In this article, the VP of Product Design at Slack discusses the importance of critique in the design process and offers advice for receiving and giving design feedback. People receiving critiques need to separate themselves from their work when seeking feedback, take control of the critique session, provide context for the design work, and actively listen to feedback. On the giving side, critiquers should be courteous, ask questions for clarity, be direct in their feedback, focus on the project's goals, and promote group dialogue for more robust discussions.
Validation messages are error messages related to users’ inputs: they communicate whether the data just entered was incomplete or incorrect. At the same time, notifications are informational messages that alert the user of general occurrences within a system and may not be directly tied to user input.
Designers presenting their research findings should identify their “five-second moment,” the core, brief experience that transforms the overall user experience. Additionally, they can use the “company launch test” to determine the best way to start their story, focusing on significant research points and tying them to metrics that matter to the audience.
2024.01.19·dataanddesign.substack.com·7 min read·TLDR Design CHUNK is a set of 600 consistent & commonly needed glyphs, all tailored to look nice and sharp at 16px. Icons come in three styles: filled, hollow, and duo (using two color shades).
A blueprint for service design, templates for design specifications, prototyping questions, impact/effort matrix, templates for usability testing reports, and scripts.
A showcase of beautiful icon designs from the iOS App Store.
There is much variation in how different screen readers announce currency formats. Even though there is no single standard to follow, some formatting techniques make financial data accessible to a broader audience.
UX designers are generalists who view the user experience holistically, treating branding and SEO equally as accessibility and performance. They are responsible for balancing the views of all the different specialists on the website so it provides the best user experience possible. As opposed to being another musician in an orchestra, UX designers ought to be the conductor who ensures a harmonious performance from all the specialists.
While AI images can be impressive and quick to create, they need more emotional depth and originality, which human creativity can provide. AI or not, images should be given the same attention as text, so designers should choose each visual carefully and place it in the right context. They should not let AI do their job, but use it as a tool.
The new ESN logo features a "dynamic cut" design element inspired by the brand's heritage and adds motion and movement to the logo. This design element is found throughout the rest of the identity, tying together the packaging design layouts and brand photography.
By moving to VR, this London-based animator could switch up his style. VR's physicality and organic nature make Melhuish's compositions more energetic, odd, and charming than classic 3D, which he often sees as soulless.
This concept shows what would happen if the Dock and Mission Control's full-screen bars were combined. Using such a macOS Dock alternative, you could navigate desktop and full-screen apps simultaneously, find open app windows more efficiently, and organize apps based on typical workflows.
A Silicon Valley-centric approach to building startups often leads to a Silicon Valley set of solutions. This article argues we’re overlooking a huge opportunity in building startups that help certain generations – like an aging population or an infant population coming into the internet age.
We’re still seeing layoffs across tech, but are they the same flavor as the 2023 vintages? This article argues no. Instead, they’re a symbol that the good times are over in tech - layoffs are simply a way to manage performance and trim the fat.
More startups are strategically raising a single funding rounds, aiming for a sweet spot of $500K to $2M. This 'one-round wonder' approach balances the benefits of bootstrapped and venture-funded paths, focusing on profitability and sustainable growth while redefining startup success beyond pursuing unicorn status.
Understanding a user's willingness to pay is critical. However, you can’t ask them straight up - they’re always going to lowball you. Here’s a set of 25 strategic questions you can ask during customer interviews in order to better understand how much a user might actually pay for your product.
This article is designed to show first-time finance leaders the ropes, lingo, and processes. It’s an incredible resource for any founder who wants to understand financial operations, control, and accounting as their startup scales.
In our last issue, we tagged an article that spoke about the dark side of sales – the negative impact of misaligned incentives. This article covers best practices from experts on how to build a successful sales commission plan.
Turn your codebase into Wikipedia-style articles using AI.
Keep your customers updated with 10x less effort.
Track keywords across social media to convert leads with AI-generated auto-replies.
Okay so this isn’t exactly about building companies, but it’s still a fascinating insight on the world around us, and what is our role as entrepreneurs other than to interpret things and build solutions to the problems we see?
A partner at a VC firm lays out all the questions they would like to ask founders. A useful sheet if you’re about to kick off your first fundraise.
A collection of lessons from the founders of Pilot, a team that has now founded three successful startups.
That’s a lot of money to spend on software, which is good news for software startups.
An entrepreneur reflects on selling his successful company, realizing it led to a loss of identity and a shift from growth to wealth management. The story highlights the importance of understanding personal values and motivations before making such a pivotal decision.
A handy trick for quickly lowering AI costs.
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Want to uplevel your container security strategy? This cheat sheet explores advanced techniques that you can put into action ASAP. Use this cheat sheet as a quick reference to ensure you have the proper benchmarks in place to secure your container environments.
Foxsemicon, a subsidiary of Foxconn, was recently targeted by the ransomware group LockBit. The hackers defaced Foxsemicon's website, claimed to steal 5TB of data, and are threatening to leak sensitive customer/employee info unless their ransom demand is paid.
Trail of Bits is disclosing a vulnerability that it discovered that allows for memory leakage from an optimized GPU region in GPUs from Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, and Imagination. The researchers showed that they could leak 5.5MB per GPU invocation, which translates to 181MB on a 7B llama.cpp model. They demonstrated that this is enough information to reconstruct the LLM response with high accuracy.
CISA and FBI warn that threat actors using Androxghost malware are building a botnet focused on cloud credential theft and using the stolen information to deliver additional malicious payloads. The botnet scans for servers vulnerable to specific RCE vulnerabilities and then scans the servers for .env files with cloud credentials. The credentials can then be used to spin up infrastructure to expand the botnet or to send out spam masquerading as the compromised companies.
Visual Studio's Development Tools Environment (DTE) COM library can enable lateral movement by interacting with the OS to execute commands remotely. The class ID of the Visual Studio install needs to be retrieved from the registry first, but it is an interesting path that can be taken.
A post on using Atomic Red Tests to test Falco detection in Kubernetes. The post first walks through deploying Atomic Red Tests and Falco in a Kubernetes cluster. It then walks through running tests, monitoring for detections, and adding custom Falco rules for missed events.
This blog post discusses a lightweight way to detect potential iOS malware by analyzing the Shutdown.log file stored in sysdiag archives. Anomalies and indicators of malware can be detected by extracting and parsing the log file. In the example presented in the post, through analysis of several Pegasus malware infections, it was discovered that the Shutdown.log file contained traces of infection.
Use OpenAI to scan your code for security issues from the CLI. It requires adding your own OpenAI API token. LAST includes options to scan full code, change code, and run in the pipeline.
AppVerifier takes the app's package name and signing certificate hash(es) and compares them to the ones you provided or the ones in the internal database to verify that your apps are genuine.
A tool to scrape SSL certificates from all AWS IP ranges and search for specific keywords.
Vulnerable Docker services are being targeted to deploy XMRig cryptocurrency miner and 9Hits Viewer software, marking the first case of 9Hits being used maliciously. The threat actors aim to diversify their money-making strategies by compromising Docker hosts via Shodan scans and running headless Chrome instances to generate web traffic credits.
This blog post discusses nine vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the IPv6 network protocol stack of EDK II, TianoCore's open source reference implementation of UEFI. The vulnerabilities affect various vendors that use EDK II's NetworkPkg module, including Arm, Insyde Software, American Megatrends Inc., Phoenix Technologies Inc., and Microsoft Corporation.
Google's Threat Analysis Group discusses the COLDRIVER Threat group from Russia and its increasing attacks on western officials using malware. The group primarily focuses on credential phishing against high-profile individuals in NGOs, former intelligence and military officers, and NATO governments. It employs impersonation accounts to establish rapport with targets and increase the success of its phishing campaigns.
The Naz.API credential stuffing list contains 70 million unique email addresses and old passwords - it was found on a hacking forum.
This retrospective on the Cybersecurity Market in 2023 notes that although overall funding was down, the largest acquisition in cybersecurity history also took place last year.
After a couple of months of being down, Tweetfeed is back with Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) shared by the infosec community at X.
Marketers are increasingly relying on AI to predict user behavior, analyze data, and create personalized campaigns in the absence of third-party cookies. The value of first-party data has increased, and AI enables efficient handling of large datasets. AI plays a crucial role in contextual advertising, providing hyper-contextual relevance and real-time ad matching based on content analysis.
Apple has updated its App Store rules in compliance with a court order related to the Epic Games-initiated antitrust case. The update allows developers to promote alternative payment methods for in-app purchases and subscriptions. There is a complex application process for including external links. Apps participating in Apple’s Video Partner and New Partner programs are excluded from using Link Entitlement. These rule updates will affect the in-app monetization and user experience.
This post covers impactful tips to make your writing convert better. Writers should understand their target audience on a deep level, including their specific pain points, desires, and interests. Content should address the strategies users have tried that don’t work, rather than just covering the solution. It should also be tailored to the platform it's on — a great blog post looks and sounds different from a Tweet.