The most prominently design-led company, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, worth more than $1trilion. John Kenneth Galbraith in a way predicted its rise in 1967: “... giants had overcome laws of supply and demand by investing in big, long-term research and development projects, which could not easily be replicated by smaller competitors...”

The most important Silicon Valley company you have never heard of. Their design thinking was way ahead of time. They released a smartphone in 1994 and failed. Their tech and concepts were copied by Apple and Google, their alumni have gone on to become some of the most powerful and influential players in tech. General Magic.

People of internet don’t speak English, they speak gibberish. The problem with implementing AI in a meaningful and useful interaction with humans is not voice recognition anymore but understanding the meaning. A real-world AI should be about solving harder problems than cat identification.

Nearly 1 in 5 of your users has a disability. Design accordingly. Most of it is common sense but thanks to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines there is a set of guidelines and standards to follow. And though it should be obvious, it is still worth to emphasise that design starts long before choosing the button colour.

“The viewpoint is memorable, the product is usable, and quality is valued over clicks”. A short film on finding a place for news media in a world that seems overrun with clickbait “journalism”, fake news, native advertising, and instant gratification superficiality of social media. Three very different players, the same approach.

“The times of thoughtless design, for thoughtless consumption, are over. An announcement of a new Gary Hustwit film on Dieter Rams who is one of the most important designers of all times. His work for Braun and Vitsoe alone left a mark on generations of designers; his Ten Principles are a must-read for designers, entrepreneurs, and managers alike. https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design

The animation in UI is not the proverbial lipstick on a pig. The nature of the interaction is temporal, and transitions between stages are crucial not only to the look-and-feel but more importantly to the very way the user perceives the product itself. Excellent take on the role of motion in interaction design.

Three superstar startups who failed to pinpoint and sustain their identities crashed despite their engaged user base, substantial revenues and huge VC investments. In addition to identifying your users and their needs, you should know who you are and what you stand for. It is an essential part of the “product” side of the holy grail-ish “product-market” fit.

Next time you will be annoyed with an oversharing adolescent, a phone glued to her palm, you might be a witness to a retail revolution in the making. The culture of over-edited lives streamed on social media started a crop of entrepreneurs selling directly to their followers/customers' phones, skipping computers, let alone brick-and-mortar shops.

The lines between online and physical commerce are blurring. Customer expectations, behaviours and values are evolving. Traditional retailers are adapting or closing their doors. Startups that started online are moving into physical space and can innovate faster than the heavyweights. New technologies and business models are emerging.

British Home Office designed a mobile app to register more than 3.000 EU nationals before the Brexit in order to cope with wast number of expected applications. Good intentions and — if done by the UK digital team — good UX, but the app won't work for half the population using iOS, and there is a high risk of ruined lives because of the app’s mistake.

Disposable chopsticks, X-Acto knife and Scotch tape. Minh Uong, a visual editor for The New York Times’s business section on using modern tech in his creative process. The tech saves a lot of time and offers numerous expression and production possibilities, but usually thought process still starts analogue and in some cases still, the rudimentary analogue techniques deliver the best visual expression. (And help catch the deadline)

“We don’t need to wait for the second coming of Christ, a couple of geeks in the laboratory can solve it…” On immortality perceived by some tech elites as a purely technical problem and where is humanity heading now, after famine, plague, and war are not anymore in the god’s hands, but can be “designed” by humans. Homo Deus — one of the most important books of 2017 — author Yuval Harari talks to Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar.

Chatty Voice assistance bots are an equivalent of the skeuomorphic design of the early touchscreen apps. Though skeuomorphism helped people adopt unfamiliar new tech through familiar metaphors, conversational interfaces should focus more on getting things done than appearing smart and cute. And by assigning too much character to robots, users will expect them to be way more 'clever' and capable than they really are. UX equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.