From Pete Warden, a good list of things that users don’t care about: How long you spent on it. How hard it was to implement. How clean your architecture is. How extensible it is. How well it runs on your machine. How great it will be once all their friends are on it. How amazing […]

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Humans make decisions by comparing options…the better you can help people compare your product with what they’re already using the easier their decision will be (or the more likely they’ll make the right decision). Here’s a good example of a nicely-designed comparison page: Breeze: Compare Breeze with the rest. via @brilliantcrank

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Building a business? Here’s a good place to start: Justin Jackson’s What Amy Hoy taught me about starting a business. In it, Amy Hoy shares a good framework to start with: Define what you want to achieve Forget ideas, study a market Target people with money Make sure you like your customer Identify where you’re […]

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Brad Feld asks Who Owns Your UX Philosophy?. “I’ve come to appreciate the important of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize […]

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Cheap vs. transformative: The easiest way to lower costs is to make something cheap. Cheap components, cheaply assembled, cheaply packaged, with cheap software and services, and cheap support, sold at razor-thin margins, results in a really cheap price tag. Nothing exemplifies this better than the netbooks of the last decade. Sold at unprecedentedly low price […]

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From the “total product experience” department…a nice story of a woman asking about product recommendations on Twitter and getting a much better initial user experience with KISSMetrics. Note that neither of these interactions actually have anything to do with the software…it’s all interpersonal communication. This is product experience in the age of Twitter… “Boom. They […]

Continue Reading: Mixpanel or KISSmetrics? Why I Made the Decision Before Seeing the Product

Andy Budd nails it: “So this is the dirty little secret in our industry. The best designers and developers rarely have more talent. They simply have more time.” hat tip: @danritz

Continue Reading: Enough time to sweat the details

Josh Miller, one of the makers of Branch: “A few months ago, my fifteen-year-old sister told me that Snapchat was going to be the next Instagram. Many months before that she told me that Instagram was being used by her peers as much as Facebook. Both times I snickered. Learning from past mistakes, I took […]

Continue Reading: Tenth Grade Tech Trends

Somewhat lost in the whole Facebook Poke/Snapchat brewhaha is what people actually use the different services for. Many people characterize Snapchat as a “sexting app” simply because the pictures/videos you capture with it have a lifespan of a few seconds. And its true that there is some sexting going on. But as Sarah Lacy points […]

Continue Reading: Calling Snapchat “the sexting app” misses a huge shift in mobile, photos, and communication

Some good thoughts in Design is not veneer by Aral Balkan, including this one: “There are no shortcuts to good design. There are no silver bullets, no magic buttons, no silver sixpences. Every design problem is unique. Design is a process, not a product. And you cannot take part in the process by ignoring the […]

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