We are all hunkered down over here in the DesignHammer office, and pretty heads down trying to finish up work before the holiday break. That being said, we still have some awesome articles to share with you: comparing chat and voice interfaces, the making of the Stranger Things title sequence, Scrum for newbies, and how to use HTML heading elements properly.
Drawing invisible boundaries in conversational interfaces
Source: Remains of the Day
Takeaway: A comparison of two interfaces — chat and voice — that are built on the same underlying tech (word recognition and AI) yet are interacted with and perceived in very different ways by users.
Tags: #Users, #Interfaces
How Stranger Things got its retro title sequence
Source: Vox on YouTube
Takeaway: A quick, but interesting video showing-casing how the creators made the old-school, Stranger Things opening sequence. Some of the steps include: researching typefaces used in the 1980's, shining light through Kodaliths to produce inconsistencies, and digital animations.
Tags: #Typography, #StrangerThings, #ITCBenguiat
Scrum for Newbies: How to Use Scrum to Tame Chaos
Source: Wrike Blog
Takeaway: Agile development is far from new at this point. We have project here at DesignHammer that follow Agile or hybrid Agile approaches, and others that follow a more waterfall based cycle. Scrum, a concept that rose from the Agile processes, has some interesting ideas, but is not something we've completely adopted here.
The authors discuss their experience implementing scrum in a small content team, and list some takeaways for newcomers to scrum.
Elements of Scrum
- Product Owner, who owns the scope of work and assigns priorities to tasks
- Scrum Master, who assigns tasks to team members and coordinates effort
- Team Members, who are responsible for delivering on their tasks
Important Notes for New Scrum Participants - How to Make it Work
- Clarify Priorities in Your Backlog
- Keep Standup Meetings Short and Precise
- Document Those Lessons Learned
Impacts of Scrum
Here's what the authors noticed in their Scrum experience:
- They were quickly working through their backlog of content creation.
- They were better able to handle ad hoc requests, as they knew who had capacity.
- They had better collaboration and support amongst the team.
Tags: #ProjectManagement, #Agile
How To Use H1-H6 HTML Elements Properly
Source: SEO Hobo
Takeaway: Headlines tags are important parts of Web page structure, and should be used with care to ensure they are being used for structure, and not just presentation. Site visitors, such as search engines spiders and screen reader users depend on structure to allow both context and even navigation on pages. If you are unsure if Heading Tags should follow in numerical order, or if you should use more than one H1 tag on a page, Shaun Anderson offers a good primer on the topic on his SEO Hobo blog.
Tags: #SEO, #HTML, #Google
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