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“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

Design thinking, however, is a slightly murky concept that means different things to different people. At heart, though, it is about fusing the creative and open-ended with the analytical and operational

For us, there are two broad skill sets--strategy and design--with no buffer in between to organize them and tell them how to work together.

a lot of organizations take a slightly patronizing view of design and creative types, assuming they can’t really be expected to understand and manage things like budgets. We assume the opposite--that everyone can and should be a good businessperson.

Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device

Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.

Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern

The parallax style has excited web developers and inspired any number of hype lists. It's also triggered a backlash among critics who feel its bells-and-whistles approach detracts from actual content. Pitchfork creative director Michael Renaud recently told the Atlantic Wire he expects people to "tire" of the trend within a year or two.

the parallax site was only superior in one sense--fun. None of the other survey measures indicated a significant difference in user experience between the two sites. Parallax didn't even edge the standard site in questions about visual appeal (although participants did think it looked slightly more "professional"). Frederick also discovered one critical disadvantage of parallax: test participants who suffered from motion sickness found the style disorienting.

Sobering as this first careful study of parallax might be to web designers, Frederick still believes it's a fad with a future. He cautions developers to think more carefully about the context in which parallax is applied. Text-heavy sites that employ parallax scrolling seem more likely to disorient users, he says. Sites that emphasize visual elements--images, infographics, or data visualizations, in particular--are probably a better fit for the style.

Couldn’t the NYT just know what I’d want to read and serve that up to me via algorithm? “Hell, yeah!” Adelman responds to that last question. “The fact that we continue to reflect that organization structure is not a statement about how we think things should be consumed. It is a statement about, there are some very natural ways for people to look for things.” Those “natural” ways of looking at things really come down to, again, user expectation. While the redesign does incorporate some algorithmically suggested sections within navigation, Adelman stresses that the NYT simply can’t remove the option to predictably click on particular topics, lest their audience question the publication’s transparency.

“There’s an element of trust that’s important in any relationship, whether it’s with the NYT or another publication, or a tool or experience you’re accustomed to,” Adelman says. “You don’t want to feel like things are moving under your feet." They also can’t merely fill the NYT homepage with articles they think someone might like to read, because then they cease to be what they are--the world’s news, presented without assumptions or bias. “I don’t think people want a customized version of the NYT homepage. They might benefit from some amount of material focused on their interests, but people come to the NYT because they want the NYT’s take on things.”

Addictive technology creates “internal triggers” which cue users without the need for marketing, messaging or any other external stimuli.  It becomes a user’s own intrinsic desire. Creating internal triggers comes from mastering the “desire engine” and its four components: trigger, action, variable reward, and commitment.

A company that forms strong user habits enjoys several benefits to its bottom line. For one, this type of company creates “internal triggers” in users. That is to say, users come to the site without any external prompting. Instead of relying on expensive marketing or worrying about differentiation, habit-forming companies get users to “self trigger” by attaching their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions. A cemented habit is when users subconsciously think, “I’m bored,” and instantly Facebook comes to mind. They think, “I wonder what’s going on in the world?” and before rationale thought occurs, Twitter is the answer. The first-to-mind solution wins.

A multi-screen world, with ad-wary consumers and a lack of ROI metrics, has rendered Don Draper’s big budget brainwashing useless to all but the biggest brands. Instead, startups manufacture desire by guiding users through a series of experiences designed to create habits

"There’s you, the person, and you have your full identity in yourself," he says. "But you know contextually when to wear certain things. You might wear one thing to a funeral, you might wear one thing for a Saturday night. You understand those contexts. And those never change your identity, so to speak, but they do start to communicate some kind of intent. And that’s what we’re trying to figure out right now. How do you create some kind of contextual mirror to create intent."

"Monolithic solutions are a necessity of yesterday, because of the permanence and cost of communication," Hendrix wrote in his opening remarks for the project. "Now we’re in an ephemeral and affordable age, and mass distribution at low cost is possible thanks to the digital revolution."

"The digital revolution let us make more complex identity systems, but what’s the point?," he says. "At some point, you start asking, 'why do I need 10,000 configurations of a mark? What’s it really saying to me?"

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.

some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

77% of mobile searches take place in the home or at work where a PC is readily available. Whether you call it lazy or convenient, the simple fact is smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the go-to computing devices for consumers.

In the post-PC era, customers expect companies to provide experiences aligned with their needs and abilities, in the right context, and at their moment of need.

Today, content is the interface and navigation is performed directly through gestures and voice commands. As a result, interactions are becoming multi-modal, engaging users through multiple senses.

I contend Pinterest as a service is best conceived of as a mood board for the company image. It isn’t a place to broadcast specifics or a way to run contests. It’s not that these are impossible, but Twitter and Facebook are better suited. Pinterest is a forum to communicate a brand’s identity, values, and personality. A place to build trust and affinity with consumers. Surprisingly, it might be the best single channel for communicating brand essence that exists today.

Opt for fewer, broadly categorized boards rather than many narrow ones. I have 5 boards total, and just one called "designed," instead of art, product design, graphic design, typography, advertising, and logos. Broad categories give your boards greater variety, and variety equals engagement.

In my experience, following people doesn't really get you followers on Pinterest. This is anecdotal, but I don't think many users do the auto-follow-back thing - that’s more of a Twitter phenomenon.

Right now, we're at a turning point. Whatever we do it’ll be wrong, either in the short term or the long term. Looking to the future and not using hover will cause pain to the majority of users today or cause pain to the increasing touchscreen user base. Offering hover interactions to only those using desktop/laptops we could consider to be a progressive enhancement. But what about hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface that offer both touch and mouse/keyboard? Can we accurately know what input method is being used? Simple media queries are not enough to know what interaction is possible.

We want our designs to be device agnostic. If we build a website we want to do the minimum to make sure it works across device. We can tweak designs at different sizes to meet needs but changing an interaction style by device seems like old-fashioned thinking.

one of the best ways to improve any experience is to simplify it--to remove complications, unnecessary layers, hassles, or distractions, while focusing on the essence of what people want and need in that particular situation.

Offering simplicity within a complex domain is likely to be so appreciated and valued by customers that it ends up being perceived as a luxury.

One way to carve out a luxury niche is by simplifying--by making it easier for customers to use a product or service without having to waste time thinking about it or sorting through too many options.

Three specifications that we’ll likely find ourselves using in the future are: “Flexbox4,” “Regions5,” “Grid Layout6.”

Magic numbers in CSS are best avoided.

We need fewer of these HTML containers and more CSS virtual container classes that we can apply to different elements as needed. In other words, instead of this… <div id="container"> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> </div> … we need more of this: <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div>

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

Gone are the days when you could stuff your website with low-quality articles packed with the right keywords or link spam exchanges to boost your Google rankings. Today the game is all about quality--content that’s authentic, informative, and, most of all, attractive to your intended audience. In short, we need to stop thinking about SEO as “search engine optimization” and more as “social engagement optimization,” as Greg Henderson at SEO Desk put it.

Our brains are getting inundated with messages all day long--so they respond well to pitches that are short and sweet. Short impactful statements on the homepage can do the job a whole lot better than huge blocks of copy that overexplain what you’re all about.

focus on quick ways to sum up how your product or service can change the customer’s life for the better.

Instagram manufactured a predictable response inside Yin’s brain. Her behavior was reshaped by a reinforcement loop which, through repeated conditioning, created a connection between the things she sees in world around her and the app inside her pocket. When a product is able to become tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing habit, it creates an “internal trigger.” Unlike external triggers, which are sensory stimuli, like a phone ringing or an ad online telling us to “click here now!,” you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in the mind and creating them is the brass ring of consumer technology. We check Twitter when we feel boredom. We pull up Facebook when we’re lonesome. The impulse to use these services is cued by emotions.

o get users using, Instagram followed a product design pattern familiar among habit-forming technologies, the desire engine.

The minimalist interface all but removes the need to think. With a click, a photo is taken and all kinds of sensory and social rewards ensue. Each photo taken and shared further commits the user to the app. Subsequently, users change not only their behavior, but also their minds.

Guber argues that humans simply aren’t moved to action by “data dumps,” dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with “Once upon a time…”

Is “telling to win” just the latest fashion in a business world that is continually swept with new fads and new gurus pitching the newest can’t-miss secret to success? Or does it represent a real and deep insight into communications strategy?

I think it’s a real insight. I’m a literary scholar who uses science to try to understand the vast, witchy power of story in human life. Guber and his allies have arrived through experience at the same conclusions science has reached through experiment.

The major takeaways from Google Panda and update (in no particular order) are as follows: Focus on original content – you will get hammered for “stealing” or repurposing on too high a scale (for example, lifting content from Wikipedia) Over-optimization kills – Google can sniff out sites that are designed solely to exploit certain key words (for example, repeating the same keyword, or variations thereof to drive traffic) Link to high quality/authoritative sites – while Panda focused more on a more systematic sweep of SEO, Penguin is focused on the processes around linking. Don’t over-link, and when you do create links, link to high quality sources Excessive Ads are Bad – If it looks like you are running too many ads against your content, you will face the consequences SEO is a “Bad Word” – The rise of the term “content marketing” effectively means that high quality content trumps low quality link bait.

Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative SitesContent marketing does not just refer to content you write for your own site, but content you write for other sites.

content marketing also improves SEO rankings and traffic.  Link building is a common SEO strategy that is always difficult to grow through a paid channel.  The best way to get organic and quality links is by creating interesting content that drives people to link and share your content.  Whether or not it’s directly related to your line of business, driving free traffic is always a victory.

100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

a spike in retweets among those in the 71-100 character range—so-called “medium” length tweets. These medium tweets have enough characters for the original poster to say something of value and for the person retweeting to add commentary as well.

the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.