Push Notifications
Hi
This week’s edition of the UXD Inspired Reading List starts with several design posts on notifications, emotion, and motivation. Designers often have to work within constraints to encourage users to change their behavior by making a choice. Often times the time spent on designing these interactions encompasses a lot of investigation, research, listening to users, and testing.
Google Glass may have been a flawed product when it was launched, but is now experiencing a comeback / rebirth thanks to a changing environment, expectations, and interactions. Designing across distributed teams can be difficult, but collaborating with others in multiple time zones is becoming all the more common. Are there better tools we can use to effectively communicate online in lieu of being in the same room with everyone on a project? Python is growing surprisingly well thanks in large part to its simplicity and use.
Switching gears to the environment, we have a great post featuring an interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the current state and future of Science. Merriam-Webster defines Science as “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.” Thankfully NDT believes we all have a role to play with the future of science, fact, and understanding. We move on to two posts covering big banks and money, and the role they play within our collective lives.
Our last four links thus week, cover how people employ empathy and understanding to better learn how concussions affect the human brain. Dan submitted a few great posts, including a post discussing how New Era uses feedback to evolve to their deigns to an entire league. The last two links cover the love of ice cream and pizza. Kwality is getting a new face thanks to a revival, while Razza, located in Jersey City, may be the best pizza in NYC.
Have a great weekend.
Mohit
1. Designing Push Notifications That Don’t Suck
“As users lapse, we can use push notifications as external triggers to re-engage them; prompting actions which in turn reinforce the practice habit. Now, the problem is that most re-engagement push campaigns suck. And that’s an understatement, really. Most of them are just here to remind you to use the app and provide you with no other value. They are nagging, desperate calls for attention (“It’s time to do x”, “Come back?”). To add to the insult, they also feel disconnected from the product. Tapping them brings you back to a menu or navigation, with no action initiated, which leaves you wondering “why the f*ck did you even bring me back?”. No wonder 60% of users opt-out of push notifications.”
https://medium.com/@antoinesakho/designing-push-notifications-that-dont-suck-af6aaa0ea85
2. Design For Emotion
“Humans have feelings, thoughts, and emotions — we all have them. Some of the best sites, apps, and experiences I’ve seen over the years have been designed for emotion — not simply performing a task but along the way they are coaxing a response. That reaction can be a simple ‘that’s cool’, could be a ‘wow’, or even provoke sobbing into your keyboard.”
https://medium.com/google-design/design-for-emotion-7ba0cf40e05b
3. Staying Motivated
“I believe that motivation is a muscle. Like any physical skill, you can improve your motivation with regular exercise.”
https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/staying-motivated-89baaaed505a
4. The Unexpected Rebirth of Google Glass
“But, Google Glass is about to relaunch this year—and that begs a few questions: Given its potential and technology, why wasn’t Glass the spectacular success many expected it to be the first time around? Why did it fail so dramatically? What made Google decide to relaunch the product, and what are they doing differently this time around? Let’s dive deeper into the hype, death, and rebirth of Google Glass.”
5. Figma Wants Designers To Collaborate Google-Docs Style
“In the past few years, a crop of nimble newcomers has emerged to woo graphic designers away from Adobe’s brawny graphics editor. The most popular is a tool called Sketch, which offers many of Photoshop’s features but is easier to use and specifically made for interface designers. Competition has become so fierce that Adobe last year released a beta version of its own purpose-built interface-design tool, the straightforwardly named Adobe Experience Design CC (aka Adobe XD).”
https://www.wired.com/story/figma-updates/
6. The Incredible Growth Of Python (From Dan)
“In this post, we’ll explore the extraordinary growth of the Python programming language in the last five years, as seen by Stack Overflow traffic within high-income countries. The term “fastest-growing” can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language.”
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-python/
7. Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says Science Isn’t Dead — And You’re The One Who’s Saving It
“America has a secret geeky underbelly, and it’s proof that Trump won’t last.”
https://education.good.is/features/neil-degrasse-tyson-education-science
8. How Big Banks Became Our Masters
“That’s a dangerous problem, because despite all of the wrangling and rule making, there’s a core truth about our financial system that we have yet to comprehend fully: It isn’t serving us, we’re serving it.”
9. What The Rich Won’t Tell You
“There’s nobody who knows how much we spend. You’re the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud.”
10. What I Learned About Concussions — By Having One
“It’s hard to understand a brain injury until you have one.”
https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/-what-i-learned-about-concussions–by-ha/f-583ddcc675%2Ftheverge.com
11. How New Era Stays On Top Of Consumers’ Minds And On Top Of Players’ Heads (from Dan)
“New Era is about to celebrate its 25th year as the official on-field cap of Major League Baseball. The company got in the game — literally — in 1934, making caps for the Cleveland Indians. By the mid-1970s, they were providing caps for 20 out of the 24 major league teams, and in 1993, was on the head of every baseball player in the MLB.”
From Dan: “Even a baseball cap has design that goes into it for players. And those players’ feedback is very important to the process.”
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299605
12. A Taste of Indian Nostalgia Finds An Eager Audience
“When the brand arrived in the country in the 1950s, it awakened a nationwide infatuation. During sweltering Indian summers, people would dash to the lit-up cases of Kwality at their local dime store for a block of nutty butterscotch ice cream, or the triple-layered ice cream bar called cassata. But its popularity waned after a corporate takeover left its taste altered.”
13. Is New York’s Best Pizza In New Jersey?
“Ed Levine knows what it means to make a strong claim for a pizzeria. The founder of the website Serious Eats and the author of the book “Pizza: A Slice of Heaven,” he caused a stir in 2004 by writing in The New York Times that the pies at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix “just might be the best pizza in America.” So when it started to dawn on me, about a year after my first dinner at Razza, that no pizzeria in the five boroughs gave me as much pleasure, I thought of Ed.”
