A good reminder from Andrew Chen, who notes how bad many consumer metrics are conversion/percentage wise: Why consumer product metrics are all terrible. “Other than the exceptional cases, consumers are impatient and disinterested in your product. Even the ones who sign up to try it out, only a small % are willing to stick around […]

Continue Reading: Don’t be dismayed by noisy metrics

The folks at Invision did an interview with me on how we do design at HubSpot. Topics covered: what HubSpot software actually does, the tools we use to design, the critical elements of our workplace, and what the HubSpot offices look like. In talking with the Invision folks I found out that their interview series […]

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If you haven’t yet read Mills Baker’s recent post Designer Duds: Losing our seat at the table, you should. Mills makes some excellent points, including this one that I regard as his thesis: “In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver results. Designers must also accept that if they don’t, they’re […]

Continue Reading: Design duds != business duds

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 […]

Continue Reading: Show growth

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 […]

Continue Reading: The attention economy has come true

Alan Klement has created a useful Jobs-to-be-done interview script that can help your team get started uncovering valuable information around product usage: A Script To Kickstart Your Jobs To Be Done Interviews Klement says: “The keystone of the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) philosophy is the customer interview. When you’re able to work with a […]

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Yesterday I wrote about how the design of the Weather.com illustrates the negative influence of advertisers on the site: the experience is degraded almost to the point of ridiculousness. Pages regularly have more than half of their real estate dedicated to linking to terrible, shallow content meant only to get clicks. Another, similar situation. Slate […]

Continue Reading: Paying to get rid of pagination on Slate.com? Really?

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 […]

Continue Reading: UI Analysis: Screen real estate on Weather.com homepage

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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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 […]

Continue Reading: Super normal product design