Hey!
Looks like humanity’s everlasting search for a home away from the home it had littered is seeing some rays of hope especially given how aside of finding phosphine in Venus we now found water below Mars’ surface! The timing is almost unreal given how space flight is getting privatised now. Well, conspiracies aside, here are this week’s reading:
Growth.Design is specifically fantastic at this and this piece is just as good. It talks about how Tik Tok makes conscious choices to pick implicit behavioural patterns rather than explicit ones! For instance, it matters more how you interact with the options given to you that the options you choose. Gestures have always been big for them.
Talking of gesture tracking, here’s a Chrome extension that records browser interactions and generates a Puppeteer or Playwright script. It can record clicks and type events, copy to clipboard, show what events are being recorded, and more. Only certain events are recorded.
UI recorder is a close relative.
Most groundbreaking tech comes with good intentions. We are currently placing tech in pig brains to see how they respond. That will help humans eventually move past addictions and mental health issues. MIT has come up with new tech that manipulates your dreams by combining an app with a sleep-tracking device called Dormio. They used a technique called targeted dream incubation and successfully placed certain intended topics in a person’s brain. Tech like this is purported to boost creativity or confront sources of stress and trauma
BBC Horizon documentary from 1981 on electronic graphics: ‘Painting by Numbers’. Horizon presents a documentary on the advances of computer graphics and its multiple uses in simulating reality in industry and science. It looks at the manipulation of 3-D images to paint, animate, design, and test scientific hypothesis.
While being in the weeds of designing, it’s easy to get lost in project requirements, technical jargon, and personal opinions. By the end, the user isn’t even part of the conversation. Since a user flow is from the perspective of the user, it keeps the designers grounded in the fact that they’re designing a real life situation for another human being. User Flows hence become critical in major decisions while ideating and throughout the design process
A super read on how Booking.com solved the problem of having an inconsistent illustration style across its 100+ strong product team.
A long investigative piece around the atrocious acts of eBay against some very small time bloggers in Boston and the lengths they went to hide it.
Here’s an Airtable of a multitude of user research tools made by Ustwo especially in the interest of the current remote times. Ustwo is a legendary design studio and is also the makers of the beautiful game Monument Valley!
A very relevant piece on how user interfaces need to be designed such that users feel like the other side cares. If you want the user to use your product you should make sure you put on your best step forward and show that you care for their approval.
Have a nice week ahead. See you soon!
