The first 24 hours with Peach, looking forward to 24 months

On the afternoon of January 8th, I observed a sudden and mysterious overuse of the peach emoji emoji in my Twitter feed. By the folks using it, I immediately knew a fresh app was on the loose and pivoted to Google where the trusty “peach app” query would turn up fruit (ba-dum-tss). Continue reading →

Reading People’s Minds, Diane Rehm with Alan Alda

Today’s Diane Rehm interview with M*A*S*H’s Alan Alda wasn’t intended to be a user experience or content strategy talk, but it was a great segment on reading between the lines with people, using improv techniques to communicate better. He references the “curse of knowledge” inhibiting interpersonal communication and has a number of great anecdotal stories.

Listen on thedianerehmshow.org

Duplicating pages in-place in InDesign

I don’t know why I didn’t Google this until today, but it’s always bothered me the default “Duplicate Spread” feature in InDesign tosses your new page to the end of your document—always forcing you to have to drag it elsewhere.

To duplicate a page inline with the page you’re actively working on, hold down your option key (Mac OS) and drag the page you want to duplicate into the position you want it duplicated to (usually right after the master you’re duplicating from).

It seems the default should be to duplicate in-line, in the context of where you are working in the document. I’m not sure of a use-case where I’d want a single page thrown to the end of the document, unless I’m duplicating a batch of pages into a new chapter. In that event, I’d rather the single page duplicate in-line by default and a multi-select of pages request a decision similar to the PDF insert pages dialog.

Stop asking me to log in! Progressive authentication

I use the Fidelity app to manage a lump of rainy-day, retirement money. One of the features I love about the app is the home screen, where it summarizes today’s “movers” (best and worst performing) among the stocks and funds I’ve invested in. Now, this home screen doesn’t need to tell me how many shares of each I own or how much money I’ve made or lost, but it quickly tells me if I need to be paying attention. It gives me personalized, public information.

—or at least it would, if it didn’t require me to log in to see it. Continue reading →

Consumer engagement via the Goldilocks parable

This week, we shopped for a new car—a thorough process of “try and buy” I’d not undertaken before. In both excitement and intimidation, we ran an exhausting 8-hour marathon, kicking the tires on a dozen cars. In retrospect, it was apparent our final selection was impacted more by the brand courtship than the product itself, with all recommended cars fitting neatly into our minimal criteria. The consumer engagement styles divided into the following three approaches. Continue reading →