stories ranging from Brian May studying astrophysics before going all-in with Queen, John Legend working as a management consultant even after releasing his first album, Spanx founder Sara Blakely selling fax machines as she prototyped and scaled her company to eventually become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, and famous author Stephen King working as a janitor, teacher, and gas station attendant for 7 years after his first story was published.
We all have multiple passions and I think life is about making strategic transitions when it makes sense. There’s no need to cut from one scene to another immediately. People may think it’s cool to be a risk taker, but it’s much cooler to come out on the other side successful.
3. Restructuring your way of thinking
Regardless of whether you choose to work full-time while exploring side projects, I think we can all be a little more effective at opening our minds to different ways of thinking. This section will touch on some of the ways that I think we can stop limiting ourselves and others.
No more dichotomies
People love putting things into boxes. You’ll hear people use nouns or adjectives as definitive labels all the time:
Technical or not technical
Happy or sad
Employee or entrepreneur
See where I’m going with this? Despite these labels, I believe that almost everything can be represented in some sort of curve; particularly with skill acquisition. For example, when do you really “become” a programmer?
Truly creative thinkers stop thinking in binary and instead are able to internalize the concept of these curves. They view things as a ramp or staircase or Venn diagram, NOT as a series of boxes. When you remove dichotomies, you are able to more clearly see other options, like slowly ramping up your time investment in your side gigs instead of quitting immediately.
Optimizing your life
I think that it’s very naïve for anyone to assume that they’re working at their global maximum in terms of effectiveness. The truth is that we all have room for improvement both in terms of being faster/leaner, but also in making better decisions to remove work that shouldn’t be on our plate in the first place.
Should you choose to work on multiple things, make sure that you have independent KPIs for all of them. People tend to do this with businesses, but the concept is so rare in our personal lives. Are you able to quantify how much time you’ve invested in yourself over the past year? Most people wouldn’t be able to.
If you don’t have KPIs for both, the one without clear KPIs will naturally slip to the wayside or not receive the amount of attention it deserves.
I also think it’s important to understand the concept of “meta work”. My definition of meta work is the following: “If you did that activity continuously for a year, would your life be any different?”
Let me elaborate.
If I answered emails every day for the next year, would my life have changed in any significant way? In other words, would I have moved from A to B? The answer is no.
The same thing is true for things like laundry or buying groceries or doing your nails. Oh yes, Netflix fits neatly in there too.
There’s a second type of task which I label as absolute tasks. If done consistently, you would likely see your skillset or life change in a material way. For example: if you read every day for a year, your knowledge set, creativity, and reading speed would all likely improve. If you exercised every day, your health would undoubtedly improve. Similarly, if you dedicated 1 hour every day to learn to code, you would have an entirely new skillset by the end of the year.
While meta tasks are unavoidable in life, make sure that your goals in life are not meta — they need to be absolute. When you create your to-do list for the day, make sure at least one thing is absolute (remember: 1.0¹³⁶⁵ = 37.8). And of course, when you can: automate as many of the meta tasks as you can. Meta tasks in many ways can be synonymous with distractions unless they bring some sort of independent joy to your life.
The myth of overnight success
Finally, I want to address one last misconception: there is no such thing as overnight success. This misconception is derived from the way the media operates.
TechCrunch will never write about how X person spent Y years bootstrapping a sustainable non-unicorn that abides by its values and respects people’s privacy. Outliers are flashy, but they are still outliers.
Up until a few years ago, I never truly understood this concept of a continuous climb. I thought that every successful person who said that it took a lot of work and hard effort was just self-justifying their luck.
“When we marvel at the original individuals who fuel creativity and drive change in the world, we tend to assume they’re cut from a different cloth.” — Adam Grant, Originals
The reality is that building anything of value takes time. Sure, it may take longer for you to build while working full-time, but that’s okay.
If you currently work full-time, don’t put yourself into a box and instead, just start working towards ideas that you find interesting. The perfect idea will never come, so I encourage everyone to start working even 1 hour per week on ideas they find interesting and ramp that up until you’re in a place where it makes sense to take them on full-time. The mental clarity of separating your lifeline (your job) from your projects may be the most healthy and thoughtful approach.
Remember, there is no moment that you become an entrepreneur, so there is no need to quit your job just to define yourself as one.
the augmented reality handbook everything you need to know about augmentedreality Augmented Reality brings with it a set of challenges that are …
from Google Alert https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=http://www.thepost.news/the_augmented_reality_handbook_everything_you_need_to_know_about_augmented_reality.pdf&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGmJhYjllOWZjNzViYWJhMTA6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNEH96OH77mjiFGYNjJrGgEeT18Vuw
Machine intelligence doesn’t automatically lead to smarter user experience if product designers and machine learning experts don’t talk the same language.
The language and concepts of machine learning are far from intuitive. And user experience design requires an understanding of how people think and behave, simultaneously taking into account the irrationality of human behavior and the messiness of everyday life.
Because of the different skills these two disciplines require, it’s normal to see user experience designers and machine learning experts work in their own separate silos even though they’re building the same product. Often, experts from both fields are not familiar with each other’s methods and tools and so are unable to grasp what can be achieved by combining experience design with machine learning. To break these professional silos, the product team needs to make a steadfast and conscious effort, but how to get started?
Here are four pivotal principles for finding an efficient and fruitful way to combine the best product design methods with the pragmatic applications of machine learning:
1. Develop a shared language
The product vision, essential user experience issues, and business goals need to be shared and understood by the whole team. You can create an intelligent, truly meaningful user experience only if product design and machine learning development methods feed each other through common language and shared concepts.
User experience designers and machine learning experts should join forces to create a common product development blueprint that includes user interfaces and data pipelines. The co-created product blueprint grounds your team’s product planning and decisions concretely to the reality of user experience: how every design decision and machine learning solution affects how the user experiences the product. A great catalyst for cross-pollination of product goals, design ideas, and machine learning concepts is to get the experts on both fields to work in the same space side-by-side.
Moreover, to build a common language, it’s important for the product team to answer two key questions together. The first question is: “Why?” Why do we choose this user experience design or machine learning solution for this particular use case? The second question is “What’s the goal?” What is the rationale and what is expected to happen when the team focuses on tuning a user experience design detail or optimizing a machine learning model. For example, everyone in the team should be able to perceive why making the copy text more appealing in a marketing notification can yield more immediate impact on user engagement than optimizing the machine learning model to produce more precise personalized content recommendations.
2. Focus on the use case
If you’re building a consumer-facing product, the most important thing is not the technology but the user experience and business goal you wish to achieve.
Map out and crystallize your use case. For example, if you’re creating a personalized onboarding for a news app, the user experience designers and machine learning experts should together draft out and design the actual use flow for onboarding. This allows the whole team to recognize the key points where machine learning could enhance user experience and vice versa. Concrete designs, including input from designers, data engineers, and data scientists, help you set realistic expectations and goals for the first product iteration.
A thorough understanding of the use case enables the team to determine a proper key performance indicator (KPI) for user experience development that is aligned with the metrics of machine learning. For example, if you’re building an AI-powered personalized news notification feature for a news app, your aim is to save users time by sending automated notifications. And you want to gauge if users are happy with the notifications appearing on their lock screen, even though they wouldn’t open the app itself at all. In this case, it’s essential to measure if the users keep the new smart notification feature on and thus continuously receive personalized news alerts directly on their lock screen.
3. Combine qualitative and quantitative data
“Big data” is not always needed to use machine learning effectively. Historical data can even become a hindrance if you believe the answers to the open-ended user experience design questions can be found in quantitative data from the past. Additionally, there are technologies like online learning that don’t necessarily require troves of historical data to get started.
To understand the effects of combining user experience design and machine learning solutions, both qualitative and quantitative data are important. Use qualitative research methods such as user interviews, questionnaires, and user testing to gauge how your users experience the product features. Qualitative data offers clarity on how users think and feel, and quantitative data tells you how people actually behave with your product. Your whole team should assess the results of qualitative studies.
When building a new product or feature, you might bump into many unexpected factors affecting user experience and machine learning development. For example, is a selected data point capturing the real user behavior or intention? Is the feedback loop ineffective for producing meaningful data because the connected user interface feature is not accessible or visible to the user? The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods gives you a wider perspective to answer such questions.
Also, interviews and user tests bring the data alive. They highlight the actual connections between your users and how they are interpreted by your system. In-depth user understanding is essential in picking up the signal from the noise in your data flow. Combining insights based on qualitative and quantitative data enables both user experience designers and machine learning experts to better understand the product as an ecosystem that is part of people’s everyday lives. Everyone on the team becomes a product expert.
4. Confirm your choices with real data in a real-life setting
Does it make sense from a user’s perspective that your smart assistant can independently order pizza, manage your bank account, or book your next vacation flights without you needing to ask it to? How do we make sure that machine intelligence is really used to create more fluent and comprehensible user experiences?
By setting up a working end-to-end solution, you can see how all the parts of user experience and machine learning fit together in real life. A minimum viable product, including working data pipelines and machine learning models, makes it easier to iterate the product together with the whole team and also gives you direct feedback from users through user testing or beta testing. All the feedback should be shared, discussed, and analyzed with the whole team. This lets you see how your product works in the real world so you can identify the most critical things for further development.
When user experience designers and machine learning experts share understanding about product development issues, product iteration is faster and more productive. In the process, your data engineers and data scientists get new insights on how machine learning can be used to understand actual human behavior that doesn’t fit directly into a mathematical formula, data model, or machine learning solution. In turn, user experience designers become more aware of the pragmatic possibilities of machine learning: how and when it can be used to improve user experience in the most impactful way. Collaborating becomes a clear competitive advantage.
Jarno M. Koponen is Head of AI and Personalization at Finnish media house Yle. He creates smart human-centered products and personalized experiences by combining UX design and AI. He has previously written articles on UX, AI, personalization, and machine learning for TechCrunch.
from “artificial intelligence” – Google News https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/09/ui-ai-combine-user-experience-design-with-machine-learning-to-build-smarter-products/
Users today are more complicated than ever: they want more, and they want it faster, better, personalized, and easier to use. Their busy, connected lifestyle leaves no room for forgiving usability and performance issues. They will abandon most apps without thinking twice, 21 percent of them after just one launch. With all these user demands, what sets the successful apps above the rest? What can app professionals do to make sure their app doesn’t disappear into the app store graveyard?
The answer lies in understanding users and tapping into their deepest unmet needs. An app team that understands what its users want — even before they know it themselves — is already positioning the app for success. That’s why it’s vital at every stage of the process to acknowledge a few undeniable truths about your users, in order to better understand their needs and desires. This guide will show you how mobile app users have changed and pinpoint several basic needs for you to address.
Image source: Unsplash
A guide to the genus “user”
Users are complicated creatures, but after all, we are all users: we all download and launch apps every day, and we all have preferences that make us delete this app and keep the other. There can be many reasons behind these often-unconscious choices, but usually they can be grouped into several basic traits.
With no time and plenty of options, users are quick to say “bye.”
You can probably empathize with this: users have no time. They want to start using the features as soon as their fingers can tap. This is due to the principle of least effort. This principle has a huge impact on an app’s success. Users are quick to abandon apps that don’t instantly meet their needs, especially since there are plenty of competitors to choose from.
The principle of least effort states that a person “will strive to solve their problems in such a way as to minimize the total work that they must expend.” In mobile apps, this means that users want to accomplish the task they came to do on the app in the minimum number of steps — faster than on desktop. Take to-do list apps for example. Users want to add tasks to their list quickly. An app that makes them go through several steps before the “Add Task” event simply isn’t giving them what they need. Another example is onboarding: many users prefer to skip it altogether, but aren’t given the option.
How do you know if your app follows the principle of least effort? By monitoring user behavior and being on the lookout for points of frustration — especially on problem-prone areas like onboarding, navigation menus and payment screens. There are many app analytics platforms that can help you do this well. Following navigation paths is a good way to spot issues with menus and navigation. A detailed conversion funnel analysis will indicate where users are dropping off. Finally, touch heatmaps can spot specific points of user frustration.
Users can skip onboarding and get right to Remember the Milk’s sign up screen. Image source: Remember the Milk
Users have their hands full.
After a decade of smartphone use, our phones are so connected to our hands that we don’t need both to operate them. Depending on the tasks users perform on the app, there’s a lot to consider when planning the size and placement of each element. It’s not just about reach — users have complained that certain elements don’t respond as well to their thumb gestures in general. Also, some mobile app users, such as young children and seniors, will have unique user interface needs according to their dexterity.
How do you ensure a smooth gesture user experience? Imagine when and where your users will be interacting with the app. Will it be on their morning commute, with a cup of coffee in their other hand? Will they be using the app while doing something else, like cooking, playing an instrument or working out? Creating these scenarios can help you in the design stage of your app. Then, from testing to post launch, your analytics tools will help you see these scenarios through.
Apps that rely heavily on swiping gestures, such as Tinder, are designed to be easy to use with one hand. Image source: Tinder
Users are not going to use your app the way you intended.
The fact that an app is designed to be used in a certain way doesn’t mean that the user will use it that way. They might use it for a completely different purpose than you and your design team have imagined. After all, Frisbees were originally meant to hold pies. Some users might download a note-taking app, for example, and end up using it to make shopping lists.
This misalignment of expectations can lead to a common ailment of mobile apps: unresponsive gestures. A user taps the screen expecting the app to behave in a certain way, only to find that this action is impossible. One example is when users try to swipe in order to get to the next screen, but the app’s designers never created such a function. These scenarios can lead to a lot of repetitive, frustrated tap-tap-tapping, users “killing” the app or abandonment.
The spots on this touch heatmap show all users’ unresponsive gestures on the app’s login screen. Image source: Appsee
They don’t trust you.
In a world where security breaches happen even to market leaders, it’s only natural for users to feel skittish when giving their personal information online. One hiccup in the payment process, account creation screen or any interaction that asks for personal details — and they’ll bolt.
How do you make your users trust you? Give them a reason to. In general, to get users to trust you, you have to give before you take. This is called the Reciprocity Principle, and it means giving your users a reason to trust them before you start asking for their trust.
For example, on the often-stressful payment screen, give them signs that they’re safe: a certification badge for whatever payment SDK you’re using and/or an icon indicating a secure connection. Display their total and shipping address at all times. You should also include some friendly, transparent microcopy. All of these will make your users feel that they’re in safe hands — and so is their bank account.
The Headspace app explains why notifications will help them enjoy the app to its fullest, by having users set a reminder for meditation before prompting them with the permission request. Image source: Headspace
Summary
Mobile technology’s lightning-fast advancement has created app users that are picky, tech-savvy and impatient. Mobile app professionals need to keep this top of mind when ideating, designing and optimizing new apps. To create a successful app, they need to get to know their target audience, understand their preferences and desires and address them one by one. By doing this, app creators can tap into previously unmet needs, earning a loyal user base and setting their app above competitors. These initiatives can save an app from disappearing into the app store ether.
Trends change in every arena from fashion to education every day. Similar is the case of software development trends. In fact, in the era of digitalization, software development is one of those fields which is changing at an extremely fast pace.
Every year brings some brand new surprises for software developers. 2018 was the year of complete acceleration for the software development companies worldwide. From blockchain to Artificial intelligence, software technologies have remained a hot topic throughout the year.
According to a report by Gartner in 2018, the IT industry has seen dramatic growth. It has also forecast growth of 8.3 % in 2019. Below is an image of exact figures from the published report:
The reason behind the growth of every industry majorly depends on the innovations introduced in that field. No static industry can see such remarkable results and this is the hard work of full-stack developers that we can view some awesome changing trends in this industry.
Every year restyling and enhancements in software development technologies are creating new trends. New technologies from PWAs to blockchain are getting a larger market constantly.
According to a report by Statista, global blockchain technology worldwide is predicted to increase dramatically from the year 2016 to 2021. Undoubtedly, it has become a hot topic in the tech world from the past few years. Here is the statical representation of the same report:
There are many other software development trends in 2019 that need your attention. We are discussing some of the most popular ones here:
Artificial intelligence:
Artificial intelligence is not much complicated to understand for a layman. In fact, every person has some idea about this technology. It involves developing software that thinks intelligently in the same manner as a human.
Today software developing companies are inculcating and shifting to AI as a necessity. It helps to improvise the tasks and increasing the business in the software market. It has reached the fields like healthcare as well which has widened the scope of constant experiments by developers.
2. Blockchain:
We have already discussed the current scenario and predictions of the highlighted technology in the contemporary world. Blockchain technology relates to simplifying banking transactions like transferring money by creating a single ledger for different parties.
All these services need blockchain software which is why a large number of full-stack developers would be needed to serve in this sector. The advantageous and growing opportunities in this arena have made more eCommerce development companies to extend their arms in blockchain services.
3. Code quality:
As technology is flourishing, it is essential to focus on the quality of your codes and language trends also. The need for the year 2019 is to have a special eye on the development approach as well.
The low code development is also on a rising trend in the software industry. This means that even non-technical employees can be hired to program software by information technology companies.
Every software developing company must have clear development approaches and structures to provide coding to their software. The task type should decide the coding quality and structure solely for the best outcomes.
4. Language trends:
Most of the full stack developers are using Javascript to program the software. The popularity of this language is due to its great adaptivity for hybrid applications as well.
It is essentially vital to choose the correct language to avoid any kind of repercussions in the later stage. There are various surveys that let us know about the popularity of different languages.
In the stack overflow survey of commonly used programming languages, Node.js scored 49.9% and Angular scored 39.6%. Some other popular languages are React, .NET core, spring etc. Here is the graphical representation of their findings:
This data clearly shows the most used and popular languages which are in trend this year in software developing industries. You can utilize this information to finalize your year plan in software development.
5. Progressive web applications:
These applications are different from regular mobile apps. You can understand it as a hybrid of web applications and mobile applications. They work on a script called service worker and it is their integral part.
They are faster to load and provides some amazing features like push notifications. PWAs are easy to develop and maintain which is why many mobile app development companies have focussed on them in recent years.
6. Cybersecurity:
Security is an issue in every parameter of human life and this issue spreads its presence in all sizes of business as well. Data and software loss threats have become a major part to look out by software developers.
The image below shows the data that has been lost or stolen industry wise in 2017 by a report published by Wipro in 2018.
This report is evidence that almost every industry is facing cybersecurity issues and they all look upon the software industry for support which makes it a trendy service requirement in the IT sector.
7. Outsourcing:
Global outsourcing market is rising every year and has tremendous trends. A survey by Statista shows the global market size of outsourcing services. A graphical representation of the same survey is given below:
This gives a clear picture that the outsourcing market is on a rising spree worldwide. IT industry also has many outsourcing projects as business owners prefer outsourcing developers rather than hiring in-house developers.
Industries in all almost every arena in the age of digitalization have a high demand for full stack developers to look into their software needs. From healthcare to accounting, software requirements are rising with every passing year.
Final words:
These trends very clearly give an idea about the constant research and development that is taking place in this industry. It creates the need for immediate and continual updates on the part of companies and developers.
The software development is working at a full and same pace all over the world. The one thing that every developer must keep in mind is that change is vital and inevitable. Every software developing company must focus on the evolution of the industry and follow the same trend to become a leader.
Every designer alive has heard of Dieter Rams’s 10 Principles of Design–the legendary designer’s quick-reference rules for making products, developed in his early days at Braun. But never has the list been presented with such a strong visual thesis as it is in the documentary Rams, by Gary Hustwit. The documentary was released in select theaters in 2018 (read my story on it here) but Hustwit recently shared this intriguing new clip online. It’s a fascinating, four-minute thesis about how Rams articulated his design philosophy through consumer products.
In the documentary, the 10 Principles of Design sequence feels quite different than what comes before or after. While Hustwit films Rams himself with a locked-down tripod, creating crisp, impeccably balanced frames, the list breaks out of this stoicism, embracing multi-panel animations and a bit of whimsy.
“I wanted this section to feel different than the rest of the film to try to put a new spin on his list,” says Hustwit.
Rosie Garschina, who was creative director at branding and design firm Trollbäck+Company, led the production of this segment. Her goal was to figure out how to illustrate the commandments of Rams through the objects he designed. Over the course of several months, Garschina’s team storyboarded and concepted ideas, eventually pairing rules like “Good design makes a product understandable” with a butt coming in from off-screen and plopping down on top of Rams’s 740 stool.
[Image: courtesy Gary Hustwit]
The multiple video panels should feel dated, like a trick out of early-1980s broadcast TV segment–but in this case, it works. The panels solve a real problem: “We wanted to make sure, first of all, having the panels provide the opportunity to show more than one functionality at the same time,” as Garschina explains.
Gary Hustwit on set during the shooting of the sequence. [Image: courtesy Gary Hustwit]
Besides, if the list was shot like an Ikea catalog, with one full-frame product and a bit of text, it would just get dull. “To carry you through the experience, we wanted to have a cadence to it that would speed up and ramp down, so there was a consistent interest throughout the whole sequence,” says Garschina, “because it was quite long.”
In any case, the segment is a superb palette cleanser in the film, and a charming visualization of Rams’s ideas on its own–even if those ideas were never meant to be set in stone. If you didn’t catch Rams in the theater, you can buy the film on Vimeo now. It comes to iTunes and Amazon this March.
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If you’re looking for the most anticipated books of 2019, chances are your search will start with Google and end at Amazon. Chances are even better that one book cover will consistently jump off the screen: Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, its graphic white title entwining with a writhing, jewel-toned print of a shape-shifting beast. This first book in the Booker Prize–winning author’s Dark Star trilogy, a queer, Afrofuturist fantasy series, has already been called the “African Game of Thrones.” (Another tagline: the literary Black Panther.) It’s clearly being positioned by publishers and booksellers as a cultural icon, with a blazing cover to match.
Scroll on through the best-of lists and other titles will pop just as loudly: The title of Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain gleams in gold letters over a drippy green abstraction of leaves. Helen Oyeyemi’s Ginger Bread shouts in bold yellow against a lightly ombré coral backdrop, its plane broken by a black crow grasping a gleaming tangerine. And Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things features a twisted, hand-drawn flamingo on a field of avocado green, with the title scrawled over it in what appears to be a fat white sharpie.
None of these titles is available yet, but anywhere you find them online will likely direct you to preorder on Amazon. [Ed.: Guilty.] In fact, their covers are designed to ensure that you will.At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature. That means that where fine details once thrived, splashyprints have taken over, grounding text that’s sturdy enough to be deciphered on screens ranging from medium to miniscule.
If books have design eras, we’re in an age of statement wallpaper and fatty text. We have the internet to thank — and not just the interface but the economy that’s evolved around it. From the leather-bound volumes of old to lurid mass-market paperbacks, book covers were never designed in a vacuum. Their presentation had everything to do with the way books were made, where and how and to whom they were sold. And when you look at book covers right now, what you’ll see blaring back at you, bold and dazzling, is a highly competitive marketing landscape dominated by online retail, social media, and their curiously symbiotic rival, the resurgent independent bookstore.
Since the beginning of print, covers have reflected the aesthetics, and the technologies, of their day. The 1950s, for example, saw the debut of Penguin’s classic vertical-grid convention in paperback design, in conjunction with the new popularity of books bound in paper. Into the ’60s, the advent of the Polaroid introduced realist images to the book cover, and the ’70s brought free-form design and psychedelia.
Over the next 20 years, as Gregg Kulick, an art director at Little, Brown, recalls, the focus turned to more intricate distinctions. “If you look at the AIGA 50 design competition winners from the ’90s,” says Kulick, “the type is so much smaller and more delicate because people’s interface with a book was at a bookstore.” And then came the web. “Now you see more of a large-type interplay with a texture behind it, because that’s what plays on a little thumbnail on the internet.”
Today’s market pressures extend far beyond decreasing the viewable size of the product. Since 2013, two things have happened in publishing: sales of print books have increased by nearly 11 percent, and at the same time, the industry has lost about a billion dollars in revenue, thanks to Amazon’s undercutting of book prices. This leaves publishers with a killer combination of higher stakes and fewer resources, which leads in turn to safer choices. “People are taking a lot fewer risks than they used to,” says Kulick. They opt for designs they know will work. Hence, our current trend.
It’s also never been harder to know exactly what does work in book marketing. Because publishers don’t sell directly to consumers, instead funneling copies through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores, they’re unable to gather much data on purchasing patterns. Amazon, for example, only shares titles’ daily sales numbers — a crude metric at best.
Of course, Amazon mines its own data intensively, refining search algorithms that are opaque to readers and publishers alike. (Its expansion into physical retail is widely regarded as just another data-collection tool.) And on its own proprietary reading device, the Kindle (another trove of data), the cover almost ceases to matter at all.
Left with blunt tools and fuzzy math, book marketing and design departments resort to instinct and look for ways to produce the most visible proof of concept: publicity. And where do we go for publicity in this age of tech disruption? Social media.
Books that are designed to render well on digital screens also look great on social. Let’s return for a moment to our avatar of great publicity, Marlon James. Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s publisher, Riverhead Books, has an Instagram account so pristine, so archetypical of contemporary design, that you’d think its jackets were all designed explicitly to sit there and rack up likes — likes that ideally convert to sales.
“Instagram is a major tool now in ginning up excitement that we used to see in print magazines,” says Emma Straub, Riverhead-published author and owner of the Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic.
She’s referring, of course, to the latte-laden still lifes that influencers post to brag about receiving an advance copy of a book, or the artful arrangements they use to signify literate lifestyles arranged in bold colors.
A week before its release, Black Leopard, Red Wolf already appears on Instagram in popular poses — atop a spectrum of pebbles, nestled in bed sheets next to fuzzy dogs, and perched beside an array of foamy drinks, building name recognition among fantasy lovers before it goes on sale.
It’s a classic rule of marketing: The more touch points a potential reader has with a particular book — the more times they see a cover posted by an account they trust — the more likely they are to buy. Consider a fairly recent Instagram success. “Alex Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is a book that people posted pictures of so many times that word-of-mouth became word-of-eye,” says Straub. “Not only would someone come in and say, ‘I’ve heard about this book,’ but they’d know what it looked like.”
In a marriage of irony and logic, a book that pops in a filtered miniature Instagram still life can declare its presence just as loudly from across the room, particularly in the boutique environment of the modern independent bookstore. In the wake of Barnes & Noble’s decline, as a certain type of consumer has grown to fetishize the local and the IRL, indie bookshops have enjoyed a surprising resurgence. Their ranks increased by 35 percent between 2009 and 2015, according to the American Booksellers Association, enriching the U.S. with over 2,300 independent bookstores today.
Within their communities, both in person and online, these stores function as the ultimate literary influencers, providing an appealing space and expert guidance. They also, as often as not, re-create the idiosyncratic touches — the homey flourishes and nostalgic signage — of visually driven social media. Inevitably, customers are as likely to photograph the shelves as they are to read what’s on them. Who could resist capturing this curated, analog utopia?
So we find ourselves in the recursive modern world of bookselling, tumbling through an endless loop from the physical to digital and back again. Confusing as that loop may be, it’s an apt summation of this moment in design.
People like the way things look on the internet: idealized, controlled, insulated from the chaos of reality. So why shouldn’t our everyday objects — and particularly our books, where we’ve always turned for escape — give us that same feeling in person? Helen Yentus, the Riverhead art director responsible for most of the covers mentioned here, says that today’s cover art needs to be ambidextrous. “We have to make sure what we make works equally well in both settings,” she says. “If you miss the details, you’re still getting an interesting, captivating visual, but if you’re giving it a closer look, the details are there.”
In fact, we might now be in the second wave of internet-forward book design. This year’s patterns are more pictorial than the simple geometries of, say, R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries or Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion. They also double down on the interaction between text and image, breaking the plane of the text in ways that can only be fully appreciated through physical contact. On the rich, matte cover of Black Leopard, Red Wolf,one of the shape-shifter’s eyes loops through the second O, and a talon creeps out from under the K. The letters in Bangkok Wakes to Rain are overlapped by the stylized drips falling across the cover’s forested background. These details feel like rewards for those committed to reading on paper; Easter eggs hidden throughout the bookstore.
The delight of the in-person experience doesn’t change the reality that most people will continue to buy their books online. But as our physical and digital worlds converge, books — or at least their covers — are finding a way to straddle both. You can have your eye candy and read it, too.
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