In his Putting the 'Design' in Design Systems presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle, Dan Mall talked about the benefits of design systems for designers and how ensure they can be realized. Here's my notes from his talk:

• Most content in design systems are not for designers but for developers. This helps to scale design efforts when there's a lot more developers than designers (typical in many companies).
• But where does design and designers fit within a design system? Are they no longer required?
• Design can be part of strategy and big picture thinking but most designers are good at making designs and iterating them, not working across the company on "big D" design.
• When it comes time to make a design system, most people start with "let's make some components!". This is problematic because its missing "for ____". What's the purpose of our design system? Who is it for?
• Design systems need a focus. One company's design system should not work for another company. A good "onlyness" statement can only apply to one company, it would not work for other companies.
• Design system principles can guide your work. Some are universal like: accessible, simple. Others should be very specific so you can focus on what matters for you.
• An audit of common components in design systems shows the coverage varies between companies; the components can focus on their core value.
• Instead of starting with making design components, think about what components you actually need. Then make some pilot screens as proofs of concept for a design system. Will you be able to make the right kinds of things?
• Don't start at the abstract level, start at the extract level. Take elements from within pilot designs and look for common components to pull out for reuse. Don't try to make it cover all use cases yet. As you work through a few pilots, expand components to cover additional use cases you uncover.
• The most exciting design systems are boring. About 80% of the components you're making can be covered by your design system. They allow you to remake product experiences quickly. The remaining 20% is what designers still need to do: custom design work.
• A good design system takes care of the stuff you shouldn't reinvent and allows you to spend time on where it matters.
• Creative people are driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. A good design system will enable all of these.
• The most common benefits of design systems are greater efficiency and consistency. But another important one is relief from having to do mundane design work. (editor's note: like maintaining & updating a design system!)
• The real value of a design system is to help us get back to our real work.

In his Move Fast and Don’t Break Things presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle, Scott Jehl shared a number of resilient patterns and tools to help us establish and maintain performant access to our Web sites. Here's my notes from his talk:

• For successful Web design, people used to suggest we move fast and break things. Today we've become more responsible but things can still break for our users if we're not mindful.
• So many factors that can compromise the delivery of our Web sites are out of our control. We need to be aware of these in order to build resilience into our designs.
• We used to use browser detection and feature detection to ensure our sites were supported across Web browsers. Progressive enhancement's importance ballooned as a wide range of new devices for accessing the Web, touch interactions, and more browsers became popular.
• Trying to make a Web site look and work the same across devices was broken, we realized this was the wrong goal and we need to adapt to varying screens, networks, input types, and more.
• Some practices stay good. Progressive enhancement and accessibility prepared us for many of these changes but it is also a performance enhancement on its own.
• Figuring out how to make Web sites faster used to be hard but the tools we have for measuring performance have been improving (like PageSpeedTest and WebPageTest).

Making Web Sites Fast

• First meaningful content: how soon does a page appear to be useful to a user. Progressive enhancement is about starting with meaningful HTML and then layering additional enhancements on top of it. When browsers render HTML, they look for dependencies in the file (CSS and Javascript) before displaying anything.
• CSS and Javascript are most often the render-blockers on sites, not images & videos. Decide if they need to load at high priority and if not, load async or defer. If you need them to run right away, consider server push (HTTP2) to send files that you know the browser needs making them ready to render right away.
• If your server does not support push, you can inline your critical CSS and/or Javascript. Inlining however is bad for caching as it does not get reused by other pages. To get around this you can use the Cache API to inline content and cache it as a file for reuse.
• Critical CSS tools can look over a series of files and identify the common CSS you need across a number of different pages for initial rendering. If you inline your critical CSS, you can preload the rest of your CSS (not great browser support today).
• Inlining and push are best for first time visits, for return visits they can be wasteful. We can use cookies for checking for return visits or make use of Service Worker.
• Time to interactive: time it takes a site to become interactive for the user. We should be aiming for interactivity in under 5seconds on a median mobile phone on 3G. Lower end phones can take a long time to process Javascript after it downloads.
• More weight does not mean more wait. You can prioritize when things load to make pages render much faster.

Keeping Web Sites Fast

• Making a web site fast is easier than keeping it fast. Over time, Web sites will add a number of third party services with unknown performance consequences.
• We can use a number of tools, like Lighthouse, to track performance unfriendly dependencies. Speed Curves will let you set performance budgets and see when things are over. This allows people to ask questions about the costs of what we're adding to sites.
• Varying content and personalization can increase optimizations but they are costly from a performance perspective since they introduce a second meaningful content render. Moving these features to the server-side can help a lot.
• Cloudflare has a solution that allows you to manipulate pages on their server before it comes down to browser. These server-side service workers allow you to adjust pages off the client and thereby avoid delays.
• Homepages and landing pages are often filled with big images and videos. They're difficult to keep performant because the change all the time and are often managed outside of a central CMS.
• For really image heavy pages, we can use srcset attributes to define multiple sizes of images. Writing this markup can be tricky if written by hand. Little helper apps can allow people to write good code.
• Soon we'll have a native lazy load feature in browsers for images and iframes. Chrome has it in testing now and can send aspect ratios before actual images.

In his Third-Party Software and the Fate of the Web presentation at An Event Apart in Denver, Trent Walton talked through the impact of third party scripts on Web sites and how to ensure they don't degrade performance and user experience. Here's my notes from his talk:

• With most client work, no one is paying attention to the impact of third parties on Web sites.
• Third parties are requests on a Web page coming from an external URL. Examples: TypeKit, Google Analytics, etc. People use third parties to get data to make product decisions, earn income (ads, marketing), add content (videos, fonts), add functionality (comments, chat, etc.).
• But third parties can also create issues. Loading scripts and files can really slow things down or provide an inconsistent UI and create privacy issues based on how they handle user data.
• If you care about the final deliverable for a Web site, you need to be aware of the impact of third parties on your product. All the work we do on optimizing images, code, and designs can be quickly outweighed by the addition of third party scripts to a site.
• Starting with the categories of 3rd party scripts helps you get a good sense of why people are using them: Advertising, A/B testing Tools, Analytics, Social Media, CDN, Customer Interaction, Comments, Essential.
• Looking at the top third party requests across the Alexa top 46 sites in the United States shows 213 different domain sources. The average site has 22 different domains. News sites have the most third party domains.
• Several tools can help you understand what's happening with third party scripts on a site. Request Map Generator can help you create a visualization of the different third parties on your Web site to help create awareness of what's happening on your site. Chrome's Lighthouse tool has a similar set of capabilities.
• How do third parties impact end users? Does your site depend on third parties to function? As more people block these components, will it break? Re-marketing can create creepy experiences as content begins "follow" you online.
• Web builders are on the front lines. We can advocate for the right approaches to privacy and data management. Though some of these conversations may be hard, it's our responsibility to end users.
• Web browsers now have tools to help you manage third party scripts like cookies and cross-site tracking. But most people are likely not turing on the stricter versions of these features.
• If you control a site, you can decide what third parties you want to include. But what about sites you don't control? Consider the perspective of your clients/companies and present data that explains the impact of third party on conversion and user experience.
• Establish some standards for third party integrations: determine the value, avoid redundant services, work with a performance budget, comply with privacy policies.
• Audit the third parties on your site and include data that illustrates how they perform against your standards. Compare this audit to competitors in order to set benchmarks or comparisons.
• Get specific insights: there's usually a few instances of third parties that have become redundant, unnecessary, or are blocking page rendering. These wins create credibility and illustrate impact.
• Maintain ongoing conversations with teams to make effective decisions about third parties on your sites.

In his Slow Design for an Anxious World presentation at An Event Apart in Denver, Jeffrey Zeldman espoused the benefits of design that aims to increase comprehension and intentional use. Here's my notes from his talk:

• We live in fast times and care a lot about making things faster for people. In this world, "slow" is often associated with friction. But some things are better slow.
• Fast is best for transactional customer-service designs. We optimize our checkout flows for efficiency and our code for performance. Likewise, service-oriented content must be designed for speed of relevancy. Getting to content like driving directions, return policies, and more should be quick and easy for customers.
• Slow is best for comprehension. Reading slowly helps us understand more of what we read and even transactional sites have some content that we want people to understand more deeply.
• There's lots of resources for site optimization but few for slowing people down so they appreciate and understand our content.
• Legibility means you can read what's on the page. Readability is where the art comes in. You don't need to be a graphic designer to improve readability. When focusing on readability you're focusing on absorption not conversion.
• Improving readability means putting the focus on content and removing distractions. The service Readability optimized Web pages for this by removing ads, third party widgets, and more.
• Considering different reading modes like in bed, at breakfast, on your lap, etc. can trigger ideas for layout and type for sites. For example, big fonts can help you lean back and take in content vs. leaning in and squinting.
• Big type used to be a controversial design choice on the Web but now has been adopted by a number of sites like Medium, Pro Publica, and the New Yorker.
• To be readable: use big type (16px should be your smallest size); use effective hierarchy for type; remove all extraneous elements in your layout; art direction helps you call attention to important content; make effective use of whitespace.
• Art direction can bring unique emotion and resonance to articles online. In a world of templates and scalability, distinct art direction can help people take notice of intentional high value content.
• Macro-whitespace is the bigger columns and padding around content we often associate with high-end luxury brands. Micro-whitespace is the space in between letter forms and between the lines of type. Consider both in your designs
• Ensure your content is branded so it stands out. When all content looks like the same it all appears to have equal value. Have a brand that sticks out to be more trusted.
• With all these techniques we're trying to get people to lean back and have a good "readable" experience on the Web.

In his The New Design Material presentation at An Event Apart in Denver, Josh Clark outlined how designers can integrate Machine Learning and other new technologies into their product designs. Here's my notes from his talk:

• Designers and front-end developers have a role to play in Machine Learning and new technologies overall. But how?
• Sometimes we get fascinated with the making of the product instead of enabling the service of the product (the end user experience). We sometimes care more about using the latest frameworks or technologies than making meaningful experiences.
• The last decade of digital design was shaped by mobile, the next one is already being shaped by machine learning. Machine learning is our new design material, how can/should it be used?
• When you encounter a new design material, ask: what can it do? how does it change us (both makers and society)?
• How can machine learning help us? If we could detect patterns in anything, how can we act on them? Recommendation (ranking results that match a context); Prediction (most likely result); Classification (grouping items into defined categorization); Clustering (discover patterns/categories based on item attributes); Generation (machines can make something).
• Get comfortable with casual (almost mundane uses of machine learning) uses of machine learning. We can add a little intelligence to many of our products using these techniques.
• While there are some early attempts at using machine learning to create Web designers, machines are really best at time-consuming, repetitive, detail-oriented, error-prone, and joyless tasks.
• How can we let people do what they do best and let machines do what they do best. How do we amplify our potential with machines vs. trying to replace things that we can do? Machines can help us focus our time and judgement on what matters (via pattern matching and clustering).
• What can machine learning amplify for us: be smarter with questions we already ask; ask entirely new kinds of questions; unlock new sources of data; surface invisible patterns.
• The job of user experience designers and researchers is to point machine learning at problems worth solving.

Characteristics of Machine Learning

• Machine learning is a different kind of design material. It has different characteristics we can learn.
• Machines try to find patterns in what we do but we're unpredictable and do weird things, so sometimes the patterns machines find are weird. Yet these results can uncover new connections that would otherwise be invisible.
• We need to design for failure and uncertainty because machine learning can find strange and sometimes incorrect results. This is different than designing for the happy path (typical design work), instead we need to design for uncertainty and cushion mistakes by setting the right expectations. Match language and manner to system ability.
• It's better to be vague and correct than specific and incorrect. Machines focus on narrow domains and don't understand the complete world. It's not real intelligence but scaled "interns" or "infinite tem year olds".
• Narrow problems don't have to be small problems. We can go deep on specific medical issue identification or identify patterns in climate change.
• We don't always understand how machine learning works, the systems are opaque. To help people understand what signals are being used we can give people some feedback on what signals inform recommendations or clustering.
• Because the logic is opaque, we need to signal our intention. Designers can help with adding clarity to our product designs. Make transparency a design principle.
• Machine learning is probabilistic. Everything is a probability of correctness, not definitive. We can surface some of these confidence intervals to our end users. "I don't know" is better than a wrong answer.
• Present information as signals, not as absolutes. Point people in a good direction so they can then apply their agency and insights to interesting insights.
• What do we want form these systems? What does it require from us? Software has values embedded in it (from its makers). We don't want to be self-driven by technology, we want to make use of technology to amplify human potential.
• We're inventing the future together. We need to do so intentionally.

For the past seven years, I've compiled an annual presentation on interesting topics, lessons learned, and data-informed insights in mobile and Web design at Google's Conversions event in Dublin. This year's video recording is now live.

Despite good intentions, lots of user-centered design isn’t actually user-centered. Learn what drives these gaps and how your organization can align business and customer needs to deliver the kind of user experiences we all want to have online. With data informed insights, “live” redesigns, and more Luke will give you the tools and information you need to for successful user journeys.

All Annual Sessions:

• Conversions@Google 2019 session on our Mind the Gap
• Conversions@Google 2018 session on our Mobile Planet
• Conversions@Google 2017 (November) session on Mobile in The Future
• Conversions@Google 2017 (April) session on Mobile in The Future
• Conversions@Google 2016 session on Obvious Always Wins
• Conversions@Google 2015 session on Screen Time
• Conversions@Google 2014 session on Mobile Design Now
• Conversions@Google 2013 session on One Design for a Multi-Device Web

Big thanks to the Conversions@Google team for making these sessions available to all.

How H&M, Zara and Marks & Spencer are buying viscose from highly polluting factories in Asia. By Natasha Hurley.

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Kim Jong-un's headline grabbing aggressive irrationalism takes some beating (though he might have met his match in recent times...)

He puts his life on the line to protect the Democratic Republic of Congo's national parks.

How Senegal is trying to involve the diaspora to curb emigration. By Sofia Christensen

The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist talks to Graeme Green about extremism, the refugee crisis and feeling at home in the past.

We talked to homeless in different countries and they revealed housing insecurity's different causes around the world.

World food prices have been rising since 2000, but this sped up slightly in 2007, then sharply in early 2008. High prices have hit the urban poor especially hard, and led to food shortages, riots and demonstrations worldwide. IRRI is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a network of international agricultural research institutes started in the 1960s.

Adani Ports arm has raised Rs 125 crore today by allotment of 1,250 rated, listed, secured, redeemable, non-convertible debentures (NCDs) of the face value of Rs 10,00,000 each

The deposit base of the private sector lender stood at Rs 11.46 trillion in Q4FY20 compared to Rs 9.23 trillion in the same period last year

Revenue from operations stood at Rs 15,711 crore, up 4.69 per cent against Rs 15,006.3 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal.

Among large banks, the brokerage sees ICICI Bank's PAT declining 49 per cent QoQ to Rs 2,100 crore in Q4FY20, followed by a 68 per cent sequential decline in Axis Bank's PAT at Rs 564.6 crore.

It had reported a pre-tax profit of Rs 8,954.38 crore in the same period last financial year (Q4FY19).

Net profit for January-March was $376 million, far below than expectations

Shares of the company were up nearly 2%, as it kept a tight lid on costs to weather the impact of the pandemic on its business

According to analysts at ICICI Securities, the Rs 8,800 crore-exposure to the telecom sector may cast shadow over the bank's asset quality.

To cushion against the uncertainties arising due to the outbreak of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, the bank has provided for Rs 260 crore under the provisions and contigencies segment

the bank reported a 17 per cent increase in its operating profit at Rs 5,851 crore in the March quarter

The Pune-headquartered company reported Rs 804 crore in consolidated net profit for the March quarter (Q4FY20), a decline of 29.1 per cent on year-on-year (YoY) basis

Underwriting losses narrowed down to Rs 29.42 crore in Q4FY20, from Rs 49.70 crore a year ago

Lower expenses drive profit number; firm had incurred a loss in the same period a year ago

The net profit of the insurer jumped 16 per cent to Rs 531 crore in Q4FY20 from Rs 458 crore because of lower tax provision

Emkay Global Financial Services expects net sales (revenue) to rise 2.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) and 16 per cent year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 18,552.7 crore

Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) stood at Rs 3,881 crore while EBIT margin came in at 20.9 per cent.

See the two ways to add a sticky horizontal menu to your site, plus 7 beautiful examples of this pattern out in the wild.

See how to use native JavaScript to create smooth scrolling HTML bookmark links inside the page, and for those that need legacy browser support, using jQuery instead.

See the best, most relevant frontend courses online to take to succeed as a frontend developer in 2019 and beyond.

What drove this Southern Baptist missionary to spend more than 35 years in healthcare in India.

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GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is creating a data-focused culture and a global machine-learning team.

Crafting a crafting a lab policy towards accessibility for all is an on-going process. It might be time to refresh yours.

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Edmonton, Alberta : Brush Education Inc., 2020

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