D&T Issue 8

Hey again! How was your week? I am asking this with no burden of a reply, it’s a completely non-committal question. It’s perfectly fine to not reply back with a status quo on your well being. We’ve been great, just so you know.

Btw, did you check the last episode of Hasan Minhaj’s The Patriot Act? Its around the concept of Dark Patterns in UX and how the US giant Intuit is using that to get users to pay over $100 to file their taxes while luring them in claiming the process to be free. Search for Turbotax!

Anyway, here are some of the things that happened and that you might want to know about.

What was the most viral product that twitter talked about last week? What product raised $200k for 3 separate charities? What product created extreme, evident FOMO among investors last week? A non-product. It was a joke and it didn’t exist. But it proved the point of its existence and the power of foo in viral marketing.

An odd link, not an article but worth a read. Here’s a very popular credit comment on the amount of Data TikTok fetches from your device and it’s various antics to great an information identity map of yours. Hint: It’s scary.

Oldie but goodie. Aptly name “User Inyerface” features a hilariously “well designed” example of bad design and what not to do on interface and ux design. A master class in what not to master!

Salient thought piece on how it’s not about any “app” that can solve your problem but to rejig your thought process to use tech as a means to solve customer and business problems.

Its $2500 for the full course and it’s going to be US first. It’s called Remdesivir by Gilead. it doesn’t reduce the chances of death. [make what you will of that]

This is a beautiful write up on how birds evolved to have spectacular respiratory systems which make ours look bad. Why they can fly over the Everest which has around 30% of normal oxygen levels.

Design to the rescue in these times of Crisis. In an effort to capture Design’s response to the urgent and far-reaching needs of this moment of crisis, Design Vanguard has a compilation of 100+ stories of how Design has evolved during the times of Covid to create a better, safer, more resilient, and sustainable world.

Meteorologist and climate change at the Correspondent (formerly at WSJ), Eric Holthaus puts in his two cents about how humans will migrate and settle over the next 3 decades.

As your product teams move into UATs and general product tests at home, Filipina UI/UX designer Renee Fleck of First Circle writes about how to effectively set up user test groups in order to maximise the value of testing rounds even when your teams are distributed.

Full disclosure, the app, Chingari, looks like a disaster. But to their credit, their infra is holding up insane traffic in the last 3-4 days. They are onboarding 300,000 users an hour as of today.
Meanwhile Zee5 has also announced it’s launching “HiPi” for content creators. Brownie points for guessing who they hired to design it. It rhymes with the word canvas.

Here are all the Chinese apps banned and their alternatives.