Ponchik News: Design+ Strategy

https://producthabits.com/how-slack-became-a-5-billion-business-by-making-work-less-boring/

Many startups focus all their energy on growing as rapidly as possible. By contrast, Slack focused on growing steadily. Each time the company received new feedback on Slack, they would not only address or implement changes based on that feedback, but...

High school teacher created a simple Physics course with stunning javascript simulations. That’s the physics I wish I had in school. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html

Visiting Portland, Oregon, I stumbled upon a really vivid case of good design/service thinking. Zoom+care redefines healthcare for people in Portland and Seattle. Really thoughtful and smart https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcodesign.com/3050380/zoom-wants-healthcare-to-be-more-like-visiting-an-apple-store...

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Designing for the world of post truth: Facebook is using subtle behavior design techniques to avoid being neither censoring nor appreciative of potentially fake news. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/27/facebook-false-news/

Great recap of Theranos, a blood sampling startup that ended up being fake (aka based on the undeveloped technology). Another thoughful vision on SV culture of fast-growth-no-matter-what https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/books/review/bad-blood-john-carreyrou.html...

Some readings that I found amusing last week: + Guardian on a psychological phenomenon of “illusory superiority” which is at heart of addictive technology, and a few tips how to not feel miserable through “status anxiety” → https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/may/04/think-special-just-proves-you-are-normal +...

Consensus, an annual blockchain technology summit is happening this week in NYC. A friend sent a video of bankers protesting against BitCoin on Wall Street. Some banners read: “Bitcoin ruined our business model”, “We opened all those accounts on accident”,...

Segment, GV, Accel & KPCB-backed analytics and data gathering tool just released Personas, a new way to automatically build personas based on common traits of your users. As far as I know, up until now designers and researchers were building personas...

Following Google IO announcement last week, Ben Thomspon from Stratechery wrote a great long-read post about two tech philosophies: 1) tech as an amplifier of human ability to complete tasks - Microsoft, Apple, and 2) tech as a source of task completion...

Figma (design tool on web that tries to disrupt another design tool on mac) has started a blog on design systems. “A resource for learning, creating and evangelizing design systems.” Reminds me of evangelizing usability 15-20 years ago - completely redundant,...

Doc Searls of Harvard on new EU regulation, GDPR (that thing every website is changing their privacy policy for) and its likely massive effect on what we call AdTech (tracking your activity without much of your consent to sell it to advertisers). «The...

«Think about the story you tell yourself about yourself. In all the lives you could be living, in all of the worlds you could simulate, how much did luck play a role in this one? Have you gotten more than your fair share? Have you had to deal with more...

You might find yourself in a moment in your career when you are thinking of what’s next. That’s an interesting twilight zone: you feel like you ready to give up old, but not sure what the new is. That’s where I found myself not so long ago. Truth be told,...

Alex Baldwin, designer at Simple Casual in SF compiled a short list of resources for effective behavior design: "Behavior design gives us an organized and specific model to define and foster behavior change. This field is known academically as Captology...

By the way: Notes are taken in WorkFlowy, perhaps the best editor for organizing your thoughts in a nested fashion. https://is.gd/o74NDK

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Notes from yesterday’s AIGA SF’s panel discussion on Voice Assistants, AI and the future of it all (“Lessons Learned: Designing for Voice Assistants") from the leading researchers, designers and product managers at Google, SoundHound and eBay. Highlights: +...

«In the first demo, a woman calls a hair salon, where another woman answers the phone; the two go back and forth for approximately a minute before they figure out a time that works for a hair appointment. In the second demo, also about a minute, a man...