Josh Williams, founder of Gowalla, has written Play by your own rules., which offers many insights on the Foursquare vs. Gowalla wars. Williams describes how Gowalla got sucked into a “check-in” war with foursquare after raising VC money and so were playing a game they didn’t want to play. The check-in wars redefined Gowalla’s product…they […]

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Max Rudberg has written a nice piece on UI walkthroughs, those special sequences of screens often created for first-time use. (note that the headline “If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it” isn’t quite what Max is saying) His advice is right on: “When it comes to teaching users to use your UIs, I […]

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Great piece by our HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah on the cost of adding features. He hits the nail on the head on many of the reasons why features are added…they’re seen as table stakes, a competitor is adding them, or there is a feeling that they’ll add bottom-line revenue. In truth it’s hard to know […]

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Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, recently tweeted something that I like: ‘Innovation is hard because “solving problems people didn’t know they had” and “building something no one needs” look identical at first.’ This is true, and a real cause for so many of the products that get built that shouldn’t have. But it doesn’t have […]

Continue Reading: Don’t design blindly

Some intriguing thoughts on a possible Apple iWatch from Bruce Tognazzini. Lots of good ideas in here, plus my favorite bit, the paradox of the “huge problem”: “A problem that feels sufficiently insurmountable will appear the product of natural law, to be accepted rather than challenged.” It seems to me that breaking this paradox is […]

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A thoughtful post from Allan over at Layervault, Progressive Reduction touches on the issue I brought up in Labels always win last week. Progressive reduction is a design technique in which you reduce interface elements over time as people use the app more. (with usage assuming familiarity). An interesting concept, to be sure. My guess […]

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But former Facebook and Twitter product guy Josh Elman makes a good point in What is “Growth Hacking” really?? “you do need to find the right “hacks” that help you get to those points of sustainable growth. LinkedIn started with Reid Hoffman inviting his entire professional network to join him, Facebook started expanding college-by-college waiting until […]

Continue Reading: Growth hacking may not be the best term…

Lots of interesting bits in Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution. The thesis: “We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn’t exist. Instead, thanks to a vision laid out by a small team of […]

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Never Lie About Who You Really Are is such a great post…taking the notion of being who you really are and applying it to product design. “People at all levels, especially management, witness the slow undoing of good customer service, product quality, or safety standards, and they don’t say a thing about it. Even if […]

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Must read. In What it’s Really Like Working with Steve Jobs Glenn Reid shares his experiences working with Steve Jobs and how he really was just a product guy who happened to be CEO: “I can still remember some of those early meetings, with 3 or 4 of us in a locked room somewhere on […]

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