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Replied to a post on werd.io :

As someone that is using Known for all my POSSE/PESOS I'd love to see some modernization of Known especially if it can leverage useful parts of the ecosystem for best-in-class frontends.

Would love to see a clean extensible design and would support the effort! There's a small pot of money, so maybe it's been waiting for this moment?

 

Just amazing work by @chankfonts including design, content (and fonts!) and photography by @midwestartbuyer and tons of other people...

Will upload to @internetarchive when I'm happy with the results..

 

@metavivor @BCAction Check out Julie’s follow list if you want to get some of her style in your feed, including Dog, Design, Lit, or Minnesota Music Twitter.

https://t.co/8F40IeVzze

Thank you for bearing witness to Julie’s life, for the condolences and for honoring @jflindner's memory.

Paul & Gus. https://t.co/NKbYwc3CeZ

 

In 2015, Julie was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Through the treatments she focused on spending quality time with family and friends. She took trips to where she enjoyed the warm weather, modern design and tennis tournaments.

@BNPParibasOpen https://t.co/uqW0IntLjL

 

The next few years Julie explored the world. Trips to Ecuador found her hiking the Andes and dancing on bartops. With cats stowed in carry-on she started life in Geneva, enjoying music festivals, @MontreuxJazz and modern design. Fondue, and shows at @LeZooUsine became the norm. https://t.co/E97WnkPwlc

 

John Henry Short Term role

Looking for a break? Want to improve fairness for Google products? Have a supportive manager? Then check out this short-term opportunity on the John Henry Team:

https://grow.googleplex.com/opportunity/job/2000000070880

So what exactly would you be doing you might ask...

- Work with a system that pulls all the term lists used for blocking through Google and properly categorize them based on identity facets.
- Work with research/product partners to apply this merged, vetted Societal Context dataset. Help remove bias from underlying systems and ML algorithms
- Build tools that will help us develop System Dynamics as a common practice in policy making and the product design process.
- Have fun!

Our environment is Java+Spanner with a goal of migrating to GraphStore in 2020.

Happy to chat about this opportunity or the project as a whole.

 

Societal Context Summit

*** This is Happening Now ***

There will be two great talks tomorrow on the intersection of technology, society, and justice. I highly recommend catching these talks if you are able! Details below:

Livestream link:

http://go/scs-keynote-livestream

Talks:

Ruha Benjamin (9:45 - 10:30am)
Anna Lauren Hoffmann (9:45 - 10:30am)

Speaker bios:

https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/ is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of https://www.thejustdatalab.com/ and the author of two books, https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/peoples-science and https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/race-after-technology. Ruha teaches and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice and at Princeton her main focus is on the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine.

https://www.annaeveryday.com/about is an Assistant Professor with The Information School at the University of Washington working at the intersections of data, technology, culture and ethics. Anna has written many https://www.annaeveryday.com/publications on issues in information, data and ethics, while especially to the ways discourse, design and uses of information technology work to promote or hinder the pursuit of important human values like respect and justice.

Rooms for livestream:

DUB-1GC-1-Dracula (8)

DUB-1GC-3-Golden Grove (7)

LON-123-1-New Forest (12)

SVL-MOT1-5-Triskelion (8)

NYC-9TH-14-F-324-Uptown Training (16)

 

Stadia and Digital Preservation

[crosspost from industryinfo..]

One thing we at Google could do is advocate for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit scheme for Games.

- Game publishers would put their games in Escrow when they publish.
- Google could publish a spec on how to interpret the game contents.
- 'Orphan' games would actually be preserved.
- Users that purchased the Game would then be entitled to a copy of the escrowed item, plus the design on how to run them.

This, combined with an export of user-generated data would allow for usability after Stadia or the Game Publisher sunsets the service/game.

And TBH I'd love to see this extended to all Online "Stores" that don't let you export usable contents.

Barring something like that Google could enter a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact with our users if we're serious about the long-haul.. For each purchase a user makes put 10x in a locked escrow fund. When the service cancels that money can be used to migrate the games to a new provider or payout back the user.

- If Stadia gets few users it's not a lot of money to exit and actually would increase satisfaction.
- If Stadia does get popular then there's an explicit feedback loop that reinforces the durability of the system and alignment of interests.

Evernote announced something like this, but never really followed through. A small company called https://www.forever.com/guarantee actually does have a preservation fund that is purpose driven.

 

Corporate Memphis

_Tracking the illustration style of choice in our tech dystopia_

Warning: once you see this you'll notice this design pattern almost everywhere you look.

 

... now I want to see Pong at TGIF via paddles. Oh and please be aware of the control you have and unintended consequences of the the systems you design. kthxbye

_It was a blistering July day in Las Vegas, with temps hitting 109. Inside the SIGGRAPH 91 convention hall Yello's Rubberbandman looped on the speakers. On each chair: a red/green paddle._



http://www.1500wordmtu.com/2018/when-pong-played-humans





 

Online Communities. Corp Culture. Headcount. Machine Resources. These and much more can also be considered _"The Commons"_. (As in the "tragedy of the...")

If the commons are failing you should look to Ostrom's design principles to understand why. Christopher Allen's adaptation of these principles is a good intro.


http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2015/11/a-revised-ostroms-design-principles-for-collective-governanc...






 

I ordered the _"Designing for Trust: The Data Transparency Playbook"_ ebook..

Gives me hope that all this GDPR work will pay off.



https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/data-trust-gap-design/






 

Google Forever

Greetings Area 120. Google Forever has also made it to the final pitch round.

We have plenty of opportunities for people to pitch in on sustainable bizdev models, decentralized engineering and more. But one role we'd love to fill is a UX/Design/Frontend leader. Here's our job listing. Please reach out if you're interested!

https://grow.googleplex.com/opportunity/job/2000000020689

Are you interested in building user experiences and critical user journeys that work for generations? Do you want to help people preserve their most important digital memories?

Consider joining the Google Forever Project. We're a proposed Area 120 project that's already made it to the final pitch round and we need you!

Our project is creating the software that will power a business and ecosystem that will last for decades and centuries. We're starting with a way to preserve the world's most valued Photos in an easy, simple sustainable way.

As a lead/founding frontend member of the team you will have considerably freedom to set the direction and tech stack while working with our passionate engineering and business teams. You will also be able to explore experimental user interfaces and user experiences that might be used in the far future.

If accepted to Area 120 you will have the chance to work on this full time. We also will accept any and all people who want to help us achieve our vision!

See http://go/google-forever or contact Paul Lindner to discuss how you can contribute.

 

New comment by lindner in "The world in which IPv6 was a good design"

I thought this was what HIP was supposed to provide?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Identity_Protocol

Anyone know what's going on with those protocols?

 

""The appearance of privacy where it doesn't exist should be avoided at pretty much any costs. Your users will invest a great deal more trust in it than you ever want to and ever should, and you should make privacy design decisions with this in mind.""


https://plateia.org/notice/12759?x=1






 

I hope our Phoenix UX folks are keeping tabs on Imzy. Lots of interesting interaction twists going on. Things I like:

- Custom screen names per community.
- Responsive OneUp design shows post on left, comments on right.

...and is +116834966192427446812 moonlighting as their character artist?


https://www.imzy.com/gaming/post/first_ever_imzy_gaming_awards






 

Code Next Opens in Oakland, creating diversity through Constructionism

Code Next Opens in Oakland, creating diversity through Constructionism

"From a design point of view it is a truly unique experience that very much leans on an educational theory known as constructionism. This codified curriculum will soon be available to the entire world as an open source."

 

Radical UX'ers

Also there's this: _Diverse teams that design for themselves are able to address the needs of diverse audiences, as opposed to teams that design for ‘the other’_

https://ind.ie/ethical-design/

 

Postdoc

*Me*: There should be a term that describes writing the design doc after the implementation

Wahbeh Qardaji answered immediately _Perf_ ....

 


It's not just me.

@112530828667788492083 can we please get a new design that has the destination adjacent to the POST button?

Invest in some eye tracking if you need to; but it's fairly obvious that people are not seeing the destination for their posts.








 

There are people out there that like to argue. To be pedantic. And who trot out every logical fallacy in the book while not even realizing it (or caring.)

It's gotten so bad that +116478487531429494919 proposed sending Harry Potter fanfic to such people to give them something to argue about.

However we're Google and we know that won't scale. Instead of letting these people harm our discussions I propose a new AAaS (Arguments as a Service) product that will keep these arguers busy.

- Arguers can find other arguers using a smart phone app.
- We'll match argument styles and positions. Ad Hominem vs Strawman, Android vs iPhone. You name it.
- Want to argue face-to-face? Our Uber integration will get you both to a bar of your choice where you can argue the merits of a sports team or anything else.

And coming in 2016 we'll offer AAaS Pro:
- Design your own Oxford style debates or Presidential fora.
- Adds Abuse and Hit-on-the-Head APIs.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y






 

Today 2pm, MTV-SB65:

"""Bob Gurr, retired Disney Imagineer, spent over 40 years developing more than 100 designs for attractions ranging from the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Monorails to the design of the mechanical workings of Disney’s first Audio-Animatronics human figure.

The attractions he developed still are incredible, and even more so if you consider the technology available to him at the time.""""

https://groups.google.com/a/google.com/forum/#!topic/atgoogle-mv/7W0k21E-ceo



https://groups.google.com/a/google.com/forum/#!topic/atgoogle-mv/7W0k21E-ceo






 

A Design Doc for your Illness

Just got the final Second Opinion report and I'm quite impressed.  [See http://go/secondopinion - it's a great perk]  I liked that they chose people that are advancing in their careers and researching the specific field.  You get a clear, well written summary of your medical record, actionable data, and citations for specific background information.  There's pragmatism and optimism, including this quote:

_Finally, if one can outpace the innovations in cancer that are taking place right now, survival may actually be substantially better._

If you're considering this service please let me know.  We're happy to share our report, just ask.  For everyone else here's an outline of what's included.

Expert Selection Process 2
Letter from Physician Case Manager 3
Summary of Clinical History 4
Questions to the Expert 20
Report by Vijayakrishna K. Gadi, MD, PhD 21
Report by Komal Jhaveri, MD 28
Curriculum Vitae for Vijayakrishna K. Gadi, MD, PhD 33
Curriculum Vitae for Komal Jhaveri, MD 37
Legal Terms 40

https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fappengine.google.com%2F_ah%2Fconflog...

 

*The Real Life Social Network* July 2010

by Paul Adams, UX researcher at Google.  This had a huge influence on the design of Google+.


http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2






 

Interviewing PMs

Not sure where to get feedback for this so tossing into the ether...

I've been getting many PM interviews for Technical Hat; I wonder what others think of this line of questioning?

- We have a SMB with 1000 devices and 20 servers
- These machines generate log files (1st question, does candidate know what a log file is?)
- Your product needs to meet the needs of the following users
- Sysadmins need to be able to diagnose problems, do postmortems.
- Auditors need to enforce rules on system usage
- A security team wants to detect intrusions, malware etc.

I then ask the candidate to ask clarifying questions and try to get them to give me any/all of the following through progressive probing:

- Min viable features of the product
- Do they suggest graphs? notifications? email alerts?
- What about user provisioning? Admin features?
- What kind of UI? Web? Mobile? Command line?
- Search?
- A high level technical design showing how the we get from Logs -> UI
- Push vs pull?
- Where/when does parsing happen?
- Technical
- How do you store the data? How do you transform it? Batch?
- What database? How many QPS?
- Redundancy? Failover?
- On site / off site?
- Insights
- Does the candidate understand privacy/security concerns? (Mention wipeout, retention for the auditor use case)

So far I've gotten some decent responses, but most fall into the run reports on files and store those.

For the good candidates we are able to progress to phase II where we design for a multinational fortune 500 scenario.

So WDYT? Good question?

PMs? How do you think you'd do on my question?

 

*Fall Detection and Diversity*

Why not build fall detection into every phone?  And why don't we have these kinds of features?

I recently had a scare where my wife passed out and hit her head while walking our dog. Luckily a neighbor noticed and helped her back to our house.  It's highly unlikely she'd use a device like the one you see below, but I suspect an app on the phone would be acceptable (and more useful)

Which brings me back to product design.  When was the last time you saw _elder_ or _person with medical condition_ as a target user outside of a11y bug?  Having multiple points of view really matter.  Without it we're blind to many use cases across the design spectrum.


http://www.tunstallhealthcare.com.au/solutions/iVi






 

*Human Factors Design Handbook - 1981*

One can learn a lot by looking into how real Architects design things.  Airports, Parking Garages, Bathrooms, Missile Control Systems, Furniture, you name it, it's in there.  It also includes things highly relevant to our field like accessibility, design for failure, and social factors and privacy:

_Personal space factors are important in establishing the privacy requirements for architectural design._

Currently residing at the desk of @102103132265474854376   -- Check it out!


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/6090541554277570881/6090541559340908530






 

Can we add a 'has sane permalinks' checkbox to Ariane?

Or maybe an SDD - _SEO Design Doc_.  For a company founded on search we do a crappy job of following our own webmaster guidelines...









 

Pluck spammed me about their new events/hangouts-like functionality.

Hello Paul,

Can you do this today?

Hold a live event, on your website or Facebook page. Invite an executive, topical expert or celebrity to host it. Let hundreds of thousands of your fans not only follow the event, but participate with comments, questions and photo and video uploads. Manage your event’s tone, pace and energy by choosing the content your fans see. Compel them to spend an average of 40 minutes on your website or Facebook page.

How about this?

Enhance a virtual or in-person event with a dynamic social wall experience. Collect, curate and display related social media content directly on your website. Moderate fan content – comments, questions, photos, videos, tweets, Facebook posts – so that it best represents your brand. Add your own original content or editorial commentary.  Create a complete, highly visual story around a particular topic or event.

Creating a Real-time Experience is about starting a conversation, not joining it. It’s about listening and engaging. Real-time Experiences are about collaborative content, and leveraging unique audience consumption opportunities on your owned media.

Pluck’s CoveritLive Real-time Engagement Platform gives you everything you need to design and produce highly interactive real-time experiences. More than 1,500 leading brands, retailers and publishers like Subway, EA, Jeep, Ford and Anthropologie have created real-time experiences with CoveritLive. They have connected with their fans – and generated new ones – through Live Blogs, Q&A Sessions, Social Walls, Second Screen Experiences, Featured Galleries and Facebook Chats.

For digital marketers seeking customer and shopper engagement, real-time experiences are highly differentiated and very sticky. CoveritLive routinely supports events with hundreds of thousands of attendees, who on average are engaged for 40 minutes.

And here’s the best part. You can download CoveritLive and run trial events of your own at no cost. What are you waiting for?









 

I call mine my "Macbook-C"  Seriously awesome hardware.

I call mine my "Macbook-C"  Seriously awesome hardware.

Originally shared by Google Chrome

Introducing the HP Chromebook 11, designed and built in partnership with our friends at HP. It has all the speed, simplicity and security benefits you've come to expect from a Chromebook, with unique design elements that makes it easier to get stuff done. And all for $279. 

Look for it starting today in the US at Best Buy , Amazon.com and Google Play and in the UK at Currys, PC World and more. It will also be coming to other countries in time for the holidays.  

Find out more on the Chrome blog: http://goo.gl/tzyHvs

 

 

Feedback from my wife who doesn't follow many people.

- didn't like having followers show up in the list of people.  She had created circles for design/art/music but they were not set to 'Following'.  I think we should ask users to check this on startup.  (I'm assuming that following-only circles are not used for hangouts)

- She saw someone she didn't recognize and from a following circle.  Her first choice was to remove the person from her circles.  That did not remove the person from the chat roster. How does Babel sync circle members and the chat roster?  ANything I can tell her? (She reloaded, logged-out, logged-in) etc...









 

It's 2013 -- why do we still have problems with hotspots in Bigtable/Kansas?

I have not looked into the backend design, but this seems like something that's been solved in the past.

Do we not have
- Dynamic-sized replicas (add more read-only replicas for hot keys)?
- What about adaptive sharding/rebalancing (rehash based on usage)?
- Hierarchical storage? (automatically move dormant accounts to older/slower hardware, move back when reactivated)
- Or... the ability to manually move a single hot key to it's own instance. (variant of adaptive sharding above)

I know about the stubby cacher and how that can help, but that seems like treating the sympton rather than the source of pain.









 

Today's a day when I wish I could type 20 ctrl-g in chat windows...

Guessing that's by design...









 

SeeClickFix is one of the best things to come along for fixing problems in Oakland.

SeeClickFix is one of the best things to come along for fixing problems in Oakland.  Here's one of their "highlighted" issues for all you typography/design nerds out there..

 

This is just so amazing.

This is just so amazing.

Originally shared by Google Glass

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Babak Parviz Steve Lee Sebastian Thrun

 

 

Anyone want to help Adam find ways to use Google+ more effectively?

Anyone want to help Adam find ways to use Google+ more effectively? I added a few tips on making yourself more findable and increasing engagement.

comments on the original...

Originally shared by Adam Rifkin

It's March 2012 and I'm still not sure what to use Google+ for.

Private sharing still seems best handled by email.

Public sharing still seems best handled by my Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.

Maybe Google+ is for people who want to share publicly but don't have Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook?

It's also unclear how to get more followers on Google+. Will my follower count always be smaller here than on Twitter and Facebook? Is that by design?

Feel free not to answer; I'm just thinking out loud.

 

Wallpaper* is here.

Wallpaper* is here. Not as much of a fan since Conde Nast bought them. Of course that just means we now have Monocle

In any case it's always good to see the Walker Art Center doing the good things they do.

Originally shared by Wallpaper* magazine

 

Do you deal with email addresses? I want to hear from you!

I'm designing a mechanism to extract facts from email addresses and I'd love feedback. A short design doc can be found here:


go/pigeonhole









 

 

Skins, Updates, More

Just caught up 10 days worth of Neighborhood posts.  I now have Vox fatigue combined with Vox guilt.  I didn't even read comments, for shame :(  After this post I'll need to check on the 'ol LiveJournal Friends page.  Don't even ask about the umpteem BlogLines blogs stuck at 200 posts...

Hi5 has a new Skins system that actually can make profile pages look good.  I had some input early on and made sure Vox and the SixApart styles were part of the inspiration.  It's coming out really well and we've received over 200 submissions.  Check out the snazzy new profile page?  Designers can check out the specs page.

Embeds are evil.  They mess up divs and tables and are often pasted in haphazardly.  Amit  came up with an amazing solution.  Use JTidy to clean up the user submitted content.  Tags match and broken html goes bye-bye!

Now back to the super-secret Hi5 Project Funk.

 

 

 

Bay XP Meeting Roundup 8/23/2006

BayXP (The Bay Area Extreme Programming Group) had a small meeting at the offices of ThoughtWorks here in San Francisco.  The topic was interesting things learned at the Agile 2006 conference.

I found a number of items to add to my reading list, Including Refactoring Databases and Working Effectively with Legacy Code.  (See Links below)

Topics of discussion from the meeting included

  • Coding Dojo - how to get hang of test-first development and Pair programming.
  • A lot of talk about how Rails stacks up against upteen different Java Frameworks.
  • The TDD Pair Programming Game is an interesting way of pairing that seems to make sense.  It's like a dance.  I write a failing test, you implement, then I refactor, then you write a test, etc.
  • The best name for a talk that I've seen in a long time was Crushing Fear Under the Iron Heel of Action.  It explored how to deal with team dynamics in an Agile environment, mostly by saying "What's the worst thing that can happen". 
  • Found out about a web site called Developer Testing.  Another thing to add to the RSS reader...
  • There was a short talk about Code Debt.  Some people are surmising that Code Debt should be publicly disclosed in a companies SEC S4 forms via Sarbanes-Oxley.  One interesting quote was that code is an asset and you should maintain that asset properly because assets "increase the means of production".  If you don't maintain code properly and use correct process your software becomes a liability.  (Or course that begs the question of who defines the Generally Acceptable Coding Practices (GACP!)