It has long been known that savvy restaurants use a bag of tricks to build buzz and interest. One trick is to seat early customers near windows so that people passing by will think the place is full. This has the effect of making the place seem popular as people usually can’t see the empty [...]

Continue Reading: Designing for the Social Web: Signs of Life

A great example of the Usage Lifecycle in practice.
The other day I wrote about the idea that people go through a progression as they use your software, what I call the Usage Lifecycle. I described how Tripit.com was doing a good job at getting people over the hurdle of Sign-up with several really nice features [...]

Continue Reading: More on the Usage Lifecycle: Lifecycle Messaging

The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.
Babycenter.com has a really great newsletter. Once you tell the site when you’re expecting, it sends you a weekly newsletter targeted at the specific stage of pregnancy [...]

Continue Reading: Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle

As anybody who has ever read anything knows, the most important part of a book are the quotes sprinkled throughout it. Yes, if you are able to pick the perfect quotes to start your chapters with, then you’ve done the majority of hard work in writing. The words that you write yourself, the other 50,000 [...]

Continue Reading: Douglas Adams on Interactivity