I had heard a lot of good things about beyond tellerrand, the semiannual web/design/tech conference in Germany. I was prepared to listen to an impressive line-up of speakers from the fields of both design and web technology. I was looking forward to reunite with old contacts and meet friendly […]
2016
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LessPass - an #opensource #Password Manager with the opportunity of #selfhosting https://lesspass.com/ and https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass#self-host-your-lesspass-database
This looks like an interesting approach for keeping passwords under private control, with the benefits of “centralized” access https://lesspass.com #selfhosting
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Top 10 Enduring Web-Design Mistakes nngroup.com
The results from this large-scale study by Nielsen Norman Group are significant not so much for what usability issues they identified to be most common, but the fact that these are still the same basic problems that have been around as long as websites have:
The big news? None of the […]
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One week to go for IndieWebCamp Berlin! Join us: https://indieweb.org/2016/Berlin
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Let’s Stop Doing Research medium.com
Amen! Erika Hall presents why purely user-centred design is out-of-date, explains how data-driven design is actually bias-driven design, and debunks the myth of the genius designer working chiefly based on intuition. And offers her own alternative approach:
We need evidence-based […]
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The fifth edition of IndieWebCamp Brighton saw a good two dozen enthusiasts gather for a weekend of debating, brainstorming and prototyping the social web of the future. Amongst a myriad of random inspirations, many of which for sure will find their way into projects of mine in the near future, I would like to summarize three main takeaways from this memorable weekend in Brighton [...]
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How to profit from your data and beat Facebook at its own game newscientist.com
Just getting started on reading up on the proceedings from the August #MyData conference in Helsinki.
“The best outcome for personal data is that we all naturally think of data as we think of money,” says Lawrence [Neil Lawrence, University of Sheffield, UK]: some money we […]
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Discrimination by Design propublica.org
A great read on how the long history of discrimination by design continues in the realm of the digital.
It’s likely that as long as humans and their institutions hold prejudices and bias, their designs will reflect them.
This upsets me every time I see yet another […] -
The Blog That Disappeared nytimes.com
I occasionally find myself accused of being overly critical of cloud services. Which I am not - per se. My critique is not about the technology and its undeniable potential, but about the terms at which it is provided …and the prevailing silence with which these are commonly accepted. The […]
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The IoT Design manifesto aims to set guidelines for responsible design in a connected world: We don’t believe the hype We design useful things We aim for the Win-Win-Win We keep everyone and every thing secure We build and promote a culture of privacy We are deliberate about what data we […]
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Ethical Web Development ethicalweb.org
It is easy for me to subscribe to each and every of Adam Scott’s Principles of Ethical Web Development: Web applications should work for everyone Web applications should work everywhere Web applications should respect a user’s privacy and security Web developers should be considerate […]
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Solving All the Wrong Problems nytimes.com
Based on my experiences from teaching at Aalto University’s design department last fall, all hope is not lost on the issues this op-ed on the New York Times raises:
If the most fundamental definition of design is to solve problems, why are so many people devoting so much energy […]
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Cifas, a non-profit for fraud protection, recently published “Data to Go”, a brilliant candid camera clip. Passers-by are asked to “like” a coffee shop on Facebook in exchange for a cup of free coffee …and, as they will find out, a lot more: they receive a mug with all […]
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Opportunity for All? Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families joanganzcooneycenter.org
Recent research on digital media use points to two important gaps in educational opportunity for low-income families with young children. First, there is an access gap. Second, there is what scholars refer to as a participation gap, in which digital resources are not well guided or supported to ensure educational progress.
This research report by Victoria Rideout and Vikki Katz (PDF) contains some interesting, mostly quantitative, findings not just about the challenges, but also about real-life practices of digital device use in lower-income families in the USA. […] -
See The Progress helloanselm.com (via archive.org)
An avid user of strict privacy blockers myself, I have long been advocating that every web developer should test their websites in scenarios with blocked third-party resources (I can’t even count the number of times I run into websites where some functionalities don’t work because a […]
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The Website Obesity Crisis idlewords.com
A burning rant by Maciej Cegłowski (aka. Idle Words) on the commercially introduced complexity (“obesity”) of the web. Drawing a bow from ads to assets, the talk also introduces some rather innovative terminology:
Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed […]