July 2016 | Is the infoglut on your hypermind causing hollow flow?
It is my duty to share that today is 7-11, otherwise known as Free Slurpee Day (from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., so you’d better get hoppin’). I participated a few years ago and was dismayed to find that my taste buds have gone off the rails – Slurpees taste unappealing to me. I think I liked them as a kid. Maybe. (I’ve always been more of an ICEE devotee (which is to say, when I see an ICEE machine, I think, “Yum! ICEEs are so good!” And then I move on without actually getting an ICEE. I think I’m just worried that I’ll discover ICEEs to be as repellant as Slurpees, which would be a sad day indeed.)) Participants can up the ante by trying 7-11’s new birthday cake Slurpee (um, yay?), or by earning Slurpee rewards in honor of 7-11’s fiftieth birthday.
And now, moving on to lesser news:
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ON THIS HISTORIC JULY 11TH…
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YOUR INFO-DEPENDENT, SCREEN-BURNED BRAIN
Our daily, hourly, second-by-second interactions with our varied and many screens impact how we think and how we act. We can all agree to that, yes? Sadly, I related to nearly all of these tech and internet-induced mental disorders. Is it time to shun technology and move to a farm? I think I’m too soft for that life, so I’ll just live in the city with my smart ticks and backlog depression. [Related: Take a 30-day social media break to create new neuropathways in your brain.]
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WAIT FOR IT
Y’all know this already – that users need visual cues to let them know that their apps working – but I loved the specific examples in this article about the art of building in wait times. Computers process and calculate complex data sets way faster than we do, but that speed and agility wigs us humans out. Results too instantaneous? Mere mortals are incredulous. Too long, though, and we get impatient and click away, dissatisfied. Enter the delicate balance of the artificial wait time. We trust our technology when it acts more human, but don’t make it too human, or we’ll shun it.
A primer on color theory and conversion (and a reminder that there is no magical color that always converts better, so user test, user test, user test).
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JUST DON'T USE COLORS THAT VIBRATE
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DESIGNINGKILLER UX
Here are some nice examples of elevating UX design.