D&T Issue 10

Hey!

Hope you had a good week! This week I’ll get straight to business instead of small talk. Because you know I am all about the business. It has nothing to do with laziness.

Anyway, here you go:

Google just let word out that it is investing around $4bn into Jio. Fb earlier this year put around 5. Isn’t it a little strange that these two behemoths are pseudo joining hands to get in on the action? There’s also something to be said about how none of these players is even putting up a fight rather than just joining hands.

We tend to draw thick lines between work and life. In reality, spending 8+ hours a day working with teams makes up for experiences that mold us gradually. Design in our case is a creative field that requires thinking, solving problems and subjective considerations. Such processes naturally invite vulnerability as opposed to scrutiny and objectification of output. It’s, however, the latter that’s dominant. Here’s a good read on collaboration in design as a function and what could make for more conducive environments that bolster productivity.

Much like in everyday life, humour holds a key role in defining product experiences. It alleviates tension, ads value and can overall bring a sense of delight to the product which is invaluable in the customer experience

The Browser Company claims it’s time for a major upgrade to how we experience the internet and they are on a mission to compete with the dominant incumbent. Also interestingly, this new browser hitting the market was co-founded by a former Obama staff member, Joshua Miller, who previously served as the White House’s director of Product. Here’s an additional short take by Techcrunch

The Spotify team has been making some noise lately and rightfully so. Here’s the team describing how they iterated through the heart micro interaction and implemented it in the app. Did you know the original Fb like button took 300 hrs to design? Here’s a ted talk by Margaret Gould Stewart on how massive products design for the user.

Introduces the magical math that secures our digital lives. It is presented graphically so complex ideas can be appreciated by the expert and layperson alike. Encryption, digital signatures, key agreements etc.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. While trying to make experiences as simple as possible for users, we have arrived at products that abstract important aspects of products which ask critical questions. A classic case is the terms and conditions of websites. Sure, no ones wants to go through it. But is it wise to not know what you are signing up for?

Have you wondered how Conv-nets work? They essentially operate as a matrix on an image pixel matrix to perform an action called a convolution. And that’s how filters are born as well. Here’s a good, short look at it.

Emojis appeared in the sccene around 1999 in Japan while emoticons have been around for close to 40 years now. How has this visual mode of communication evolved and what does it say about our need to be heard? Read on Google Design.