As software becomes more embedded in our everyday lives customer research becomes more important…we need to really understand the problem we’re solving before we can build a great solution for it. Since design and development processes are getting faster every day it makes sense that research needs to get faster too…but research tends to conjure […]

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From this interview with Jonathan Ive on Apple’s design process: “One of the values of things I learned absolutely directly from Steve was the whole issue of focus. What are we focusing on: focus on product. I wish I could do a better job in communicating this truth here, which is when you really are […]

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A good reminder from Tomasz Tunguz: The Hidden Costs Of The Switching Products In The Consumer Web “In most of the consumer web, I’ve come to believe switching costs are significantly greater than I ever suspected…switching from one product to another requires effort: the time to learn new software and build new behaviors. This is […]

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A great read on changing from reservations to ticket sales for restaurants by Nick Kokonas, partner at the restaurant Alinea in Chicago: Tickets for Restaurants. This is really about product design…designing the product experience around attending a restaurant. What I like about this is that Nick has touched not only on the obvious improvements in […]

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Great read by Andy Baio on the history and future of Upcoming.org: Diary of a Corporate Sellout. For those of you who don’t know what Upcoming was, it was an awesome events website where you could manage the events you wanted to go to (before those types of sites were popular) that Andy created and […]

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Doing great design is as much about being in the right mindset as it is about anything else. Designers need to think about their users constantly…being empathic to their needs and behaviors. They need to continually ask themselves…does this help a user do what they want? It’s a constant challenge that any designer faces every […]

Continue Reading: Creating badass users

Popular wisdom says that ideas are nothing and “execution is everything”. There are so many ideas out there that the only ones which actually make a difference are the ones that get executed on. Makes sense, right? But, then you realize there are a lot of things that get executed on every day that really […]

Continue Reading: Why ideas aren’t worthless

I’ve just published Principles of Product Design, a list of ideas and principles that I try to keep in mind when designing products. I’ve been collecting these over the last couple of years while building product at HubSpot and working on the What to Wear daily report. I created it in the same fashion as […]

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My good friend Christina Wodtke has been writing a lot of great pieces on OKRs recently. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a framework for determining and reaching goals that many companies including Google and Zynga now use as part of their product development. OKRs are a great way to marry product […]

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A fascinating tidbit about Apple’s culture from ex-Apple senior designer Mark Kawano in this interview with Fast.co Design. “It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design," Kawano said. "Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about […]

Continue Reading: On Apple’s design culture