Q-tips never told us to stick the swabs in our ear canal to clear out earwax. Yet, somehow, we use it for the very thing it specifically warns us not to do: Putting it inside our ears.The humble Q-tip was so perfectly designed for the purpose of cleaning our ears, that it turned into a generic word for a product.

Q-Tips: The Cotton Swab To Clean Ears And Eyes

Q-tips were positioned as an essential tool for women's cosmetics and beauty routines.In the 1950s and 1960s, they began to tell consumers they were for more than just for babies or women -- they were handy for any project around the house or in their lives.

The Beauty Assistant

Every Q-tips box has a warning label: "Do not insert swab into ear canal," and if you're going to use it to clean your ears, gently swab the outer part only.

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Fashion & Beauty

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Marketing & Sales

health

Health

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Science & Nature

How we got addicted to using Q-tips the wrong way

Research suggests four leading indicators that together assess our fitness:
<ol>
<li>aerobic health</li>
<li>muscular strength and endurance</li>
<li>flexibility</li>
<li>body composition</li>
</ol>
Being skinny is not the same as being healthy. A 2008 study suggests you can be fat and fit and thin and unhealthy. A 2015 report indicates that many people with a seemingly normal BMI (body mass index) have a significantly higher risk of metabolic problems and death.

Your Level of Fitness

First, find your resting heart rate. The typical healthy adult's resting heart rate should be between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Then test your heart rate while doing aerobic activity. The numbers are different depending on your age. For example, a 25-year-old's target heart rate falls between 98 and 16, while a 55 year old's should be between 83 and 140.

Aerobic Health

There are two types of muscular fitness assessments:<ol><li>Muscular-endurance tests assess the ability to resist fatigue.</li><li>Muscular-strength tests assess the maximum amount of force an individual can produce in a specified number of repetitions.</li></ol> Test your muscular endurance with a push-up and sit-up test.<ul><li>Count how many push-ups you can do. Your chin should touch the floor. A 35-year-old woman should be able to do 19 push-ups without stopping or 30 sit-ups (or crunches).</li><li>For muscular strength, a personal trainer can help to assess your muscle strength.</li></ul>

Muscular Strength and Endurance

Flexibility demonstrates an individual’s overall health profile because it tells the story of joint, muscle and tissue health. Regular stretching can help lessen the natural decrease in flexibility. Check how flexible you are: Sit down with your legs out; line up the bottom of your feet with the 15-inch line on the yardstick. Then, reach forward three times for at least one second and record your farthest distance. A 65-plus should be able to reach from the 17.5- to 15.5-inch mark. A 25-year-old should reach the 19.5- to 21.5-mark.

Flexibility

Measure your waist just above the hipbones. According to the Mayo Clinic, women with a waist circumference of 35 inches or more and men with waist circumferences of 40 inches or greater are at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes. Another way is to use a BMI calculator that uses your gender, age, height and weight and the circumference of your waist. A healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9.

Body Composition

A proper fitness assessment considers aerobic health, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, and body composition. Here's how to test these variables in yourself.

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Exercise & Fitness

Health Is Not Defined by Fat and Skinny. Test These Metrics Instead.

A company you bought something from months ago sends you an email with three immortal words: “we miss you”.These messages feel icky because the sentiment is belated and insincere. Deep down we know that the business doesn’t really miss us. The business doesn’t know our sparkling personality or understand our unique contribution to the community – the business just misses our money.

We Miss You!

﻿A retention campaign that paints a commercial relationship as a personal one will always be awkward at best and at worst will create ill will. Here are three better ways to create retention campaigns that feel genuine and actually work:<ul><li>Focus on how your product helps</li><li>Identify and solve the problems that caused churn</li><li>Proactively monitor usage and value</li></ul>

A Better Retention Campaign

The mistake at the heart of the “we miss you” message is that it represents the customer’s relationship to the business as personal, not commercial. Personal relationships are based on who we are, and we want them to persist through thick and thin. But commercial relationships are different.To <a href="https://www.intercom.com/blog/customer-engagement/">re-engage customers effectively</a>, you need to remind the customer of what it is that got them there in the first place. Instead of guilting them into returning simply because they bought from you once, remind them of the benefits that your business can provide.

Focus on how your product helps

Many experiences can cause churn: inability to find the right product, <a href="https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-tours-first-use-onboarding/">struggles to get set up</a>, a poor service experience, or changing business needs. A retention campaign that specifically <a href="https://www.intercom.com/blog/churn-retention-and-reengaging-customers/">addresses the issue that caused churn</a> and provides a simple next step stands a high chance of success, as it speaks to the root cause of the churn.<ul><li>The first step is analyzing customer actions to identify common causes of churn. </li><li>Secondly, design a campaign to specifically address the cause of churn.</li></ul>

Identify and solve the problems that caused churn

Customers generally stop using (or cease to repurchase) products when they don’t get enough value out of your product to justify the price, not out of forgetfulness or disloyalty. To identify customers who might not be getting enough value (and so are candidates to churn), look for the ones who aren’t using the functionality that they’re paying for.The trick to doing this well is <a href="https://www.intercom.com/blog/understanding-your-aha-moments-and-putting-them-to-work/">measuring behaviour that corresponds to a customer getting value</a>. For consumer products, the value will be tied to usage. But ensure you set a threshold that avoids counting logins or app opens alone.

Proactively monitor and manage value

Understanding why each customer is buying your product and then measuring whether they’re taking the actions that would enable them to achieve that result enable you to deliver specific and personalized interventions. If your company has an account management team, this scorecard can form the basis for high-impact business reviews with customers.

The Bottomline

How often do you get an email from some company you once used with the words “we miss you”? Here are 3 better approaches to user retention.

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Economics

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Business

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Product & Design

Don’t tell me you miss me: 3 better approaches to user retention

Left navigation facilitates a vertical scanning direction, this greatly improves speed, it also requires fewer visual fixations so we can see multiple navigation links at the same time. (Side navigation can be positioned on the right for the right to left writing systems)

Left navigation is easier to scan

If we look at the common laptop screens and the portion that is taken by the navigation components, left navigation often will take 3 times more space than the top one. Adding to that some reserved header space for search or other elements like notifications or profile. Left navigation can easily take 25% of page space. Collapsing side navigation to save space will also not always work, as you cannot consistently fit long labels, and having icon-only navigation will strain user memory too much.

Top navigation saves space

This can change depending on the device and font sizes, but generally, you would be able to show at least double the number of navigation links in the side nav above the fold (not mentioning the scroll). Side navigation works better when your information architecture has many top-level items that cannot be logically grouped into several buckets. This also means it's much easier to add more items as your product grows.

Side navigation is easier to scale

The scalability of the side navigation makes it the only choice when users can configure their own navigation. Variable menus are quite common, be it channels in Slack, folders in Outlook, or hierarchical menus in Drive or Confluence.

Side navigation supports customizable navigation structures

The left navigation with a drawer-style submenu has issues with diagonal cursor movement. In addition regardless of the number of items in the submenu, with side navigation most likely you will need to block another vertical pane on the screen.

Hover activated submenus work better with top navigation

This edge that top navigation bars have with hover-activated menus, is even more apparent with mega menus that are predominant on e-commerce and other big websites. They are an excellent design choice for accommodating a large number of options or for revealing lower-level site pages at a glance. This layout also leaving more space for product display and ads.

Top navigation bars and Mega Menus

<ul><li>For top navigation with not too many navigational links, you have the benefit of keeping all of those links visible on tablet portrait views. </li><li>Side menu most likely will be hidden in the hamburger menu on tablet portrait, but has the benefit of keeping the navigation view consistent across all screen sizes.</li></ul>

Both top and side nav have challenges with responsive design

<ul><li>Top navigation: Uses little space and takes a prominent position on the page. Works well when there are not too many navigation items. Use primary top navigation for small, medium, and large websites, e-commerce, and web applications that don’t have a hierarchical structure.</li><li>Side navigation: Supports products with a large number of navigation links, easily scalable and configurable. Use primary side nav for complex applications and websites, admin apps, desktop apps, and file/content management products where users can customize their navigation.</li></ul>

Best navigation for you will depend on your context

When choosing a navigation layout for your app usually you will need to define the position of primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation hierarchy. A research study “A comparison of three-level…

Top vs side navigation: Which one is better for your product?

When you improve your spacing, the following happens: <ul><li>It is easier for users to consume the content. </li><li>It creates a hierarchy of information that relays importance to the user. </li><li>It creates consistency throughout your designs. </li><li>It just looks better. </li></ul>

1. Why is spacing important?

The 8Pt grid allows you to use multiples of 8 to space elements in your design. These units include 0, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. The advantage of the 8Pt grid is that there are fewer numbers to work with. The benefit of the 4Pt grid is that there are more numbers to work with, making it easier to create tighter designs. The 8Pt grid allows you to use multiples of 8, including 0, 4, 8, 12, 24, 32, 64, 72, etc. If you want to 

2. An introduction to point grids

The more familiar the two aspects are, the closer they are together. Conversely, the less friendly they are, the further apart. If you break up elements into different friend groups, you can decide on how ‘ friendly’the elements are to each other based on how related they are. If a class is a friends group, a page layout is a class. Everyone is together, but only some are friends. If you break the rules,

3. Spacing friendships

Containers (includes cards, modals, pages, etc.) should have the largest spacing value. As an example, Godbole uses 16pts as her largest value.Content (includes headers, paragraphs, tables, etc.) is about spacing your typography correctly. The height of headings, paragraphs, and the space between them should all be taken into account and spaced.Components (includes buttons, input fields, icons, etc.) is about the spacing between your smaller components and inside of them, for example, the spacing inside and around your button.

4. The three Cs of spacing

The easiest way for me, to see an interface designer’s skill is by how they use spacing in their design. Color, typography, imagery, etc., are usually given to you in a brand guide — but correctly…

UI cheat sheet: Spacing friendships

During the first two weeks, I illustrated in Sketch and then imported it into Principle for animation. <ul><li>Sketch : A lightweight vector editing tool that is intuitive and affordable. I find it a handy tool to create simple illustrations. </li><li>A lightweight Prototyping tool that generates interactive animation. It works with sketch Seamlessly.</li></ul>

Sketch + Principle

After the first two weeks, I switched to Illustrator and After Effects for more advanced control. <ul><li>Illustrator : The most powerful vector editing tool. The illustration created in Illustrator can be imported into After Effects seamlessly. </li><li>After effects: the most powerful animation tool.</li></ul>

Illustrator + After Effects

Creating animation is time-consuming. I broke the creative process down into four steps and aimed to complete them in two days.

Creative Process

I collect motion design inspiration from Dribbble, Behance, and Instagram on a daily basis. My <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/tiantianxu/ui-motion/">growing Pinterest board </a>has been my go-to place for inspiration.

Step 1: Look for inspiration (15 mins)

I created the illustration and imported it into Principle or After Effects. Keeping the design file well-organized can significantly speed up the importation.

Step 3: Create illustration (40 mins)

I animated the illustration and exported the final animation as a short video. I posted the video to Instagram with the hashtag #100daysofmotionbytx

Step 4: Create animation (60 mins)

I created my first animation by watching <a href="https://youtu.be/qYCPoqwmQK4">Principle—Simple Character Animation (Jumping Donut </a>).

Day 1–14: Start with the basics

I watched the video tutorial in 1.5x speed and tried to create the animation from memory.

Method 1: Watch tutorial and create from memory

I studied other people’s work on Dribbble frame by frame and then came up with my own idea.&nbsp;I rebounded <a href="https://dribbble.com/shots/2542570-Bouncy-Fruits" target="_self">Bouncy Fruits</a> by Deekay. I deconstructed his work to study the “Squash and Stretch” animation principle.

Method 2: Rebound other people’s work

Repetition is the key to reinforce a newly learned skill. I intentionally re-applied the skills I learned to create new animation.

Method 3: Re-apply learned skills intentionally

Halfway through the 100-day-project, I took a day to read &lt;Adobe After Effects CC Classroom in a Book&gt;. I was able to connect the dots by revisiting the learned skills in a more systematic way. I also discovered new techniques that I wanted to try.

Method 4: Read book to connect the dots

Some of my work was inspired by my favorite games and movies. Some of my work was inspired by other people’s illustrations. I created artwork to promote type Thursday Seattle — a monthly design Meetup that discusses Work-In-Progress projects.

Day 71–100: Create from the heart

The Idea-Driven approach has kept me motivated and pushed me to discover new techniques. To make my idea of flipping book come true, I found a Tutorial on Openyourbook. To make a cup of Pumpkin spice Latte, I found a Tutorial on flat 2d smoke clouds.

1. Driven by ideas

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the cognitive bias in which people of Low-Ability have illusory superiority. The more I became aware of my own incompetence, the humbler I became.

2. Stay humble

In Internet culture, there is a “1% rule” that describes the participation rate of an internet community: only 1% of the participants of a community actively create new content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 90% of the participants only view content.

3. Be the 1%

It was a summer night in Seattle. I ate some ice-cream, watched a Youtube tutorial, and downloaded a free trial of Principle. Several months later, I completed my 5th 100-day-project — 100 Days of…

100 Days of Motion Design

I just landed my first full-time role as a UX designer and officially closed my job search. After more than 40 coffee dates, phone calls, design presentations and one-on-one interviews, I’ve come up with this list of 10 UX questions that I found crucial in my search.

Notes from a young designer

Focus on crafting a unique and specific definition that sheds light on who you are as a designer. Use this also as an opportunity to tell a story that provides context for your design perspective. However you define UX, make this a chance to add something personal.

How do you define UX/design?

Everyone has a different design process (and that’s okay). What will matter is your ability to describe your process and explain the rationale behind your approach. It’s a good idea to have a standard ‘go-to’ process in mind, yet it’s important to acknowledge your design context. Different UX situations inevitably call for different UX processes. It’s a strength to understand your environment and determine a process that’s best fits for your situation.

What is your design process?

When thinking about this question, consider your audience and have a range of apps/websites that can demonstrate a diversity of aspects you find important to design. When I was interviewing, I chose <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/square-cash-send-money-for/id711923939?mt=8" target="_self">SquareCash</a>, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lyft/id529379082?mt=8" target="_self">Lyft</a>, and <a href="http://www.meetup.com/" target="_self">Meetup.com</a> — all experiences I loved for different reasons.

What are some apps or websites that you love?

Engineers: I’ve found that providing especially close attention to interaction design and accounting for edge cases is important. Engineers are responsible for building the product — making sure that your interactions function properly for all use cases will save your engineer friends time and frustration. Also, try to speak their language — learn how to code. Being confident in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a great start.

 How do you work with engineers?

PMs: I emphasize communication, storytelling, and tradeoffs. PMs manage deadlines, appeal to admins and keep projects running smoothly. Make sure you and your PM are sync’d. Being able to tell a powerful story about your design will also help to make their job easier when trying to persuade other stakeholders.

 How do you work with Project Managers?

Designers: Show, don’t tell. Focus your attention toward the design problem instead of individual design preferences. Working with other designers is an incredible opportunity for collaboration and can push you to better work. When working with other designers, sometimes I like to practice <a href="https://medium.com/goodux-badux/turning-to-pair-design-dafa4c95ef91" target="_self">pair design</a> — it’s a great way to develop shared ownership over the work and push your individual design limits.

 How do you work with Designers?

Don’t fudge this question! Find some members of the design community now that you admire and start reading — there are a lot of incredible designers out there to source inspiration. If you don’t have a list, check out LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter or design blogs to get started. If you’re feeling brave, reach out to members in the community and begin to cultivate a relationship. It’s remarkable how friendly people in the design circle can be.

Who in the industry do you follow and read?

Use this as a chance to tell a story — and follow a typical story arc: background, opportunity, process, adversity along the way, triumphs, and outcome. Talk about what you did on the project but focus most on why this particular project was so interesting for you. Did it have to do with the people, circumstance, opportunity, or something else?

What is the most interesting project you have worked on?

Having self-awareness of how you work and demonstrating flexibility is key. Consider the company you’re interviewing with — the size, what you know about the culture, and how you might fit into work dynamics. Also be true to yourself. The interviewer will be looking for how you play with others and determine if you’re a good culture fit.

Do you prefer to work alone or with a team?

Think about a time you took on a difficult task head first and struggled through ambiguity to eventually arrive at some conclusion. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a triumphant story as long as you show your willingness to explore, test, (fail), and iterate and demonstrate a commitment to learn and adapt going forward.

How Did You Handle A Difficult Assignment?

I like to talk about the company from a design perspective. Focus on mentorship, design culture, co-workers and the type of design challenges the company is currently facing. Make it personal and demonstrate a vision. Being able to talk about how the company melds with your past and how it will elevate you to where you want to be in your future shows a clear understanding of what you want and how to get it.

 Why do you want to work at [company x]?

For young designers, this can feel like the toughest question to answer. Without a lot of design experience, what you can offer is your hustle and a proven willingness to learn. Emphasize it. And don’t just talk about it —show it. Point to personal projects, blog posts, and other forms of commitment to design that you’ve taken.

Why should I hire you?

I just landed my first full-time role as a UX designer and officially closed my job search. After more than 40 coffee dates, phone calls, design presentations and one-on-one interviews, I’ve come up…

10 Questions You’ll Be Asked in a UX Interview

Millions of us fiercely defend our right to make “free” choices, while we ignore how those choices are manipulated upstream by menus we didn’t choose in the first place.When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask: <ul><li>“what’s not on the menu?” </li><li>“why am I being given these options and not others?” </li><li>“do I know the menu provider’s goals?” </li><li>“is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” </li></ul>

If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices

Here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket:  <ul><li>When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got. </li><li>When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got. </li><li>When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. </li><li>When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match. </li><li>When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath. </li></ul>

Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets

<ul><li>This keeps us subscribed to newsletters even after they haven’t delivered recent benefits </li><li>This keeps us “friended” to people with whom we haven’t spoke in ages </li><li>This keeps us swiping faces on dating apps, even when we haven’t even met up with anyone in a while </li><li>This keeps us using social media </li></ul>

 Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)

We’re all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.Everyone innately responds to social approval, but some demographics (teenagers) are more vulnerable to it than others. That’s why it’s so important to recognize how powerful designers are when they exploit this vulnerability.

Social Approval

<ul><li>You do me a favor — I owe you one next time. </li><li>You say, “thank you”— I have to say “you’re welcome.” </li><li>You send me an email— it’s rude not to get back to you. </li><li>You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. </li></ul>

Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)

Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore.How? Easy. Take an experience that was bounded and finite, and turn it into a bottomless flow that keeps going.

Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay

Companies know that messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously (like email or any deferred inbox).In other words, interruption is good for business.

Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery

Another way apps hijack you is by taking your reasons for visiting the app (to perform a task) and make them inseparable from the app’s business reasons (maximizing how much we consume once we’re there).

Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons

We’re told that it’s enough for businesses to “make choices available.” <ul><li>“If you don’t like it you can always use a different product.” </li><li>“If you don’t like it, you can always unsubscribe.” </li><li>“If you’re addicted to our app, you can always uninstall it from your phone.” </li></ul>

Inconvenient Choices

Apps can exploit people’s inability to forecast the consequences of a click.People don’t intuitively forecast the true cost of a click when it’s presented to them.

Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies

I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that…

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Remote Work

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Technology & The Future

How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Former Insider

According to a new academic paper in the Journal Of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the structure of everything around us, including space and time, may have been created by our own observation.According to the authors of the paper, the physical world is not something separate from us but is a creation of our own consciousness. We, the observers, are defining the structure of physical reality itself.

We Create The Universe

The quantum term for an observer influencing reality is decoherence and it provides the basic structure of the waves of probability, inside the mind of the observer.The observer is the vital force that processes the present, the future and also the past, which as Stephan Hawking once said, is indefinite and is just one of many different possibilities.

The Observer Influences The Future And The Past

Influencing reality itself needs a conscious entity that is not a bot and has the capacity to understand.The observer is conscious and is the first cause for beginning, maintaining and collapsing a quantum wave. Our thoughts and the ability to form memories and move in the arrow of time are essential qualities for creating the cause and effect phenomenon we see around us all the time.

Being A Conscious Observer

While explaining the physical world, there are two main theories:Quantum mechanics works at molecular or subatomic levels and general relativity works at massive, cosmic levels like the structures of black holes and galaxies.When the properties of a conscious observer are taken into account, the incompatibility between the two theories disappears.

The Universe Being A Simulation: Convergence Of Two Theories

​Is the physical universe independent from us, or is it determined by our minds, as suggested by scientist Robert Lanza in a new paper? The study could help yield insights into the God Equation, which attempts to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity.

How we got addicted to using Q-tips the wrong way

Health Is Not Defined by Fat and Skinny. Test These Metrics Instead.

Don’t tell me you miss me: 3 better approaches to user retention

Top vs side navigation: Which one is better for your product?

UI cheat sheet: Spacing friendships

Joanna Tapia