DPL Reading List – March 24, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Why Innovators Should Study the Rise and Fall of the Venetian Empire – “Entrepreneurs and innovators resist “success as usual” syndrome, exploring emerging technologies and new business models. They try to keep the big picture in mind and are wary of being too efficient and too optimized. This perspective helps them promote unconventional ways of thinking, solving problems, and challenging the status quo.”
The Dynamic Duo: Product Management and UX (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Product Managers and UX Designers have many of the same responsibilities. They talk to customers, find the underlying ‘why’, sketch ideas, test solutions, negotiate requirements, and so on. These interwoven responsibilities can cause both roles to butt heads. Modern organizations rarely make these divisions of duties explicit. These blurred lines can cause an unspoken power struggle. Design winces when Product sketches a UI idea. Product rolls eyes when Design outlines an MVP spec. The reality is, sharing responsibilities leads to a stronger product and team.”
Linting HTML using CSS – “When HTML is written incorrectly, nothing much happens. Because of this, it’s easy to have invalid, unsemantic, or unaccessible bits in markup without it being obvious. There are many ways we can lint our HTML to discover and fix these issues, for example using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Another thing we can do, which can be more easily integrated into a development workflow, is to use some slightly advanced CSS selectors to highlight potential problem areas.”
Why You Need a Creative Hobby, Even if You Think You’re Too Busy – “Whether you see an improvement in your work or not, creative hobbies and volunteering both offer plenty of benefits alone. But what a bonus if they happen to improve your work thanks to helping your brain recharge and sharpening your creative skills!”
Do responsive sites have to be so tall on mobile? – “When designing responsive sites, we tend to focus a lot on keeping content nicely formatted within all the various screen widths in the world today. This makes sense given that horizontal scrolling is not particularly user-friendly, so constraining the design to the browser’s viewport width is generally a given. On smaller screens, stacking things into a single column is the go-to move and often, as long as the content stays within the proper width, further thought isn’t given to the height of the page. As a result, I’ve noticed that in my own designs and many out in the wild, mobile page lengths tend to be quite long.”
The Neuroscience of Trust – “It’s not about being easy on your employees or expecting less from them. High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults.”
How calc() Works – “The CSS3 calc() function allows us to perform mathematical operations on property values. Instead of declaring, for example, static pixel values for an element’s width, we can use calc() to specify that the width be the result of the addition of two or more numeric values.”
