As usual, Ethan makes a lot of sense in this post about how the way we build is impacted by the environment in which we build:

In our little industry, we often work on decent hardware, on reliable networks. But according to Pew Research, thirty percent of Americans don’t have broadband at home. One in ten American adults are smartphone-only internet users, while 13% of American adults don’t use the internet at all.

Meanwhile, we make mobile-friendly websites with widescreen devices, using broadband to design experiences for slow, unstable networks. In a lot of ways, we’re outliers among the people we’re designing for.

I really enjoyed this post from Dropbox about what they do to help cultivate an internal culture of accessibility.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the advice here mirrors the same sort of good advice an organization might here about cultivating cultures of performance, security or any other critical yet overlooked component of design and development: share knowledge, experience the issues first-hand, celebrate improvements, and build it directly into your workflow.

Even in my tiny design practice, every decision I make is shaped by my biases; every decision I make is capable of harm. And it’s so, so easy to forget this: to focus on the layout challenge in front of me, to fulfil the client’s latest request, or to meet a business goal. When I do these things, I occasionally forget to ask myself who’ll be impacted by my work and, most importantly, to ask how I can mitigate that harm.

By now I think it’s become pretty clear that we haven’t done a great job of educating people about the security and privacy implications of the technology they use. Much of the information around these topics tends to lean more towards fear-mongering than towards providing actionable advice and hope.

The Privacy Paradox, a five-part series of podcasts done by Note to Self, does an excellent job of explaining what the risks are and what can be done about it. The episodes are short and actionable: each spends some time on a privacy risk followed by a specific “challenge” you can do to take back a little control. Well worth a listen.

I was just talking to Marcin Wichary last week about my love for post-it notes and he admitted the most common colors are not exactly aesthetically pleasing. Looks like we have pure convenience to blame.

The yellow color was chosen for convenience, according to Nicholson: it was what the lab next door had available, so they used it.

Una recently added a “Save Offline” button to her blog posts that gives users control over whether an article will be saved offline or not. There was some recent discussion prompted by Nicholas Hoizey about how much data is too much to save offline. Giving users control (whether on an individual post basis or in bulk) seems like one way to deal with that question.

A fantastic breakdown of the impact media has on how we perceive reality. The post starts by looking at the huge difference between coverage of terrorist attacks and the reality, demonstrating that media’s fixation (and the attention we give those articles) makes terrorism seem far more prevalent than it is.

Then there’s this sobering, accurate and important conclusion:

In addition to selective data, as readers we’re over-generalizing our view of the entire other side , based on extreme events or commentary from a select fringe.

Fantastic breakdown about the different “zones of death” in the browser. It really hammers home the importance, and difficulty, of designing for security.

The history of email, following a progression from write all the way to what we have today.

I really like the idea behind SimplySecure—focusing on making security more intuitive and usable. There’s a long history of usability and security being at odds and they’re doing some good work to try and fix that.

This discussion with them about how designers can improve the state of security and privacy online is well worth a read.

The smart folks at Google are now using a technology called RAISR to shave up to 75% off the file size of the images they display. It uses machine learning to enable it to be much more intelligent about the upsampling methods applied to images. Clever stuff!

A study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that “rich” teens use the web very differently from “poor” teens.

…richer teenagers were more likely to use the internet to search for information or to read news rather than to chat or play video games.

If you dig into the actual report itself you’ll find a bit more context.

After accounting for differences in the ability to read and understand printed texts, students' socio-economic status has only a weak, and often not significant, relationship with performance in the PISA test of digital reading. In other words, students with good reading skills, regardless of their background, have a much easier time finding their way around—and mining the considerable assets of—the Internet.

Seems to echo many other reports about barriers to internet access in stating that literacy—whether digital or language—remains a significant obstacle.

Harry started a newsletter late last year, and it’s been pretty fun—I particularly enjoy the cocktail recipe in each issue.

His latest issue mentions this really well-done video from TED-ed about sorting algorithms. The video uses an example of having to sort a pile of books and does a really nice job of illustrating the differences between the various algorithms at your disposal.

Fun visualization of 1,000 American’s activity over the course of an average day.

Run from data-driven companies. In thrall to semi-science and blinded by their dogma, they’ve lost the ability to see intelligent alternative perspectives on their business, their products, and the world. Embrace instead data-informed companies. This isn’t mere grammatical pedantry — a company genuinely informed by data understands the risks of datafication and adopts sophisticated, balanced approaches to strategy that blend quant, qual, and even some of that unfashionable prediction and intuition.

Pretty impressive investigation and creative work done by the GitHub folks to make their diff pages, some of the slowest on the site, three times faster.

I love companies that are as invested in giving back to the community as they are at doing quality web-work. The Guardian is certainly one of them, and their latest post is a great example. They walk through several errors and mistakes they made on their site this year, why those mistakes were made, and how they fixed them.

Great introduction to the various different types of browser caches by Yoav Weiss, told as a tale about Questy’s Journey. The illustrations by Yoav’s daughter, Yaara, are also wonderful.

Matt Griffin’s wonderful documentary about the web is now available to stream for free on Vimeo.

Here’s the thing: the more we experience how other browsers work, the more we learn about how different users experience our websites.

Tim started a “micro-cast” called “Ok, Get This” about oddities that he has come across. The first two episodes were a lot of fun to listen to.

Sarah has written a really useful post about the different roles animation can play. Naturally, I was really happy to see her talking about the impact on perceived performance:

Animation also aids in perceived performance. Viget conducted a study where they measured user engagement with a standard loading GIF versus a custom animation. Customers were willing to wait almost twice as long for the custom loader, even though it wasn’t anything very fancy or crazy. Just by showing their users that they cared about them, they stuck around, and the bounce rates dropped.

In most cases, I’d argue, it would be even better to provide some sort of feedback to the user about what is happening in the background, but the same general idea applies: taking the time to design for when processes take too long is important.

Vitaly published a lengthy checklist of performance optimizations, which I was more than happy to review. There are PDF and Apple Pages versions available of the list if that’s your cup of tea.