Paul Boag writes at Smashing Magazine:

Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way around.

My generation were loud about the outdated software our employers used. We begged, insisted and shouted from the rooftops that efficient workload management demanded a higher level of polish, functionality and user experience.

Even massive software makers like Oracle do little if anything post-sale to ensure their products get the design and functionality upgrades they so desperately need. You can pay an army of contractor-consultants to customize the database architecture and processing flow, sure, but the interface is still all ’90s.

That was then, though. Today, the up-and-comers are just as unlikely to accept awful software and user experience. The difference is they won’t ask or shout at all, they just start using third-party tools. Sometimes this is fine, but other times there are serious security concerns with using third-party software for company work.

Read Boag’s article, especially if you manage any young folks, because this stuff is happening and you should take the opportunity to learn from them. They’re going to gravitate toward good user experience and efficiency, and that’s good for business.

This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:

As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.

I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.

It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…

…because it has.

Ben Fullerton of Method, writing in UX Magazine on the interplay between user experience design and brand messaging:

For designers, the development of a compelling brand helps to round out the design, creating a before and after. It builds a background narrative and meaning that empowers people to respond to design in more complex ways.