Just today UXmatters published an article I've been slowly pondering for a year or two, on being Flatly Authentic. If you read all my works, you'll notice that I reused some of the ideas and images, and some of you may have also seen a presentation with the same title and many of the same words.

The gist is that we need to stop thinking that it's flat or skeuomorphic. We need to stop thinking that we can only inherit design cues from paper and physical spaces. Digital domains have shape, space and dimension themselves. They have layering. They are used by people. And we can leverage these to make designs that work for people, and work not in affected, fake ways but authentically digital ways.

Questions, comments? Send them back to me, or tell me you just have to get on Skype to argue. We'll set up a time.

Mobile UX Design Approaches: Workshops UXmatters, 8 September 2016.

Other articles I think you should read, mostly with my own summary or commentary, but this time a tiny bit ordered and grouped. A little:

• How This Massive Structure in the Oregon Desert Keeps Facebook Running Best general overview of a server farm I've seen in a while, plus some really nice bits about how it's not one, but part of the chain. You know I love it when they say resilience! Also the the iPhone trays. If you don't understand what they are doing, or why you dream of being able to do that at work, ask me to explain more.

• Why do most startups fail? the answer is UX, no not UX as in UI/UX, real UX

• http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/the-genetics-of-motion-sickness-2/ Buried the lede there. I'll help: Motion sickness effects about 1/3 of the population. One third! A genome-wide study identifies the exact 35 genetic variations and gave us that number. Big damned deal here. Motion effects and AR/VR cannot be used (may even be disabling) to around 1/3rd of the total population!!!! WILL ADD TO A11Y DECK

• Accessibility Guidelines Sadly, a bit messy and not consolidated enough. Just a menu of options from various (referenced) sources. But, it's a checklist and there are sources so that is sometimes useful. WILL ALSO ADD to a11y deck!

• http://fr.slideshare.net/PersonaeUserLab/smartphone-street-observer-1er-baromtre-dobservation-des-usages-mobiles-saison-3 Waiting for english one, but should be more good data to add to the touch stuff.

• http://blog.invisionapp.com/mobile-first-mobile-only/

• https://m.facebook.com/business/news/updated-features-for-video-ads add to a11y stuff, 80% of mobile viewers turn off audio on fb videos. So: captioning.

• Ericsson Mobility Report regular report... good stuff: around 55% of world on smartphones, most people likewise on 3G or worse, what are you doing about it? Balloons and satellites aren't needed, just better optimized products.

• articles/2016-07-25/smartphones-overtake-computers-as-top-e-commerce-traffic-source?utm_campaign=Enterprise%20Mobility&utm_content=33665278&utm_medium=socia segue to this... mobile only, for many people. Why are you building desktop first!

• The Most Popular Product of All Time You may have heard that with the iPhone selling their billionth device, someone did some math and decided it is the most popular thing ever. Naturally, fanboi alert: That's only true for certain values of popular, thing, and ever. Lest you still be impressed by the number, there are 1.4 billion active Android devices. And that count is by visits to the Play store in some period. A lot of devices (esp in China) never visit for complex reasons, so it's more than that.

• https://arc.applause.com/2016/07/27/the-future-of-ios-and-android/#.V5vDLYOZyxg.twitter I need to read this, pull the nuggets, etc.

• Google vs. Facebook – Almost the final frontier ...great data on indian internet use, but mostly good political background; our internet overlords aren't altrustic, at all...

• https://medium.com/@jsaito/is-this-my-interface-or-yours-b09a7a795256#.16a0saa0j much to say... what's my opinion!? I think tone overall and tone is not just content but structure. Also see other links in the comments.

• https://www.propublica.org/article/looks-can-kill-the-deadly-results-of-flawed-design must read, discuss a bit

• https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol ... last month had the history of something. This is super, super cool on how the WWW was not a foregone conclusion. predicting the future is hard.

• British Airways stops musician from flying with cello as 'it didn't have a visa' Let's have a funny one. Read the article. Giggle. Okay, what went wrong? Not sociologically or politically, but what went wrong with systems? We don't know for sure, but we can guess. The website she booked through required her to give a name to each ticketed "passenger." So she did. The BA system requires each passenger to have a visa. Impasse! Solving this is not just on one system, but both, and all. Edge cases need to be dealt with, and we're in a bad trend of simplifying by removing features instead of designing well. Since it's possible to buy a ticket for a seat to put a not-person there, that should be an option. An obscure, hard-to-find option, but one anyway. And people who mis-allocate in one part of the process, should not be disallowed from fixing it later on. Now, go back and think what you are doing to the systems you design. Can this happen to you?

• 'Baby Simulator' Programs May Make Teen Girls More Likely to Become Pregnant, Study Finds And let's finish off with one that's not about digital product design at all. Just like DARE results in more kids taking drugs and girls who participate in purity ring programs get pregnant more, the scared-straight style baby simulators don't just not work, but have the opposite effect intended. Gut instinct is no way to run anything, as we see over and over again. Test. Data can be inconvenient, but it doesn't lie.

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