Friday reading #18
The first Friday Reading list since I revived my interest in RSS feeds - and there is no appreciable difference this week. I think most of the links came via tweets of one sort or another. Anyway, regardless of source, here is a collection of long(-ish) read articles that I found interesting whilst knocking around the e-webs this week. Follow the individual links below, or get the whole bundle wrapped up in one handy iOS/Kindle friendly reading list at Readlists.
Friday reading
“Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery” -Rian van der Merwe, A List Apart
“The Lean Startup concept of ‘Minimum Viable Product’ is certainly useful, but shouldn’t we rather focus on Minimum Desirable Products?”
Read the full article
“Why It’s Important to Sketch Before You Wireframe” - Anthony T, UX Movement
“Sketching sets the tone for the rest of the design process. It’s key in crafting the user experience and communicating it to others. You may think that you don’t need to sketch because you already know exactly what you want and how the interface should look. But when you actually do sketch, you’ll realize that there are more possibilities than you initially thought. And that the path that you were so set on might not work the best.”
Read the full article
“What can journalism learn from computer science?” - Anna Codrea-Rado, Tow Center for Digital Journalism
“Integrating technology into journalism, however, doesn’t simply mean installing Excel on newsroom computers, or teaching journalism students basic HTML and CSS. Applying core computing concepts to reporting and story telling can not only improve journalists’ production efficiency, but also shape their narratives.”
Read the full article
“Picturing Books” - Jacket Mechanical
A lengthy exploration of how we visually perceive literary characters aswe discover them in a novel. “Do stories and their native inhabitants seem sketchy because we are bad at imagining? Maybe the muscles we use to imagine are growing weaker as our culture ages. Before the age of photography and film did we picture better, more clearly, than we do now?”
Read the full article
“The Web That Can’t Wait” - Rahel Aima, Rhizome
“This kind of pearl clutching over time poverty and the whirling hyperkineticism of the Web is nothing new. A few decades into the Internet, the browser has become cemented as the new battleground. At face, debates about the experience of reading online rest on a collective nostalgia for the book as an aesthetic object. What’s really at stake is the practice of reading itself: when, where, and on whose platform.”
Read the full article
“Using Writing Smells to Refactor Your Email” - Adarsh Pandit, Giant robots smashing into other giant robots
Good set of rules of thumb for improving the way you write emails to people.
Read the full article
“Between Two Worlds” - Eloquently Twisted
“I don’t really talk about my [autistic] sister. It’s never been because I am ashamed of her. More so that my feelings surrounding her are a tangled mess of hurts, loves and fears.” Incredibly moving and honest essay . [via @SimonNRicketts]
Read the full article
“The village where people have dementia – and fun” - Jon Henley,
guardian.co.uk
“Two of the staff who worked here [in a nursing home] unexpectedly lost their mothers. Each said to the other: Well, at least it happened quickly, and they didn’t end up here; this place is so horrible. Then they realised what they'd just said, and started to think: what kind of home would we like for a relative with dementia? Where might we want to live, maybe, one day? How would we like our life to be; what would we hope to experience?”
Read the full article
Things you may have missed
“The lost art of RSS reading” - Martin Belam, currybetdotnet
“I prompted for a show of hands, and out of a group of 40 people - who were all involved in making the web in one way or another - only a couple put their hands up to admit to using RSS readers.”
Read the full article
“‘So you think you want to be a Uxer?’ - New date and book announced” - Martin Belam, currybetdotnet
“if you can’t get to the training itself, I’m very happy to be able to say that the Guardian have also commissioned a book version of ‘So you think you want to be a Uxer?’, which will be out later in the autumn.”
Read the full article
“EuroIA is nearly upon us” - Martin Belam, currybetdotnet
“It is just about a month to go until EuroIA, which this year is being held in Rome.”
Read the full article
Forthcoming talks and events
I’ll be talking and teaching at the following events over the next couple of months:
- 14 September: “brightonSEO” - Brighton
- 17 September: “So you think you want to be a UXer?” - evening course, London
- 25 September: “Mobile media strategies” - London
- 27 September: “Responsive IA” - half-day workshop, Rome
- 29 September: “IA in the touchscreen era” - EuroIA, Rome
- 10 October: “Improve your blogging” - evening workshop, London
- 16/17 October: “a4uexpo Performance Marketing Conference & Exhibition” - Facebook talk, London
- 29-31 October: “World Publishing Expo” - Frankfurt, Germany
- 20/21 November: “Online information” - London