Friday reading #4

Number four in what looks like an increasingly permanent feature - gathering together some of the things I’ve read or noted over the week on a Friday, so you can load up your Kindle or Instapaper or Pocket app for the weekend. Please let me know if you find it useful...

Friday reading

“A refresh of BBC's TV channel homepages” - Dave Killeen, BBC Internet blog
An interesting look at how the BBC has made these pages responsives – including the device screens they are targeting. And here is my own blog post from 2005 when I was involved in a relaunch of bbc.co.uk/tv
Read the full article

“What’s next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?” - Peter Yared, Venture Beat
Failed? Cripes. Most people haven’t even started with it yet. A decent point about getting user experience right gets lost somewhere in a needlessly provocative post
Read the full article

“Responsive Design: The New Whipping Boy” - Brad Colbow, Colbow Design
“It’s just a shame that what he [Kirin Prasad who heads up LinkedIn’s mobile design team] decided to bash was responsive design. For LinkedIn to go responsive they would have to cut crufty features. That would require admitting they were wrong about old unused features. That would require wading neck deep into the company’s bureaucracy. That would require getting buy in from all levels of management. That stuff is hard, maybe impossible. But starting over from scratch with an app, that’s doable. It’s just a shame that a design technique is getting all the flack for content problems.”
Read the full article

“Digital revenues round-up: who's earning what and how” - Paul McNally, journalism.co.uk
“Digital revenue growth ranging from nine to 58 per cent year-on-year has been a common theme running through all of the major publicly listed UK news companies' latest financial results.”
Read the full article

“Lean UX Is Not Anti-deliverable” - Jeff Gothelf, Johnny Holland
“Let me be very clear: Lean UX is not ‘anti-deliverables.’ It is a refocusing of UX efforts away from the documentation for which we’ve become known inside and outside organizations. It moves towards validating product hypotheses that relieve the organization of wasteful practices that include designing and building products and features customers don’t actually want.”
Read the full article

“Discontent” - Jeffrey Zeldman, Cognition
“If our designs don’t serve content, users will find ways to get the content anyway. Used by millions, apps like Instapaper and Readability now deliver great reading experiences when the designer forgets to. Of course, users have always had the ability to tailor their web reading experience: a custom style sheet here, a non-default font setting there. But these days, it’s not just those with special needs or quirky personalities who are changing our designs on the fly. It’s ordinary users who care about content.”
Read the full article

“Do A/B tests focus us on the wrong problems?” - Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering
“The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.”
Read the full article

“Hack the cover” - Craig Mod
“If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can't hurt them. They're dead. So let's start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.” [Lovely essay which @solle pointed me to]
Read the full article

Things you might have missed...

By me on currybetdotnet and the Guardian this week:

• Election coverage is changing fast – can traditional media keep up? on the Guardian Media Network
• Platforms not pages - solving problems with The Atavist, n0tice and Journajobs.eu
• “It’s all about content. It’s not about content” - Giles Colborne’s IA Summit Redux at London IA
• “Making sense of messy problems” - Johanna Kollmann at London IA
• “It’s all about content. It’s not about content” - Giles Colborne’s IA Summit Redux at London IA
• Situation vacant: Head of UX at the Guardian