DPL Reading List – August 25, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
How Gatorade Invented New Products by Revisiting Old Ones – “The calls to leave behind old, tired products can be strong, and forging a new path can be tremendously exciting. But in a volatile and uncertain global business economy, it makes powerful sense to explore the growth opportunities hidden in your current products – as Gatorade and others have found, there can be untapped potential in those existing markets.”
What non-technical entrepreneurs need to know about UX and UI – “We’re all digital product users, so we know first-hand that both UX and UI are essential — even if you’ve never thought about WHY an app feels simple and compelling. We can feel innately that the structure and the décor need to be solid.”
In the AI Age, “Being Smart” Will Mean Something Completely Different – “We will spend more time training to be open-minded and learning to update our beliefs in response to new data. We will practice adjusting after our mistakes, and we will invest more in the skills traditionally associated with emotional intelligence. The new smart will be about trying to overcome the two big inhibitors of critical thinking and team collaboration: our ego and our fears.”
Web fonts: when you need them, when you don’t – “If your text is difficult to read to start with, a web font can only offer a small improvement at best. So get the foundations of readable typography right before even thinking about font faces.”
Why Startups Should Look for Opportunity Between the Coasts – “The picture is much more favorable outside the coasts: there are many emerging tech centers throughout the country offering the same high caliber of intellectual talent and expertise, but at a fraction of the cost.”
Growth Doesn’t Start With Experiments – “In my experience, my most impactful learnings emerged from testing the relationships between a segment, an action, and a theme. Those learnings turned into bets the larger business could run with. Once you begin to frame questions in this context, every experiment you run and all research you conduct will have targeted business impact.”
How bad typography (almost) ruined my holiday – “I’m not saying Old Style Figures are evil, not at all actually, I like ‘m. But there is a time and a place to use them. And it’s not in the document number of a passport.”
