DPL Reading List – March 17, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
The many ways design adds business value (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Using generative research and deep customer understanding, businesses can generate new revenue streams. This same understanding combined with UX design, prototyping, and iterative development can increase key metrics for your products. Improved workplace tools and a better design and development process can reduce your costs. Your projects can hit the marketplace faster with proper design specs. These are all a direct result of common elements in most design processes.”
Product People, Mind the Gap! – “Every single time someone uses software, they’re aiming to be transported from the situation they’re currently in (and don’t want to be in anymore) to a situation that they’d rather be in. Figuring out what has to happen in getting them from one situation to the other is our principal job.”
Why Do Developers Now Compare Vue.js to JavaScript Giants Angular and React? – “Vue.js, an MIT-licensed open source project, is a JavaScript library for building web interfaces. The library was first released in 2013, but not many developers took cognizance of it in web framework technology for the next two years. It was 2016 when Vue.js rose to fame and gained so much traction that it’s now seen as an alternative for even well established JavaScript libraries, such as Angular and React.”
The Science Backed Ways Music Affects Your Brain and Productivity – “When nothing else seems to help make us productive, the right music can supercharge us. But in terms of our brain and work, what does music do and why does it help us?”
Chatbots Will Change Your Life But They Won’t Be Your Friend – “As an interface, chatbots hold the potential to help us break our internet addiction by learning not only what we want but when we want it. By replacing apps with chatbots, we can be constantly connected in a way that helps us, paradoxically, to make the most of our time in the real world. In that sense, we’re approaching what you might call the ambient internet, an omnipresent force we interact with in ever more subtle ways.”
The Unexpected Power of Viewport Units in CSS – “The days of fixed-width designs and needing to only test against a handful of viewport sizes are gone. We live in a fluid-width world with a myriad of device sizes and aspect ratios. Percentage-based units allow us to accommodate the variety of possible ways our content will be viewed, but they don’t work in every scenario. Viewport percentage units units, or “viewport units” for short, offer an alternative “fluid” value to use when percentage-based units prove inadequate.”
The Promise of Blockchain Is a World Without Middlemen (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Blockchains support the formation of more complex value networks than can otherwise be supported. Normally, transaction costs and other sources of friction associated with having more vendors keeps the number of partners in a value network small. But if locating and locking in partners becomes easier, more comprehensive value networks can become profitable, even for quite small transactions.”
