DPL Reading List – February 22, 2019
Here are some of the new and interesting articles we found this week.
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years – “The vulnerability was the result of an absolute path traversal flaw that resided in UNACEV2.DLL, a third-party code library that hasn’t been updated since 2005. The traversal made it possible for archive files to extract to a folder of the archive creator’s choosing, rather than the folder chosen by the person using the program. Because the third-party library doesn’t make use of exploit mitigations such as address space layout randomization, there was little preventing exploits.”
Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling Applied to Product Managers & UX Designers – “When I meet people at social gatherings and I’m asked what I do for a living, my response is: “I’m a storyteller.” It makes for a way better conversation than leading with “product management in a B2B SaaS company.” Truly, product managers and user experience designers are storytellers. We constantly need to be telling stories when communicating with everyone.”
Making Learning a Part of Everyday Work – “Employees use social media and search in their spare time to satisfy their curiosity, right when they need it. It should be exactly the same at work. We must create corporate learning experiences to match consumer-grade experiences. This is our vision: to create a learning-in-the-flow-of-work ecosystem and become a learning organization, whose workforce is upskilled in real time.”
The freshest writer on design was born 200 years ago – “We live in an age where design has created mass luxury in ways Ruskin couldn’t have imagined, from TJ Maxx to Ikea. When we learn to see those luxuries with Ruskin’s eyes, we begin to see the other costs designed into them: social, economic, and environmental. The challenge for the next generation of designers is to make products that benefit the people who make them and the planet that sustains us.”
Refresh this crazy website to create new people who don’t exist – “Wang didn’t create the site to enable abuse of any kind, though. He created it because he says he’s “very worried” about our future, and he wanted to make the public aware of how far technology has advanced so quickly. “It’s an assault on our sense of reality. Societies are built on top of beliefs,” Wang writes. “Judging from the reaction, most people seem to be very unaware this was possible.””
The 8-second rule in UX – “Even without technology to deviate us from our work, there are plenty stimuli. Getting lost in thought and conversation being most common. ‘Zoning out’ or ‘Drifting in thought’ are terms coined specifically for these phenomenons. So, what can we do as designers to satiate this need for humans to consume content faster than they can process it?”
As a Designer, I Refuse to Call People ‘Users’ – “But labeling people as users strips them of complexity. It reduces humans to a single behavior, effectively supporting a view of people as more like robots whose sole function is to use a product or feature. This is a poor ethos for building ethical technology. If we maintain such a narrow and flattening view as a cornerstone of our discipline, I fear we’ll make little progress toward evolving design to meet the pressing needs of a changing world.”
