Tag / tools
Meet XRespond Testing Tool: Let’s Make Building Responsive Websites Simpler
The way people consume information is constantly evolving. As web designers and developers, we keep up with all of the different screen shapes and sizes, learning to create beautiful, flexible software. Yet most of the available tools still don’t reflect the nature and diversity of the platform we’re building for: the browser.
When I was making my first responsive website in 2012, I quickly realized how inefficient and time-consuming the constant browser window resizing was. I had just moved from Estonia to Australia, and with a newborn, time was very much a precious resource.
The post Meet XRespond Testing Tool: Let’s Make Building Responsive Websites Simpler appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Design Thinking
If you like this article, you probably want to sign up to be notified when my new book on Visual Thinking is out (in less than a month, I promise!) Also, there is discussion and some clarification on the Medium version of the post.
When I first heard about Design Thinking, I thought it was a clever rebranding effort by IDEO to charge twice as much for user-centered design. What can I say, I’m an old fart of a designer, and when I read about design thinking, I didn’t really see the big whup. And I wasn’t alone.
But over time I’ve discovered that the oft-parodied approach to Design Thinking — a lot of post-its and a lot of prototyping — works better than nearly any other approach to product and service innovation.
Why?
Do designers truly think in a different way?
The key is the word “thinking.” I want to make an argument that Design Thinking is a kind of thinking based on three key cognition theories:
Distributed Cognition Expertise Thinking Iterative World Modeling Let me break ea..
How the Insurance Industry Can Push Us to Prepare for Climate Change
Climate change risk is rising, and yet behavioral economics research argues that we are collectively underinvesting in protecting ourselves. In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters, Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther point to several personal traits that expose us to greater risk from natural disasters. First, individuals focus on short time horizons and thus underprepare for future threats. Second, when major disasters do occur, individuals are shocked but quickly begin to let their guard down again. Third, people are over-optimistic and thus underestimate their own risk exposure.
And the risks are real: Zillow’s research predicts that $400 billion dollars of real estate value in Florida could be at risk from climate change by the year 2100.
It might seem, then, that private insurance can be of little help in addressing climate change. There’s concern that for-profit insurers won’t want to insure risky properties, and that individuals won’t have the wherewithal to ..
A Survey of 3,000 Executives Reveals How Businesses Succeed with AI
Photo by Aaron Burson The buzz over artificial intelligence (AI) has grown loud enough to penetrate the C-suites of organizations around the world, and for good reason. Investment in AI is growing and is increasingly coming from organizations outside the tech space. And AI success stories are becoming more numerous and diverse, from Amazon reaping operational efficiencies using its AI-powered Kiva warehouse robots, to GE keeping its industrial equipment running by leveraging AI for predictive maintenance.
While it’s clear that CEOs need to consider AI’s business implications, the technology’s nascence in business settings makes it less clear how to profitably employ it. Through a study of AI that included a survey of 3,073 executives and 160 case studies across 14 sectors and 10 countries, and through a separate digital research program, we have identified 10 key insights CEOs need to know to embark on a successful AI journey.
Don’t believe the hype: Not every business is using AI… y..
Email and Calendar Data Are Helping Firms Understand How Employees Work
Using data science to predict how people in companies are changing may sound futuristic. As we wrote recently, change management remains one of the few areas largely untouched by the data-driven revolution. But while we may never convert change management into a “hard science,” some firms are already benefiting from the potential that these data-driven techniques offer.
One of the key enablers is the analysis of email traffic and calendar metadata. This tells us a lot about who is talking to whom, in what departments, what meetings are happening, about what, and for how long. These sorts of analyses are helping EY, where some of us work, by working with Microsoft Workplace Analytics to help clients to predict the likelihood of retaining key talent following an acquisition and to develop strategies to maximize retention. Using email and calendar data, we can identify patterns around who is engaging with whom, which parts of the organization are under stress, and which individuals are m..
A Survey of 19 Countries Shows How Generations X, Y, and Z Are — and Aren’t — Different
In the near future, three of the most studied generations will converge on the workplace at the same time: Generation X, the age cohort born before the 1980s but after the Baby Boomers; Generation Y, or Millennials, typically thought of as those born between 1984 and 1996; and Generation Z, those born after 1997, who are next to enter the workforce.
In a survey of 18,000 professionals and students across these three generations from 19 countries, we found some important differences in their aspirations and values. We hope that results from this survey, conducted by the INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute, Universum, and the HEAD Foundation, will be useful to companies seeking to retain, develop, and attract employees from these talent pools. However, it’s important to note that our findings are a snapshot of where these employees are at this moment in time; employees’ needs and expectations often evolve over the course of their careers, and we hope future surveys will update these findi..
Google’s Secret Formula for Management? Doing the Basics Well
Steven Moore for HBR Google has opened its trove of management processes to one and all, for free. It might not feel that surprising — after all, Google has created plenty of free tools for the world to use, from internet search to email. Management tools may not seem that different. And it also follows Google’s many years of work in people analytics.
But, in fact, there is something surprising in the details of what Google revealed. Turns out a lot of its management tools focus on some pretty basic stuff, like how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals.
Why would Google release its management processes? I see three reasons.
First, the company has nothing to lose by doing it. That’s because as basic and unsurprising as some of these practices may look, they are really hard to do well on a consistent basis. My coauthors and I explore this in detail as part of a study of how well 12,000 firms in 34 countries performed 18 core management practices. We found many reasons for..
3 Ways Companies Are Building a Business Around AI
There is no argument about whether artificial intelligence (AI) is coming. It is here, in automobiles, smartphones, aircraft, and much else. Not least in the online search abilities, speech and translation features, and image recognition technology of my employer, Alphabet.
The question now moves to how broadly AI will be employed in industry and society, and by what means. Many other companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, also already offer AI tools which, like Google Cloud, where I work, will be sold online as cloud computing services. There are numerous other AI products available to business, like IBM’s Watson, or software from emerging vendors.
Whatever hype businesspeople read around AI — and there is a great deal — the intentions and actions of so many players should alert them to the fundamental importance of this new technology.
This is no simple matter, as AI is both familiar and strange. At heart, the algorithms and computation are dedicated to unearthing novel patter..
An Introduction To Gravit Designer: Designing A Weather App (Part 1)
Being a designer at the moment is great because a wealth of modern design applications are available that let you easily bring your ideas to the screen: Sketch, Affinity Designer, Adobe XD (beta) and Figma, to name just a few (not to mention the classics, Photoshop and Illustrator).
One app that is quite new, though — and perhaps a bit overlooked — is the free Gravit Designer app. Gravit gives you all of the tools needed to create functional and elegant screen designs. It can also be used to make icons, designs for print, presentations and much more.
The post An Introduction To Gravit Designer: Designing A Weather App (Part 1) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
The Creative Founder
Class Write Up: Three Years of Learning Creative Founder is in many way the anti-foundations of interaction design.It has no interest in designing interfaces, or usability (except as a means to an end.) Yet it is the ultimate design class, using design methodologies to understand customers and buyers, and to speak value in their language, and to provide change in their lives.
Creative Founder was the first class I taught at CCA, when it was called Designer as Founder. I suggested teaching a startup class to the chair of the department because I believe designers should understand business. I suspected designers would resist taking a class that admitted it was teaching them business, but would flock to sexy start-up land. It’s been waitlisted every year, though no longer for the original reasons. It has developed the reputation of being ridiculously hard, and the class that gets you ready for thesis, and then for life.
Zhiyou and Jaime working the BMC. The first one was spring of 2014..