Almost everyone in product design is familiar with feature creep…the slow but steady growth of features over time that eventually make a product cumbersome and difficult to use. Yet, even though everyone is aware of the problem, we are almost powerless to do anything about it. Why is that? Well, I recently attended the Warm […]

Continue Reading: Killing Feature Creep

Excellent piece by Ben Horowitz on culture within larger organizations: Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture “As a venture capitalist, people often ask me why big companies have trouble innovating while small companies seem to be able to do it so easily. My answer is generally unexpected. Big companies have plenty of great ideas, but they do […]

Continue Reading: Can’t-Do Culture

A small observation with huge implications: scrolling is easier than clicking. This affects a lot of things, like whether to place information further down a page or whether to place it behind a drop-down, button, or link. Should we break up our articles like news sites onto 7 different pages? Are people happy clicking through […]

Continue Reading: Scrolling is easier than clicking

John Gruber of Daring Fireball made an important point about product design recently in response to Robert Scoble’s concern that many Google employees were not wearing their Google Glasses. After Scoble suggested that a lack of employee support might hurt adoption of the Glass product, Gruber responds: “Scoble has the cause and effect backwards. If […]

Continue Reading: Product quality trumps evangelism

In Shipping is the beginning of a process, Paul Adams of Intercom writes of the crucial difference between shipping as an end vs. shipping as a beginning.: “Shipping is not an end goal. Unfortunately too many teams launch and move on to the next thing. Learning from what you shipped takes discipline. The larger and […]

Continue Reading: Shipping as a beginning, not an end

Nice post here on several common design problems: We listened to the people, not the problem. The money quote: “When flexibility itself overtakes your solution, or worse, becomes your solution… that’s a problem.” Too often the takeaway from experiences like this is “don’t listen to people”. But this does not capture the subtlety of the […]

Continue Reading: Should designers listen to people?

The current battle of the social web is to create the single stream that gets the most attention. Watch the giants copy each other.

Continue Reading: One stream to rule them all (the real Facebook vs. Twitter war)

Fred Destin weighs in on Snapchat and that old no revenues debate after skeptics questioned Facebook’s $3,000,000,000 offer for Snapchat: “A few years down the road, YouTube is clearly a phenomenal acquisition. How would you like to be in the shoes of the company who paid under $2 billion for the world’s largest media and […]

Continue Reading: Think that was worth 2%?

I don’t think the recent spate of articles on building startups without writing code are a fad. Here’s why.

Continue Reading: Before you write that code…

I have several drafts on the topic of research and startups. Until I finish one of those I leave you with Erika Hall’s excellent summary of the topic: How the ‘Failure’ Culture of Startups Is Killing Innovation. Money quote: “Somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one’s risk of failure. Part […]

Continue Reading: Research can often prevent the need to fail fast