DPL Reading List – January 15, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
There Is Something Extraordinary Happening In The World – “A few months ago I freed myself from standard-procedure society, I broke the chains of fear that kept me locked up into the system. Since then, I see the world from a different perspective: the one that everything is going through change and that most of us are unware of that.”
Why Hover Menus Are Problematic (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Hover menus are very popular on the web. People think they are popular because they ‘aid discoverability’ and ‘save users a click’, the latter of which is a common UX fallacy. The thing is, hover menus are problematic and here’s why.”
Recognizing Probabilities In Budgeting And Forecasting (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “We recommend that CFOs explore several budget scenarios with their CEOs — and specifically discuss probabilities of various outcomes. At first, this may be uncomfortable, because CEOs are paid to be optimistic while CFOs are paid to be pessimistic. CEOs are likely to believe an outcome has a 70 percent probability, while CFOs will have a lower, more conservative, view.”
Read This Google Email About Time Management Strategy (Thanks to Todd Guenther for recommending this article) – “I recently wrote an email to our team that posed a simple challenge in time management. The response I got was unexpected, and I was urged to share it with more people—so here we are. Some of my fellow Googlers went so far as to make a video for those of us who appreciate a good visual aid.”
Do You Have A Manager’s Mindset? – “Because coaching and coordinating others is not how you spent your days as an individual contributor, it can be hard to discard old habits. Start by tracking the improvement of your direct reports from where they are rather than comparing their output and capabilities to your own. If you assess people individually, their talents will emerge—and their progress will become a measure of your own success.”
Conceptual Debt Is Worse Than Technical Debt (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “I’ve been using the term conceptual debt as a way to communicate to companies the importance of choosing the right mental model and abstractions from the outset of designing products. The consequences and inertia of bad design choices at the modeling stages can be really expensive for a company, because they’re potentially building their entire product on the wrong foundation. Conceptual debt is often the difference between a product succeeding or failing.”
4 Clues Your Design Neglects The User (And How To Fix It) – “Usability testing is most effective when conducted periodically throughout the entire process, starting from low-fidelity prototypes. At times the process can be so tight that there’s simply no time for user research, especially if your team uses quick sprint cycles. Testing shouldn’t be dispensable, but rather it should be your strongest link to what your users actually need. Otherwise, you’re just guessing.”
