Lisa Shininger

What does hitting shift + ? in your dashboard do?

This article could not have come at a better time.

There was one lesson from the UX Crash Course: User Psychology that caused some controversy: Anti-UX.

i.e. — working against the user to prevent them from doing something impulsive. I absolutely stand by the lesson’s central idea, but the example I used definitely goes against the way some people think about UX. 

So here’s an awesome example from real life, with data and everything. :)

In a nutshell: Lumosity added 5 pages of very relevant questions to their registration process.

It increased their active users by 10%.

At first glance that could either seem impossible or sound like a lie. But think it through.

10% is a relative increase. You can achieve that in two ways: add more active users, or remove inactive users. Aha… that’s the trick.

By making their registration more time-consuming while still keeping it easy and relevant, they made unmotivated users drop out.

That saves those users time, spam, and maybe money.

And, what do you have left after you get rid of the unmotivated people? Motivated people!

Lumosity will spend more time on the people that matter, and will get better information because they won’t talk to people who aren’t actually interested.

They will also create a better product, faster, and will design features for people with long-term interest and loyalty.

Everybody wins. And that could only have happened by using Anti-UX; working against the user.

A technical glitch causes the Hubble Space Telescope, which ordinarily captures magnificently crisp scientific imagery of the cosmos, to lose balance and create this inadvertent piece of modern art.

Kelly Sue Deconnick (via fuckyeahsuperheroines)

Writer behind Captain Marvel. 

SMBC is just killing it this week.

ETA: The bonus panel:

Dowling Duncan and redesigning the American Dollar:

Why the size? We have kept the width the same as the existing dollars. However we have changed the size of the note so that the one dollar is shorter and the 100 dollar is the longest. When stacked on top of each other it is easy to see how much money you have. It also makes it easier for the visually impaired to distinguish between notes.

Why a vertical format? When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.

Why different colors? It’s one of the strongest ways graphically to distinguish one note from another.

Why these designs? We wanted a concept behind the imagery so that the image directly relates to the value of each note. We also wanted the notes to be educational, not only for those living in America but visitors as well. Each note uses a black and white image depicting a particular aspect of American history and culture. They are then overprinted with informational graphics or a pattern relating to that particular image.