“Daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions [which] predicted worse day-to-day psychological and physical health, but also greater motivation to take action aimed at changing the political system that evoked the negative emotions in the first place.”

Law 1 / Reduce - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.Law 2 / Organize - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.Law 3 / Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity.Law 4 / Learn - Knowledge makes everything simpler.Law 5 / Differences - Simplicity and complexity need each other.Law 6 / Context - What lie…

"Designers love it, website owners want to fill it. Whitespace seems to be one of the most controversial aspects of design. Why then is it so important and how can we ensure it is maintained?"

start to understand how we may need to balance social media with other more challenging, but ultimately more satisfying forms of communication

"This article presents three experiments (total N = 1718) investigating the possibility of familiarity backfire within the context of correcting novel misinformation claims and after a 1-week study-test delay."

Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads.

Summary: Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

Gerry McGovern on skills needed for digital communication people. For example: - choose the right word to drive action; - make it easy finding content allowing users to complete a task quickly; - design for maintenance and evolution; - love metadata, be an information architect. I wished I had all of those.

"Eyetracking studies show that users sometimes look at only a single result on a search-results page because that result is good enough for their needs."

The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.

"Never be afraid to speak up, simply because you feel there are more valuable voices in the room. [...] Just be sure to express it as your perspective and not absolute truth!"

One self-experiment we all should try once: To understand this website based on its images.

We live in a supercharged attention economy - the internet is a buffet. Keep in mind when we create and how we consume content! What kind of information do we give to our audiences? Junk, or healthy stuff?

Cheap storage. Cheap processing power. Cheap energy. It’s all great. We don’t have to think. We just dump our content onto the website and let search engines figure it out.

Traditional, mass marketing branding still good for low information type customers. If they’re high information customers, you need to give them the facts and be useful because that’s what they want.

Good evidence why coming up with ever new, more "beautiful", "attractive" and trendy designs that "pop" is not always a good thing.

"In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved over time."

An interface to control a spacecraft - how complex and complicated does it have to be?

Using "job-stories" instead of "user-stories": "remove any sort of biases that the team might have for that persona. Personas create assumptions about the users that might not be validated."