It’s fine to protect customers from illicit activity, as long as you don’t end up protecting them from themselves, and creating lots of unwanted friction in their workflows.

I’ve been dealing with the customer support of PayPal Germany today, as I was experiencing problems logging in to my account, and I had urgency to do that for tax declaration purposes. I currently find myself abroad in Japan, using a different machine than the one I normally use, with a brand-new version of Mac OS installed on it. So that triggered the security system mechanism and I was required to submit…

You can’t read news articles in peace anymore. Nowadays, one in two websites is going to throw a newsletter sign-up module at you before you even start reading the first paragraph— want access to this article that you find so interesting? Sign up here first, just a matter of seconds! If you are on mobile, you are likely to tap on the wrong spot, and be redirected somewhere else, and it’s so much fun…

Marketing experts are getting creative at finding new ways of luring us into giving away our email addresses. The strategies they experiment with are just short…

Unfair contract terms, marketing brainwashing, and questionable strength training exercises that might do more harm than good. While we need better regulations to prevent fitness companies from doing what they want with their customers, we can also defend ourselves by knowing how they lure us into trusting them.

Contract terms against customers

When I signed up to a one-year contract at my local Kieser Training gym, I knew there was no other option than a 12-months minimum commitment, take it or leave it: no short-term option, no pay as you go. …

Intentional UI traps

As professionals, we should not support enterprises whose business model is rooted in shady practices to trick users.

LinkedIn: a frantic attempt to connect you with the whole universe

Designers and developers united. The plan:

• Get as many contacts as possible from customers’ email.
• Spam as many random people as possible.
• Send invitations up to three times per person, if they don’t respond.

A carefully crafted, deceptive dialogue, right after accepting a pending invitation:

UX Map is a widget library to document user journeys and human-computer interactions using a simple visual language. It also allows to add interactive annotations to your Axure prototype.

After spending years improving at prototype creation with Axure RP and experimenting with the most favorable techniques for efficiently gathering design specifications together, I have summed up my experience together into a widget library to ease the workload of designers.

UX Map is the quickest and easiest way to add contextual annotations to any prototype created in Axure RP. …

Un commento sull’irresistibile e invereconda ascesa dei Cinque Stelle, il partito dei disonesti convinti di essere onesti. La classe politica non è la sola ad essere responsabile del disastro italiano. Responsabili e colpevoli sono gli italiani. Quelli che purtroppo andranno a votare.

Quando alcuni mesi or sono si diffuse impavido tra i social media il video del discorso Di Mattia Fantinati al convegno di CL, le tifoserie da stadio non aspettavano altro. Un’occasione ghiotta per potersi nutrire del sangue avversario. Un’auto-celebrazione di massa, in attesa dello spettacolo successivo. …

You sometimes hear people celebrate continuous testing as being essential and tremendously effective, but meanwhile, we seem to forget about the good old principles of design. Continuous experimentation can sometimes hold back not just design, but also common sense.

Experiments at Airbnb… what’s the point?

On May 2014, on Airbnb’s techy blog an article appeared called Experiments at Airbnb, where they provide useful examples of how to run split testing, alias A/B testing. They make controlled experiments — they say, that are very important in shaping the user experience on their site. Their argument is not convincing, though. …