DPL Reading List – January 13, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Know when to ask for help with the 15 Minute Rule (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “The fact is – your time is expensive. It might feel good to learn things the hard way – you’ll build valuable skills along the way – but there are no prizes for spending 3 hours on a problem someone else could have solved in 10 minutes.”
The Imbalance of Culture Fit – “When it came time to start hiring employees, I thought a lot about what the company needed to advance, what skills it was lacking. I asked friends for advice, and introductions to people they knew and trusted who fit the bill. And I asked myself what felt like a natural question: would I want to hang out with this person all day? Because clearly, I would have to.”
How not to design web forms (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Web forms. They’re the heart of product design (most products are, from the user standpoint, just a bunch of forms) and usually the most important part of any web page they appear on. Given that importance, you’d think that, after 25 years of building them, we’d have forms nailed. But we totally don’t.”
Print styles (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “I really wanted to make sure that the print styles for Resilient Web Design were pretty good — or at least as good as they could be given the everlasting lack of support for many print properties in browsers.”
How to create effective push notifications – “It’s no wonder notifications are considered the telemarketers of the 21st century. Impersonal, irrelevant and poorly timed, they’re usually treated as a badly executed marketing strategy, rather than a publishing channel in and of itself.”
Are You Solving the Right Problems? – “The pattern is clear: Spurred by a penchant for action, managers tend to switch quickly into solution mode without checking whether they really understand the problem.”
The Pros and Cons of Pros-and-Cons Lists – “Self-awareness, reflection, and actively applying a range of mindsets are examples of alternatives to the pros-and-cons list that shed light on these hidden, unconscious cognitive biases, ultimately leading to better insights and better decision outcomes.”
