Looking through the glass in the conference room, I couldn’t help noticing that the Dubai hotel was pretty badass — got to be the most opulent place I’d ever seen. The sight through the corridor on the left wing was particularly amazing. Oh, yeah — a designer knows how to catch some fun too. I was trying to make a couple friends there but I mostly just bent over on my side, drinking my free champagne when it happened. Oh my gosh, the red dress she wore was killing. She was tall. Six foot I guess. Early 20’s, maybe 24 at most. Her long dark hair was looking “ ”, and her deep glowing (or rather mischievous) eyes were calling out to me. photoshopped Was I going to just seat back? I braced up to make a move, and when I thought she was just walking past me, she looked and gave a rather soft smile — like those sweet gradients drawn on the Sketch app. I couldn’t hide the blush. Immediately, I was like, damn she’s so soooooo hot! Please try to forget what happened afterwards… So what’s in a User Interface? . The User Interface in very basic terms, refers to everything you can see or touch Back to the story. The hot red dress, long dark hair, and mischievous eyes may be called user interfaces (UIs). If she were blonde or wore a blue dress rather than red, that would have been a change in the “user interface”. With regards to an application, the colors used, buttons, sliders, and other components, make up the user interface. Okay, and the User Experience? Remember the feeling, ? “Immediately, I am like, damn she’s so soooooo hot!” What I felt then could be likened to a delightful user experience. How you make your users feel or behave refers to the User Experience. How easy your product makes the user get their problems solved, the frustration or joy they feel when using your product (hopefully not the former )— that’s the core of the user experience of any product. Carefully thought out User Interfaces. In the opening story, there probably would have been no without some elements of admiration. “zing moment” I did see the hot red dress, great hair, and every other asset I refer to as then the admiration set in. “user Interface elements,” Do you see how user interfaces equally play a major role in crafting delightful user experiences? This is exactly the role user interfaces play and it is why UI designers are important allies to every UX designer. They always will work together to achieve the same end goal in any product design. It’s important to note that the choices made in UI designs should be carefully thought out and planned with the user in mind. This is to foster a great user experience — that’s the petition of every UX designer. A simple practical example. Some months ago I was hired to do a redesign. The client from Toronto, helped African students gain admission into schools in Canada, so they wanted to redesign their poorly converting website. I could have made a lot of design choices, but after a bit of research, most users wanted to do one of two things when they first got on the website. Apply to get on the admissions process (having heard about the company) know more about how the admission process worked (if they never heard about the company) These options defined my choice of having the “ ” and “ ” buttons within the initial viewport of the users’ device. (see below) Apply now How it works The Industry’s Definition User Experience design is a broad field that looks like this in real life… For web based products, this graphic above helps illustrate the difference between UI and UX. Adapted from: http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf Apparently, I have not attempted to explain all there is to User Experience design. This is just an interesting introduction to how it differs and comes to terms with User Interface design. Key takeaways Every product is got some sort of user interface. They may not necessarily foster a great experience though. Great user experiences are built on carefully thought out user interfaces that enables the user achieve their end goal easily Understanding the user’s needs and product objectives are the foundations for crafting a successful user experience You want to get your product users in the “ ” zone? — craft a delightful user experience! zing If you loved this article, I’d appreciate it if you hit the heart icon below. It’d certainly be a delightful “user experience” for me :-)

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[Photo:flickr user ljnixon ] “Crisis management” isn’t a monolithic process or a skill that suits every situation. Sooner or later, no matter their size, location, or industry, all companies face some sort of crisis. The trouble, though, is that we often talk about “crisis management” like it’s a single skill or process: You have it or you don’t; you do it right or you totally mess it up. But that isn’t the case at all, and the effects of this misunderstanding aren’t hard to see. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Emory University and found (unsurprisingly) that mismanaged crises often resulted from unprepared leadership teams and led to a wide range of long-term consequences, whereas companies that handled crisis effectively managed to recover fully and quickly. reviewed the data Here’s a basic yet underappreciated taxonomy of business crises and a look at what it takes to weather them. THREE TYPES OF CRISIS This is when there’s serious individual misconduct and unethical or illegal activities by key players. The right now, centered around founder and CEO Roger Ailes, is a flagrant example of this type of crisis. It not only reflects Ailes’s alleged personal conduct but the culture of the organization he led. 1. Personnel crisis. sexual harassment scandal that’s rocking Fox News Even if some decisions involve the most basic of gut instincts, leaders navigating crises need to tell their teams precisely what they want, when, and why. Former Volkswagen CEO is under investigation for alleged market manipulation related to his involvement in the company’s emissions scandal, which began to unfold in 2014, alongside other VW board members. The company has already admitted to secretly installing software in some 11 million vehicles in order to pass emissions tests, a violation that investigators now appear to suspect may have been mismanaged (or even started) among top leaders. Martin Winterkorn Chipotle is still fighting its way back from a string of customer food poisoning incidents in late 2015. The company is but still struggling to right itself. Chipotle’s failures were a matter of systemic operational crises up and down the organization — from its supply chain and quality control to customer interactions. 2. Systemic crises. finally back to in the black Brexit, mass shootings, terrorism: From local incidents all the way on up through geopolitical upheavals, businesses can wake up one morning and suddenly have to navigate a variety of crises they couldn’t have seen coming. This type of crisis originates externally but dramatically changes the context in which a company operates. It creates psychological turmoil and unsteadies employees and customers alike. 3. Contextual crises. Professor of MIT’s Sloan School of Management : Peter Senge once wrote Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances . . . Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities. That’s a high bar to clear — especially during a crisis. But if leaders grasp that their job is already about creating new circumstances, then sudden changes of fortune (even for the worse) may not actually seem so anomalous or frightening after all. You can’t set an action plan for every possible contingency, but you don’t have to. Here are two steps for navigating a crisis whose specifics you can never anticipate. 1. START WITH YOURSELF, THEN WORK OUTWARD Managing crisis means accepting incredible levels of uncertainty with a calm, cool, and positive attitude. That’s never easy. But the sense of urgency to tackle tough situations always requires an even temper. In order to communicate a decisive yet flexible plan as soon as crisis hits, you’ll need to assess the situation effectively: 1. Ask yourself: What does this situation demand? Is it a personnel crisis, a systemic crisis, or a contextual one? 2. Then craft an immediate-term response strategy based on how you want to emerge from this crisis at the end — even if you don’t know exactly how you’ll get there — and communicate it to your team, partners, and customers. 3. Finally, as you begin rolling out that strategy, keep an eye on ability (your own and your organization’s) to execute it based on how the crisis evolves (and it will!) — without losing sight of your company’s assets, structure, and capabilities. Sound like a lot to handle? To be fair, it is. In 2014, Mary Barra became General Motors’s (GM) first female CEO. After only two months in the role, GM had to recall 1.7 million cars with an ignition switch defect that was responsible for more than a dozen deaths — a clear-cut systemic crisis, with possible reverberations at the personnel level. Barra snapped into action. She personally went on a media tour and apologized for GM’s grave mistake. As the reported, “It was a moment unlike any other at General Motors: The top executive stepping — personally and publicly — into the middle of one of the gravest safety problems in the company’s history. Her performance was a marked departure from the norm in the auto industry, where corporate chiefs routinely avoid talking about recalls unless subpoenaed by Congress.” New York Times After assessing the situation, Barra took personal responsibility for dealing with GM’s crisis head on, preventing a systemic crisis from spiraling into an irrecoverable and a failure of leadership to boot. PR disaster 2. INFLUENCE OTHERS, THEN LET THEM INFLUENCE YOU Successful leaders inspire and influence everyone in good times and bad — their executive team, employees, customers, clients, partners, investors, and many others. That’s also part of the job description. Even if some decisions involve the most basic of , leaders navigating crises need to tell their teams precisely what they want, when, and why — then help them make it happen. Waiting too long to weigh countervailing opinions can spell doom. gut instincts Here’s what , chairman of Nationwide Building Society, said immediately after the Brexit vote: David Roberts Britain has always been at its best at times of high uncertainty and volatility. There are important decisions coming, but for the next few days, weeks, and months, we all have a responsibility to work through the issues in a calm, thoughtful, and positive manner. Despite the naysayers, the economy will continue to function effectively; customers will still need to save, borrow, and invest, and we will all continue to be there for them as we were yesterday and in the weeks past. Roberts didn’t resort to abstraction even while working to calm fears; he concisely describes what the U.K. economy’s goals must be and which consumers’ needs remain unchanged. It’s inspiring talk amid a contextual crisis, but it’s also marching orders of a sort — here’s what we all need to do next — reflecting Senge’s goal of helping people “become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world.” Communicating effectively in times of uncertainty means not just articulating your point of view, but listening actively — without bias or judgment and with a real willingness to consider different perspectives. Roberts acknowledges this, too, when he notes a shared responsibility for navigating the issues collaboratively. That means paying heed not just to the content of others’ ideas, but to their emotional tone, too. Both are crucial for mutual understanding — and, ultimately, everyone getting back on their feet. [Photo:flickr user ljnixon ] Original Article @ Fast Company . Copyright © 2016 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved. I am an . Founder of and other companies. Shadoka enables entrepreneurship, growth, and social impact. Author of “ ” (McGraw Hill, 2014) and “ ” (Motivational Press, 2015). Follow me on Twitter . entrepreneur and author SHADOKA Everything Connects — How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability Survive to Thrive: 27 Practices of Resilient Entrepreneurs, Innovators, and Leaders @faisal_hoque

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Three out of YC’s latest Summer 16 batch of 92 companies (which were publicly disclosed) are focused on VR uses and applications. As the bellwether incubator for top startups, and thus a strong leading indicator of where the industry is headed, Y Combinator will serve as an excellent barometer of growth for the nascent VR and AR industries. companies technology The companies that launched are: , an in-flight VR entertainment system; , a distribution platform for enterprise VR applications; and , an infrastructure layer virtualizing high performance PCs for VR in the cloud. Skylights ConstructVR Sixa Remember, before iPhones, newly launching companies would proclaim a “Mobile strategy,” and that became a “Mobile First” strategy, and now, no one says that, because it’s just modus operandi….? Well, expect to hear similar terminology about a “VR/AR strategy” over the the next 12 months. Let’s talk a little about timing and stars aligning. Pokemon Go: Since this current S16 batch applied and were accepted to YC this past fall, Pokemon GO launched and became a global phenomenon, making Augmented Reality a kitchen table term and raking in . $200M in it’s first month Snapchat, the world’s most actively used Augmented Reality application — Face Filters — is rumored to be working on a more formal . AR/VR device and solution B to be a key sales and distribution partner for Oculus this holiday season, putting demo rigs in over 500 retail stores. est Buy just signed on Playstation VR: Very soon, we’ll start seeing the Q4 deluge of holiday commercials for the upcoming release of Playstation VR, which will make Virtual Reality a household demand, and parents the crazed purchasers. To further “cross-the-t,” during GameStop’s recent quarterly earnings call, the Playstation VR pre-order was the “quickest sellout in GameStop history” and it happened in “literally five minutes.” they reported This time next year, we’ll have a massive increase in VR and AR applications launching from Y Combinator, and other industry leading incubators like TechStars and 500Startups. To throw out a projection, because why not, this time next year we’ll see a 5x increase increase in companies graduating from YC with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality focuses. If you’re interested in building a company in the space, now is the time. If you want to hang, talk and learn more about VR & AR join us at . VR Tuesday

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Debates about which is best can get quite intense and I have found it hard to cut through them to really understand which would best suit my projects. What has helped me many times is to hear from the experience of people who have moved from one framework to another. Javascript framework I recently decided to rewrite an Ember.js project I have worked on for several years in Vue. It was quite a big decision so I’ve decided to write about why I chose that option here — hope it is useful to someone out there. This is the project I am now implementing in Vue: _pwb-admin-vuetify - New admin interface for PropertyWebBuilder_github.com etewiah/pwb-admin-vuetify It is an admin panel to manage various settings of my open source website builder for the real estate sector. Quite a simple project to start with but it slowly got more complex than I had anticipated. In particular I struggled while using ember to find a good way to allow rolling back unsaved changes. The first thing to say is that I by no means think Ember is a bad framework. It is great in many ways and the community around it is particularly outstanding. The guys developing it are pretty smart and they are probably right about a lot of the conventions that they push. Truth is though that I found it very frustrating each time I had to change the way I wanted to do something because of an Ember convention. In spite of my many years of frustration with Ember, I was quite reluctant to change to another framework. JS frameworks are so fickle that I knew I could spend a year with some other framework and then find there was another one that turned out to be even “better”. Because I was working on an open source project, an important thing to me was that a framework had a good community around it. I want as many people as possible to use and contribute to my project. For a few years it looked like Ember was the framework of choice for great open source projects. One of the main reasons I chose to use it was because it was being used by the . In the last couple of years though I have noticed fewer open source projects using Ember.js. This is one of those observations that result in very strong pushback when used as an argument for picking one framework over another. For one thing it is not easy to accurately determine which framework is the most popular. Plus popularity does not equate quality. discourse project I have already made the case that for PropertyWebBuilder it was important to use a framework that was popular enough to attract collaborators. As to figuring out how popular Ember is relative to Vue I’m happy to rely on my instincts. Just in the course of talking to people and browsing various websites I have come across enough activity around Vue to feel pretty confident that if it has not already attracted more developers, it will soon. Over the 12 plus months that PropertyWebBuilder has been open source I have only had a couple of people interested in helping out with the Ember side of things. I have already had 3 people show interest in the 2 months since I started using Vue. As I started experimenting with Vue, I noticed that quite a few UI libraries were being built on top of Vue. This really added to my interest in it! Much as I like Ember and its community, there just aren’t that many UI libraries being built on it. The best one I found was but it was nowhere near as impressive as any of the top 5 Vue UI libraries. I spent a few hours trying out and was smitten. In no time at all I was able to create a great looking demo that would have taken me 3 or 4 times the effort to create with Ember. Ember Paper Vuetify Thus far it may sound like I get swept away by whatever the new cool kid on the block turns out to be. There may be some element of that but I have resisted shiny new frameworks before. Both Angular and React got a lot of hype at some point but I never found enough compelling advantages to either of them to justify switching. Sure they both seem to have overtaken Ember too in the popularity stakes but they were constantly changing and I struggled to pick one over the other. Neither was particularly easy to pick up and I felt that if I implemented something using either I may well find I had to reimplement a good chunk of it within a year or two. Somehow Vue seems to achieved something no other framework before it could manage. It is super powerful but fairly easy to learn. It is quite new but feels more stable than other frameworks that have been about for years. It does not force you down any conventions but it has a great ecosystem of accepted libraries for the main things you might need — routing, animation, state management, data-retrieval etc. Quite incredible considering it was created by one guy with no large company behind it. There is one other reason I ended up migrating from Ember to Vue. It hurts me to admit this but my Ember code was terrible. Really, really ugly. Of course I can’t blame the framework entirely for that but when I look back I find it ironic that I ended up writing such unconventional code when one of the big value propositions of Ember was that it pushed you to follow good conventions. Here is my explanation of why my Ember code ended up so ugly — sorry if it sounds like a poor excuse, perhaps it is... Over the time that I’ve been working on PropertyWebBuilder, Ember has changed enough that I got confused about how best to do things. As an example, when I started writing the admin panel for PropertyWebBuilder, using components to encapsulate functionality was not yet the preferred way to organise things. It has since become the preferred way to break up units of functionality. With the introduction of routable components there have been even more significant changes to the recommended way Ember projects should be organised. It is quite likely that if I was smart enough and had paid attention to all the announcements about each change in Ember I could have kept my project up to date and decent. The reality of being a developer is that you have limited time and I got super frustrated trying to keep up. Because I accepted that the guys behind Ember are way smarter than me, each time I struggled I put it down to my own incompetence. I dreaded each version release so the project is now several versions behind the current Ember release. I want to make sure that I don’t repeat the mistakes I made with the Ember version of my project. I want to make sure I follow best practices from the start and get some community involvement early one. In the ideal case I would like it to be a reference implementation that others can learn from. It will be difficult but I’m enjoying Vue a lot right now and I’m ready to put in the effort to do a better job this time round. I will write more blog posts about the implementation details I decide to go with. Any feedback and help with improving it will be very much appreciated.

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I’ve done a number of video lately. This seems to be the norm for a live event today. I start with a short one from when I was in Adelaide, then a longer one from Sydney, and wrap it up with what is one of the most fun interviews I’ve ever done — this time in with my partner Seth. interviews Minneapolis Enjoy! from on . Beta.MN Talks: Brad Feld & Seth Levine pt.1 TECHdotMN Vimeo from on . Beta.MN Talks: Brad Feld & Seth Levine pt.2 TECHdotMN Vimeo from on . Beta.MN Talks: Brad Feld & Seth Levine pt.3 TECHdotMN Vimeo Originally published at Feld Thoughts . is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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