I was recently talking to a developer who was building out a new stream view for a web app she was working on. She was in the middle of getting infinite scrolling to work, which isn’t very hard for developers these days but it does take a significant amount of time to do elegantly. My […]

Continue Reading: 1 hour of research saves 10 hours of development time

It seems like everyone is hiring designers! They’re hiring product designers, UX designers, creative directors, directors of design, UI designers, visual designers, etc. There are even acquihires of entire design teams! So…how do you find a good designer? First, a quick backstory for people who have never read my blog before. Until this past August […]

Continue Reading: Tips on how to hire a good designer

Marco Arment, in his recent post Apple has lost the functional high ground: “But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with […]

Continue Reading: Does Apple care any more?

I’m noticing an interesting practice emerging when designing for mobile: in-context messages that help you learn or give feedback about an app. Here’s an example: In this example from the New York Times Now app, the designers have dropped in a “quick tip” to let you know that you can swipe left to discover new […]

Continue Reading: In detail: Designing in context for mobile

Since paper receipts aren’t very useful these days, I’ve been choosing recently to have my receipts emailed to me. The other week I filled out my email address on a Square checkout device at my local coffee house (Atomic Cafe) and didn’t think much of it. But when I read the email receipt later I […]

Continue Reading: In detail: Square’s email receipt and feedback flow

I was talking to a design team yesterday and one of the team members casually mentioned that they were launching something new. I took a quick look at what they were planning to launch and it was clear that something wasn’t quite right…there was a weird UI bug and some data looked off. So I […]

Continue Reading: The problem with “we’ll fix it later”

Lots of folks I talk to about building products want to know how to grow from a tiny initial user base (10 people) up through 100 to 1000. It certainly seems like each of these stages is different, but it’s not clear why. I recently thought a lot about this when interviewed by Jay Acunzo […]

Continue Reading: Growing from 10 to 100 to 1000 users

Rob Go of NextView Ventures makes a great point: saying “It’s been tried before” is a bad excuse to dismiss a product or startup. Rob says: “I’ve said those words before as well, both directly to entrepreneurs as well as in our internal conversations about companies. But I’m convinced that “it’s been tried before” is […]

Continue Reading: Great idea, poorly designed

Great list by Braden Kowitz on why you should listen to your customers: Several important points: 1) People love to say they talk to customers but rarely do. And some people talk to a couple customers, feel good about it, and assume their job is done. But the fact is that you have to go […]

Continue Reading: Three important points about listening to your customers

A nice set of notes here: The Right Way to Do Lean Research, curated from a discussion panel of several folks who really know their stuff: Christina Wodtke, Laura Klein, Todd Zaki-Warfel, and Mike Long. Right questions: Ask the right questions and save a tremendous amount of time by knowing what you want to learn […]

Continue Reading: Tips for doing Lean Research