DPL Reading List – November 25, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
You Don’t Need a Master Plan — You Just Need to Start – “Starting something in the hopes of making an extra $1,000 a month is every bit as worthy as trying to colonize Mars. Start small and give your ambitions room to grow.”
The Myth of Invisible Design (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “There are three great design themes: making something beautiful, making something easier, and making something possible. The best designs accomplish all three at once. This might involve making parts of the product invisible. But it might not. The best products are as visible as they need to be to make the activity better.”
16 Prototyping Tools & How Each Can Be Used (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Often times I find myself prototyping a really high fidelity experience just for the sake of prototyping, instead of focusing on prototyping just the things that are needed to communicate and test the overall concept. Beware of prototyping just for the sake of prototyping! Prototypes exist for the sake of proving a concept, communicating an idea, or testing an approach. Everything else is wasted time.”
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (Thanks to Cassey Lottman for recommending this article) – “Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.”
108 million web users are color blind. Tips for designing keeping them in mind (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Even if a relatively small portion of the population is color blind (5% of the total is still a number though), there is still a need to design with them in mind. Keeping this section of users in mind when making your color choices, you could be happy and content that the final designs will please everyone, resulting in a MUCH better app and user experience.”
A happy little binary tree: learning to code from Bob Ross – “[Bob Ross] gave viewers the confidence that they, too, can paint elaborate landscapes. This is why the best coding classes are like Bob Ross videos: making something beautiful in real time, with errors and detours — gently and gracefully corrected.”
How to Make Your Company Machine Learning Ready (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “The majority of your workforce will continue to have a job, and you can help them to be more productive, and work on more interesting and demanding (read: more valuable) tasks by digitizing more of the mechanical parts of your business. For now, artificial intelligence cannot turn a business’s performance from bad to good, but it can make some aspects of a good business great.”
