AMA: I’m Julie Zhuo, director of product design @ Facebook

Read it.

There’s a 30% chance your shrimp isn’t what you think it is

And this surely does not apply to shrimps only.

Finding New Solutions in Old Philosophy

A beautiful post applying philosophical thinking to UX problems.

my friend found a table with a chess board on it and sat down
and noticed bob dylan leaning against the rail and looking at the water.
at first nobody noticed him but eventually he started to get surrounded.
my friend got up and walked right up to him and said
“bob we got the chess board you wanted”
and bob saw his chance and took it. my buddy got to play silent chess with him
the whole trip and as long as bob seemed engaged people seemed to
leave him alone.

A collection of stories from Todd Snider about people (randomly) meeting Bob Dylan.

Open New Tab = satellite photo of Earth

Install this Chrome extension and get a beautiful satellite photo of earth every time you open a new tab.

Improving WhatsApp

Some ideas on how to improve WhatsApp by Maximilian Kiener. I think the read status indicator is the most elegant of the proposed features.

Drag and drop to share is too different from platform (iOS) conventions and would necessitate educating the users, something WhatsApp doesn’t do since their app is so unbelievably simple and platform-savvy.

Interesting stuff overall.

Your life on earth

Amazing. An interactive experience by the BBC which shows how the world has changed since you were born.

The most expensive comic book ever sold, $3.2M.

Produced in 1938, the comic marked the first appearance of Superman and is considered the genesis of the superhero genre of comics (although there is some debate about that)

Why so expensive?

The reason it was in such impeccable condition was that the while the first owner bought it for 10 cents from the newsstand in 1938 like 200,000 other people did, unlike most everyone else he lived at fairly high altitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia and when he finished reading it, he put the comic in a cedar chest where it remained virtually untouched for four decades. The cool, dark, dry environment of the cedar chest froze time for this comic.

The A to Z of Sketch

Great collection of tips on how to use Sketch more efficiently.

Remember, the three key things about an intuitive navigation system is that they tell you where you are, and they show you where else you can go. Hamburger menus are terrible at both of those things, because the menu is not on the screen. It’s not visible. Only the button to display the menu is.
And in practice, talking to developers, they found this out themselves. That people who use their app don’t switch to different sections very frequently when they use this menu. And the reason for that is because the people who use their app don’t know where else they can go. Right? They don’t know because they can’t see the options, or maybe they saw it at one point in time, but they have since forgotten.
And if you use this control, you have to recognize that the people who use your app may not realize the full potential of your app.

Apple’s advice to designers: don’t use the Hambuger menu. The rest of the article is worth the read, it’s a transcript from the WWDC Designing Intuitive User Experiences session.