Emphasizing the user experience of a product is crucial when launching something new. Design teams that account for how people adopt innovation stand a much greater chance of having users accept and actually use their products, writes Victor Yocco. In this second essay on building new products with the process of user adoption in mind, Yocco writes about 5 “characteristics of innovation” and what implications they have for design teams. This includes: sharpening the relative advantage of a product, deeply understanding how the product will fit into a user’s lives, and designing for simplicity.

+ How The Guardian is iteratively tweaking its in-house analytics program Ophan through staff feedback (Nieman Lab); How Storyful designed the complexity of its new cross-social media simple-searching tool (Medium)

+ Imgur releases a new tool for creating looping video files that act like GIFs, the .gifv (The Verge)