ux | work | life matters
When you run a marathon you will hit the wall. After 21 miles of running your body simply runs out of glycogen and wants to shut down. This is the point where your will is tested most. You push through it. You force carbohydrates into your body although your stomach
…the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you. From the BBC article The myth of the eight-hour sleep, an interesting read on how we back in the days used to sleep more
If you’re a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. One is that you don’t know anything about business. The other is that you’re afraid of competition. Neither of these fences have any current in them. –
Touch gestures can make things better, not just different. That’s an important distinction. – Josh Clark, the author of Tapworthy in Luke W’s write up of Josh’s Busting Mobile Myths presentation Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/coyote-agile/1578404172
We’re not just making pretty interfaces. We’re acutally in the process of making an environment where we’ll spend most of our time, for the rest of our lives. We’re the designers. We’re the builders. What do we want that environment to feel like? What do we want to feel like?
The critical measure of work isn’t and never should be input but output. What matters isn’t how many hours your team puts in, but the quality and quantity of work they produce. From the Inc. article The Truth About Sleep & Productivity stating that working overtime doesn’t increase your output.
The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone. – Ben Pieratt, Svpply – referenced in
If you’re a tech company or a marketer, your goal is to be the first thing people do when they start their day. If you’re an artist, a leader or someone seeking to make a difference, the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals,
We believe that talking about the future is the most important thing that people do, even though the future, by its nature, is unknowable. We invent the future through our actions and change it constantly. We can never know it fully but we can always be better prepared for what
[youtube id=”lNFNOSzik14″ width=”475″] Nicely done video introducing the book and talking about being more conscious of the information we consume. Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/3383629917
A while back I stumbled over this project – Ballons of Bhutan done by Jonahtan Harris. He spent two weeks there exploring what happiness really mean to the people living there and the result is, as the site describes it, “a [wonderful] portrait of happiness in the last Himalayan kingdom”.
A smart idea in one city can make any city smarter Ad in Wired for The Smarter City, a video based site talking about the challenges cities face and how we can connect them and their different systems to make them smarter Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/ivanclow/4260762246
Forget the building for a while. Focus totally on what people will be doing in the spaces and places you are designing – next year, in five years, in 20. -Sunand Prasad, architect, and other top artists reveal how to find creative inspiration in this The Guardian article Image source:
I crave simplicity. But I also crave challenge. From the Study Hacks article The ambitious minimalist: Musings on impact, simplicity and the good life Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/7111395641/in/photostream
Ten years ago, the average attention span was 12 minutes – now it’s just 5 seconds. From the All Twitter article Is Social Media Ruining Our Minds? that talks on the emergent studies into how our multitasking skills, social interactions and ability to focus is affected by social media. Image
Apps are nuggets of magic…In many ways, apps are representative of the changes taking place in personal technology. Small, downloadable chunks of software, they give people access to information in a neatly packaged format From the Economist article Apps on tap – the beauty of bite-sized software talking about why
The only limit to what can be done with these connected computing devices will be what entrepreneurs and engineers can dream up. From the Tech Crunch article The Cambrian Explosion in Start-Ups, an interesting read on the increase in number of start-ups and how ‘connected’ will play a crucial role.
Looking at the stats of our own site show that 14% of all users on desktops accessed the site directly. All of the rest found us via search engines or referrals. Compare this to our mobile users and 47% of them found us directly. – Rob Borely from In-traction in an
This video from Microsoft is the latest one of the “future-concept” videos that are doing the rounds on the internet. It’s got some nice executions in it. Some lovely interface designs and ideas of simple and seamless connectedness.
Pretending that you can’t is sort of like pretending that a retailer that once sold primarily via catalogue can’t and shouldn’t sell via the internet too. From the Ecounsultancy article Native apps versus mobile website: three simple rules A great read on why this isn’t an ‘Either-or’ matter, what you