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Howdy folks,

Hope you’re enjoying a wonderful summer. This week’s edition features discussions about context, UX mistakes, and how to display data to give us a better understanding of context. Please recommend more articles on “context” because it’s one of the most important things designers can miss.

Thank you!

StartupDigest Design is curated by:
Jeremy Merle – Creative Director, Brightcove
Enrique Allen - Founding designer, 500 Startups

What You Need to Read This Week

The Trouble with Context
By Stephanie Rieger, Shaping the Mobile Experience

This presentation makes you think about issues like “how to design an app for a tall, American business woman, using an iPhone, while riding a ferry across Hong Kong harbour.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Context
By Paul Dourish, UCI

I often think of the environment and activities surrounding use cases as the context. With each activity you can analyze context by availability, accountability, awareness, and visibility. I recall this paper as foundational while doing research in the Persuasive Tech Lab.

YouTube Unveils Slick Experimental Redesign, Codenamed Cosmic Panda
By Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch

Congrats to YouTube for cleaning up the context, or home, surrounding their video experience. After a week of being in the wild, what do you think?

Top 10 UX Mistakes to Avoid
By UX for the masses

Everyone loves top ten lists. Keep these in mind as you practice lessons from previous editions. I chuckle when I hear someone say, “I need an awesome designer to create a great user experience for our product,” because they’re missing the point.

Data Visualizations Modern Approaches
By Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine

Oldie but a goodie that breaks down different ways you can think about visualizing your data. Each way of visualizing should help frame the context for looking at your data and help you draw out new actionable insights.

Site of the Week

Visual.ly

Excited to see the world’s largest community for exploring, sharing, creating, and promoting data visualizations emerge. Hopefully we can learn from these visualizations by seeing the bigger picture of key problems and opportunities we’re facing. You can even submit your designs for distribution and feedback!

Bonus

30 Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download

Beyond the numerous PDF gems from 37Signals to Koi Vinh linked, there’s something special about having PDF versions of things that make it feel a little more tangible.