July 20th
Hire two designers, not one
If you can’t hire a designer it’s probably because you don’t have a design culture.
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Author Archive
May 12th
Show growth
Adrian Sanders, an alum of the startup accelerator program YCombinator, gives some advice on what is important when talking about your startup: “Do not tell me how your idea is going to work, show me that it is working. That is far more convincing. Every idea out there has been dreamed up (save money on […]
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May 9th
The attention economy has come true
Recently I have found myself returning to this classic piece by Michael Goldhaber, published in April 1997!: The attention economy and the Net. In this piece Goldhaber lays out what has most certainly come true: that our attention is what is valuable in an information age. From the summary: “If the Web and the Net […]
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April 21st
UI Analysis: Screen real estate on Weather.com homepage
One of my motivators for creating the What to Wear daily report was the poor experiences I have had with weather sites. I never seem to enjoy using weather sites to do even the simplest of tasks, like finding out what the weather is right now. It seems as though weather sites are not in […]
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April 20th
Pictures under glass
If you’ve never read Bret Victor’s Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, now is a great time. Victor rails against what he calls “pictures under glass”, or the pervasive vision of the future which involves touch screens for everything. He points out that humans interact with the world in amazing ways, specifically through our […]
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April 1st
Super normal product design
I like this idea by Dave Morin: Super Normal: “When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it […]
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March 14th
Starting Small
Great piece by Joel Gascoigne: The Habits of Successful People: They Start Small “The challenge for a lot of us is that when we go about our lives, we interact with so many “big” things and we forget or don’t even know how they originally started. It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of […]
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March 11th
Jony Ive on quality
I think it’s really easy for anybody to say “we care about quality” or “quality is job #1”. In fact, I just wrote it twice…it’s very easy to do. But actually executing on quality is extremely difficult as quality takes time and care. And it’s hard to argue for something that takes time when all […]
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March 10th
What, exactly, is a startup?
Two definitions of startups: One from an excellent piece by Steve Blank on why companies are not startups: “a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The corollary for an enterprise is: A company is a permanent organization designed to execute a repeatable and scalable business model. […]
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March 8th
Is your product a vitamin or drug?
An interesting framework from Grace Ng in which startups(products) are categorized along two axes: the level of pain you’re solving and the frequency of use: When should your startup focus on UX?. I think this is an interesting way to talk about products and their real value. A lot of mobile apps I’ve tried are […]
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