TIMING/VIDEO Remove auto-advancing after creating a video version: On/Off: In the tabs (not menu): “Slide Show” [X] Play Narrations [X] Use Timings [ ] Show Media Controls Clear the timings completely: Select all the slides Right click a slide > “Slide Transition…” In the “Advance slide” section uncheck “Automatically after” The complete guide to Designing Mobile User Experiences 6) Information Architecture Resources @shoobe01 4ourth.com

Information Architecture Read More: IA is a whole topic with books larger than the one I wrote. People are information architects for a living. There's a lot to doing this well, and even more when you consider multi-channel devices, and complex user interactions. Read up on it and start to understand at least who to engage and how to help you with it.

The Difference Between Information Architecture (IA) and Navigation http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ia-vs-navigation/ Simple and important. A recent (2014) article from Nielsen Norman Group on IA, and how it should not be confused with navigation, or anything about interface alone. Making navigation component choices based on looks alone can force you to change an ideal IA to something that doesn’t best serve the needs of users or accommodate your content.

Designing for Imperfection http://uxmag.com/articles/an-introduction-to-designing-for-imperfection http://uxmag.com/articles/designing-for-imperfection-in-action A two-part article I wrote for UX Magazine on applying principles of resilience engineering into a practice of resilient design. While the complexity of modern systems can make designing for perfection a futile process, embracing the inherent messiness of digital design can forge better solutions.

Inexact Design: Beyond Fault-Tolerance http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/4/162511-inexact-design/fulltext There are lots of articles about resilience engineering, but this gets into the concept of it, not operationalizing to keep the site running. Still engineering focused, but awesome stuff going on here. Krishna Palem, a computer scientist at Rice University, has an unorthodox prescription for building faster computers. "If you are willing to live with inexact answers, you can compute more efficiently," he says. If you ask him whether one of his processors is working correctly, he's apt to answer, "Probably." Paywall. But I already said that you should join the ACM.

The Trouble with Systems http://andyfitzgerald.org/the-trouble-with-system/ Starts off about systems thinking and gets to how to apply these concepts to designing one product for many, many different devices, in different contexts, efficiently. We tend to find this annoying, alarming, or infuriating. Sometimes all three. Web design for the pre-mobile internet could, for a time, mimic the constraints and limitations of the printed page. Eventually the rest of the system began to catch up with us. Stephen Hay notes that “the responsive web is the web as it was intended” (4). The challenges of responsive web design were always inherent in the web; we were simply able to ignore them for a time.

Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold http://www.nytimes.stfi.re/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html?_r=3&sf=rxenlj What happens if you are not properly resilient? People’s houses freeze and you get yelled at. And, you cannot fix it quickly. …a nine-step procedure to manually restart the thermostat, which involves detaching the device from the wall, charging it with a USB cable for 15 minutes, reattaching it to the wall, pressing a series of buttons, charging it again for at least an hour, and then. … But this isn’t just about the Nest. This points to a larger problem with so-called smart devices that we are inviting into our lives: Small glitches can cause huge problems.

Probablistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~dcm/Teaching/COP5611-Spring2013/VonNeumann56.pdf PDF, because it’s a scan of a typed document from 1956. I should probably transcribe this. It’s the full text of the Von Neumann speech I quoted. Cool stuff to me but not required reading here really.

The benefits of a single task-driven classification / navigation http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/benefits-single-task-driven-classification-navigation This ideal for decades has been the 1:1, personalized experience. From an IA/nav point of view, this has always been a challenge though. We never really have enough data to do it automatically, and we cannot ask them. I have encountered the exact issues this paper outlines. Now it’s clear we need to be very, very careful building custom nav trees for individual user types, and can get good results by being task-focused instead.

Microinteractions http://uxmag.com/articles/failing-gracefully Dan Saffer’s current buzzworthy term. Some say too much so. Design in the details, but not to interface (colors, pixel perfect spacing) but the interactions. The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn mute on? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments—which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored—can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved.

Infinite Scrolling, Pagination Or “Load More” Buttons Infinite Scrolling, Pagination Or “Load More” Buttons? Usability Findings In eCommerce https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/03/pagination-infinite-scrolling-load-more-buttons/ I don’t get down this far into widget design here that much, but infinite scroll vs. paging is worth discussing. Note that eCommerce has some different perceived needs, so your project may not care, but read closely and think about the best way. P.S. In my experience, it’s never paging. And you can usually fake paging when tech requires it with Load More buttons. So, only those two to choose from. Enjoy!