My soup

“ CSS, by its very nature, is used to lay elements out on the page. However, there is a distinction between layouts dictating the major and minor components of a page. The minor components—such as a callout, or login form, or a navigation item—sit within the scope of major components such as a header or footer. I refer to the minor components as Modules and will dive into those in the next section. The major components are referred to as Layout styles. ”

“ Data is in fact the new capital of the 21st Century, a highly valuable resource that is creating jobs and building whole new commercial markets. ”

“ Cuts of these dimensions are impossible. Austerity will not be politically tolerable in a rich country in peacetime where boardrooms pay themselves 49% rises. ”

“ In many ways, Google and PayPal are trying to create their own relationship with your customer. I think that’s the thing that Stripe has done right. We’ve designed this for fast use, yes, but also so that you can retain control of your experience, your product, and your customers. ”

“ In the end, I think the most important thing to recognize is that we’re now living in a world of excess. Excess data, excess access, excess “stuff.” Our behavior and mindset should change accordingly. The discussions we have should not be about consuming less or having more, but rather “What is better?” and “What is appropriate? ”

“ It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it. ”

“ The most important thing that 2011 taught me about web design is that physical context of use can no longer be assumed by platform, only intentional context can. For the past couple of years, we have gotten into the habit of presuming that mobile means on-the-go, desktop denotes a desk, and tablet is on the toilet. But increasingly the lines are blurring on where devices are being used and how they’re being used in unison. This year I have learned to see devices as location agnostic and instead associate them with purpose—I want to check (mobile), I want to manage (desktop), I want to immerse (tablet). This shift away from objective context toward subjective context will reshape the way we design experiences across and between devices, to better support user goals and ultimately mimic analog tools woven into our physical spaces. ”

“ The trick when faced with a raft of public negative user feedback like the BBC has at the moment is picking out the signal from the noise. My maxim is always to fix anything that is actually “broken” - i.e. non-functional - but otherwise do no knee-jerk changes in response. If possible you should do some considered follow-up research amongst the users you were hoping to please, and check that you have pleased them. And, when you have a massive audience, you have to remember to design for the 80%, and to factor in the views and behaviour of the silent majority. ”

“ With mobile first, the end result is an experience focused on the key tasks users want to accomplish without the extraneous detours and general interface debris that litter many of today’s websites. ”

“ When you consider the amount of useless navigation, content fluff, and irrelevant promotions that litter a typical web experience, you realize why the mobile diet can be good for both businesses and customers. Once people use the mobile version, it’s not uncommon for them to pine for the desktop version to be “that simple. ”

“ Consider the social networking service Facebook. There are more than 250 million active users (http://bkaprt.com/mf/27) accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. These users are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users. ”

“ Fourteen percent of Twitter’s members use the mobile web experience compared to 8% using the native iPhone app and 7% using the Blackberry native app. ”

“ But in general, the trend seems to be toward making Facebook the connective tissue between you, the websites and apps you use, and your friends. ”