Read These (Product Design Links, 11/14/16)
This is the first of a weekly series of Product Design, Product Management, or otherwise 👍 👏 🙌 👌 🤘 links by the Axial product team: Sarah Adams, Giff Constable, Dan Lee, Thomas Meimarides, & Simon Riker
Thomas: I really liked this article from Nielsen Norman Group about bounce rate. It brings back PTSD memories of working for a marketing agency and the obsession over lowering bounce rates without considering the underlying user behavior or even acknowledging that every visitor will bounce, but if your product is successful, they’ll return, and return often.
Optimize for Return Visits, not Bounce Rate (by Aurora Bedford @ Nielsen Norman Group)
Sarah: This week was eventful, to say the least. One small piece of design I kept encountering Tuesday evening was this little jittering dial on the New York Times’s infographics displaying the election forecast. I’m not the only one that found it rather stressful to watch, & it generated a lot of discussion and speculation online. Here the creators of the UI explain their decisions in designing it.
Why We Used Jittery Gauges in Our Election Forecast (by Gregor Aish @ vis4.net)
Sarah: This was such an exciting project to watch unfold. In little under a week Sougwen Chung managed to organize and create a comprehensive database of organizations representing civil rights, marginalized groups, and climate change that need support. Togetherlist is one of the most recent examples of the importance of design pattern libraries, by building off an existing language, they were able to move quickly while making something work well & look good. Using tools like Pad.Riseup, Google Surveys, and Nomadlist’s UI pattern, they were able to quickly gather information and build. Already they’re working on incorporating more features.
Togetherlist (Started by Sougwen Chung)
Sarah: Recently the Harvard Museum released an online catalogue of 32,000 works from their Bauhaus collection. The scope of the collection is large, and they also published an essay on the influence and history of the school. Unfortunately the site is pretty hard to navigate and the photos are disappointingly small. But it’s a great resource to have both for research and inspiration.
Harvard Museum’s Online Bauhaus Collection
Thomas: I re-read this Medium post about designing confirmations about once a month as it pops up in various recommended lists or feeds. It’s on point, every time, and he even includes a .sketch file to download so you can cheat and reuse!
Designing Confirmations (by Andrew Coyle @ Flexport)
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