DPL Reading List – August 28, 2015

Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.

How Doodling Can Help You Get Ahead at Work – “A study conducted last year by a Stanford Graduate School of Business researcher found that concepts have more impact when presented as whiteboard-style drawings than when photos are used. Observers watching hand-drawn slides were more engaged and more likely to remember what they saw, and they perceived presentations to be of higher quality and more credible.”

7 Reasons Designers Should Learn to Code – “Coding skills will give you another perspective to consider in your design work, help you empathize with full-time coders and, ultimately, strengthen your team. Design might always be your core competency, but understanding code will make you that much more desirable to hiring managers.”

5 Myths of Great Workplaces (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “What differentiates great workplaces is not the number of extravagant perks. It’s the extent to which they satisfy their employees’ emotional needs and develop working conditions that help people produce their best work. For too long, we’ve relied on assumptions when it comes to improving our workplaces. Isn’t it time we looked at the data?”

‘Alphabet,’ From Ancient Greece to Google – “Mr. Page’s allusion to Google’s ‘alpha-bet’ illustrates a new business-minded trajectory for the letter names among quantitative financial analysts, or ‘quants.’ As Journal reporter Scott Patterson wrote in his 2010 book ‘The Quants,’ ‘alpha’ signifies a return on investment that outperforms a benchmark index, while ‘beta’ is ‘shorthand for plain-vanilla market returns anyone with half a brain can achieve.’”

Facebook Dumped Intern After He Pointed Out Messenger’s Creepy Location Tracking – “Within a day, Facebook asked Khanna not to talk to the press. He complied. Within two days, Facebook asked Khanna to deactivate the extension. He complied. Within three days, Khanna had lost his coveted internship. Nine days later, Facebook released an update for Messenger’s location sharing, so even though Khanna got screwed, his jettisoned summer gig resulted in an actual privacy improvement from Facebook.”

Optimising Google Fonts for Fast Load Times (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Unfortunately, adding web fonts to your site adds extra overhead to your site and can often slow your page load times. If you’ve worked hard to ensure that your application has a fast load time, the last thing you want to do is slow it down with extra HTTP requests that carry unnecessary weight.”

The Next Feature Fallacy: The Fallacy that the Next New Feature Will Suddenly Make People Use Your Product (Thanks to Nate Lowry of Travefy for recommending this article) – “For people who love to build product, when something’s not working, it’s tempting to simply build more product. It leads to the launch-fail-relaunch cycle that I alluded to in a previous essay, Mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999. However, this rarely works, and when you look at the metrics, it’s obvious why.”