Good reads this week

Instead of quoting each post separately, I wanted to try something new and see if I can manage to do a link-post each Friday with what I've enjoyed reading during the week.

• Improve your UX with micro-interactions
  The best products do two things well: features and details. Features are what draw people to your product. Details are what keep them there.
• Abstracting the Microsoft Outlook Design Process
  I love getting insight like this into how other organisations do their day-to-day work. As an industry we tend to focus so much on the results but forget to look at the process that brought us there.
• I'm learning new tech and it's hard
  Most of all, I falsely remember it being easy to learn HTML, CSS, and Photoshop because I wanted to learn those things. I was doing it for me, not for a job, and certainly not to keep up.
• Taking Sunday Back
  Game of Thrones averaged two-and-a-half million viewers on average per episode in 2011, and only went up from there (the final episode had 13.6 million viewers, a far cry from something like The Big Bang Theory’s 23.4 million, but massive for a premium cable audience).
• Hire two designers, not one
  So, here’s a crazy idea: hire two designers instead of one. Don’t start off with a single designer. Hire two at once. Don’t hire that lone person and expect them to perform miracles alone. And don’t wait until you have a years worth of budget for two people. Invest! Invest in design by kickstarting your team with two people.
• Dear designer: Your first job
  If you are a white dude, I need you to do me a favor: If you’re in a meeting and Maria is talking and Kevin from Engineering interrupts her, I want you to turn to Kevin and say, “Shut the fuck up, Kevin. I want to hear what Maria has to say.”
• How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory
  Analytics has famously influenced the tactics in professional baseball and basketball in recent years. Ultimately, it may have just as great an impact on soccer, which traditionally hasn’t relied on statistics to figure out much of anything. Graham, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Cambridge, built his own database to track the progress of more than 100,000 players from around the world. By recommending which of them Liverpool should try to acquire, and then how the new arrivals should be used, he has helped the club, once soccer’s most glamorous and successful, return to the cusp of glory.
• I was wrong about the iPad Pro
  What I've discovered this time around is a sense of delight from the iPad that I hadn't really seen in technology for a while. Essentially, I liked the iPad because, despite its restrictions and rigidity, it actually helps me get more work done.