Reviews: Book Reviews

If you’ve ever frittered away an afternoon, watching a late 1990s sitcom on Netflix on autoplay or, if you lamented the final demise of the neighborhood video stores—or even Blockbuster—Marc Randolph’s idea might be to blame.

While Reed Hastings has been the CEO of Netflix throughout its period of tremendous growth since 2002, Marc Randolph was its first CEO and co-founded the firm with Hastings. Over a period of roughly a year, Marc led Netflix from launch to an established firm providing mail-order DVDs. Many of the innovations that Netflix initially pioneered—such as its queue of movies, distinctive envelope, and automated method of recommending movies—the company conceived during Randolph’s tenure.

That Will Never Work is Marc Randolph’s autobiographical perspective on the early days of Netflix, from ideation through research, iterative design, and launch. Read More

Some have said that we are living in the age of algorithms. Netflix uses an algorithm to recommend videos. Facebook has an algorithm that displays the posts and advertisements you’re most likely to interact with. Google’s algorithm serves different search results to different people, based on prior Web traffic. Amazon’s algorithm makes recommendations for things you might want to buy. Match’s algorithm identifies people with whom you are likely to be romantically compatible. We have smart thermostats that use algorithms to learn user’s climate-control preferences. My 11-year-old son uses an algorithm to solve Rubik’s cubes in under a minute.

An algorithm is really nothing more than a mathematical model or formula that accepts inputs, applies calculations, and provides output. Cathy O’Neil, the author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, introduces the idea of an algorithm as being similar to making a family dinner, taking into account the various likes, dislikes, and quantities her family needs. Algorithms can be extremely useful in automating and understanding large, complex sets of information—for example, searching for a document on your hard disk. But they can also be harmful, as several articles about YouTube have noted, describing how their algorithm tends to lead viewers down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and salacious content. Read More

As organizations become more customer obsessed or user centered, we are seeing greater specialization in the delivery of user experiences. We are also experiencing significant changes in how organizations are delivering user experiences. A role that has recently risen in importance and shares some overlap with User Experience is that of Product Management. Specialization and modern forms of project management are encouraging these changes.

Rather than following the traditional waterfall process of software-project management, more and teams are adopting agile methods of software development. For organizations who may still be at an early stage in their UX maturity and user-centered thinking, it is still quite common to have a single UX professional working with a standing team of generalist developers who divide their time across multiple projects. However, as agile methods have become more common and in today’s world of scrum teams and agile sprints, it has become necessary to consider more specialized roles. Read More