Noah Mittman

Principles of Human-Centered Design (Don Norman)

Design is never neutral

Designers can’t simply make digital products easier to use. They have to think about what’s in the best interests of the user, writes Adobe’s Khoi Vinh.<p>To their own detriment, designers prefer to think about “how” much more than “why.” Here’s a good example–or perhaps it would be more appropriate …

What exactly does it mean to call for “ethics in design”?

Just about everything around you has been designed—but not always by people who consider inclusion.

Designing For Micro-Moments

18 min read<p>Share on Twitter or LinkedIn<p>Smashing Newsletter<p>Upgrade your inbox and get our editors’ picks twice a month.<p>With useful tips for web devs. …

Idle Words

<b>21.09.2017</b><p>On September 18, the British Channel 4 ran a news segment with the headline, 'Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are ‘frequently bought …

Are we designers shamelessly good at self promotion? — UX Essay #1

website<p>http://essays.uxdesign.cc/<p>Are we designers shamelessly good at self promotion? — UX Essay #1<p>An analysis of the state of design publishing and …

Ethical OS Toolkit As technologists, it’s only natural that we spend most of our time focusing on how our tech will change the world for the better. Which is great. Everyone loves a sunny disposition. But perhaps it’s more useful, in some ways, to consider the glass half empty. What

As technologists, it’s only natural that we spend most of our time focusing on how our tech will change the world for the better. Which is great. …

A native lazy load for the Web platform

A new Chrome feature dubbed “Blink LazyLoad” is designed to dramatically improve performance by deferring the load of below-the-fold images and third …

Netflix tests a bypass of iTunes billing in 33 markets

Netflix is one of the highest-grossing apps on the iOS App Store, but it looks like the video streaming giant is contemplating how it might make an even bigger margin on its iPhone and iPad users.<p>TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Netflix, in its own words, is “testing the iTunes payment …

You Can't Keep Sims Sober

<i>The Sims</i> is a pretty good simulacrum of human life. Sims fall in and out of love, move, change careers, have families, and grow old. It’s easy to see …

A Narrative Strategy Game That Confronts the Nature of Power

A lot of games are about collecting of power and resources, but 'Dust & Salt' asks how and why you want to wield them.<p><i>Postscript</i> <i>is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.</i><p>The title of <i>Dust & Salt</i> came into focus about an hour …

Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?

Want to yell like a real chef in Overcooked 2? These restaurant workers share how

Orders fall behind. Something starts to burn. The bliss of getting a plate out on time is short lived as orders replenish. Then the yelling begins. …

Giant Bomb Still Changing Video Games Media Ten Years Later

What’s your favorite Giant Bomb moment?<p>The bellicose “Mario Party” livestreams? The miraculous <i>Persona 4</i> endurance run? The time Brad Shoemaker went …

Sinistar or: How to Play Games Wrong

American Students in Italy Start Fire Trying to Cook Pasta Without Water

Most people have had a cooking disaster or two in their lives, but the vast majority of the time, those failures only embarrass the person at the …

An Exploration of Variable Fonts

Variable Fonts are the latest addition to the OpenType font format and change the way we make and use fonts on desktop and web. In short, they offer …

Valve quietly unveils streaming platform Steam TV

It already went live by streaming Valve's 'Dota 2' esports tournament.<p>Valve seems to have unveiled a Twitch competitor with nary a peep of fanfare. A few hours after Steam Database founder Pavel Djundik discovered that the company registered the domain steam.tv, the website started live streaming …

Does your Google News change based on whether you’re conservative or liberal?

How much do algorithms encourage echo chambers? We know that the information people receive can be very different depending on the terms they Google — and that can lead to fears about people with different political leanings receiving very different news. A small study that will be published in …

This spaghetti-breaking problem stumped physicist Richard Feynman. Two MIT students have now solved it.

A quick Google search of the current biggest mysteries in physics turns up a daunting list of questions: What exactly is dark matter? Why does time only move in one direction? What happens inside a black hole?<p>But sometimes, as American physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman discovered decades …

Alexa is very confused by little kids

Kids love to play with Alexa. Voice-activated assistants are a bottomless source of entertainment, offering knock-knock jokes, bedtimes stories, and animal facts on demand. There’s just one problem: Alexa and her smart-speaker ilk don’t always know how to come out to play.<p>Up to around age five, …

How the shared family computer protected us from our worst selves

Long before phone addiction panic gripped the masses and before screen time became a facet of our wellness and digital detoxes, there was one good and wise piece of technology that served our families. Maybe it was in the family room or in the kitchen. It could have been a Mac or PC. Chances are it …

Digital Nomads Are Not the Future

In an era of increasingly precarious jobs, ever-longer working hours, and declining social mobility, it’s no surprise that digital nomads are gaining …

The product designer’s toolbox – UX Collective

Brainstorming and Ideation<p>Pen and paper<p>When English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton cointed the phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” in 1839, he …

Self-Service UX: 'Cards' Dashboards Must Be Highly Consistent and Appropriately Styled

During our large-scale Self-Service E-Commerce usability testing, test sites employed a variety of layouts for user account dashboards.<p>Each layout — …

Proactive UX Design: A Big Leap Requiring Baby Steps

These days, we’re seeing more teams successfully bring more <i>proactive user experience design</i> into their projects. It’s not easy, but the results are …

Why YouTubers are feeling the burn

I’m hesitant to badmouth the algorithm. YouTubers can use it as a bit of a scapegoat Charlie McDonnell<p>When Lucy Moon sat down with her therapist to discuss why she was feeling so low, she was on top of the world. A burgeoning career as a YouTuber was in mid-bloom: her subscriber count – an …

“What Have We Done?”: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They've Created a Monster

Gig-economy companies like Uber and Instacart are on the verge of overtaking the traditional economy. And the only people who understand the threat are the ones enabling it.<p><b>In the heart</b> of San Francisco, the gig economy reigns supreme. Walk into a grocery store, and a large number of shoppers you …

The Difficulty with Linearity | Mini-Read

Skin Deep

For a modern racial allegory, David Cage repeats a lot of history's mistakes