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 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

Nice article by Aubrey Johnson: Hollow Icons on why hollow icons are just more work for people. This is yet another reason why the iOS7/flat design style just isn’t fully baked; removing too much affordance requires more cognitive load on the user. His thesis: “Don’t follow bad design decisions to appease a platform.” Obviously nobody […]

Continue Reading: Hollow icons = cognitive load

Great post by Christina Wodtke on change: User don’t hate change. They hate you. The first point is critical: user’s don’t hate change. This knee-jerk explanation is almost always wrong. What people don’t like is to have to re-learn something they already knew. They don’t like starting over. They don’t like being forced to change […]

Continue Reading: Designing for change is about keeping users in control

I thought I was the only one who thought about user requirements like this…a nice insightful piece by Alan Klement: Replacing The User Story With The Job Story. Alan points out that with user stories it’s not as clear a connection between what someone wants to do (their goal) and the task they’re doing to […]

Continue Reading: User Story vs. Job Story

Fred Wilson, on reading the Steve Jobs biography and observing how Jobs brought product focus to Apple: “(Jobs) brought focus to the product line, and thus everything else. There’s this great scene in the book where Jobs draws a classic four quadrant chart, consumer and pro on one axis, desktop and laptop on the other. […]

Continue Reading: Finding Focus

Great post on Serious Pony about cognitive resources: Your app makes me fat. This post retells the story of feature bloat in terms of the cognitive effort it forces upon the people who use our design. As we add more features, we add additional friction to the user’s day, and not just while they’re using […]

Continue Reading: Can an app makes you fat?

Great post by Ryan Singer: Vital elements of the product design process. He outlines a simple way to think about the pieces of a product: the job it does, the design patterns you use, and the resulting product concept. Lots to like in this article, including this gem of an analogy: “When the job isn’t […]

Continue Reading: Singer’s vital elements of product design

A nice piece by Chris Dixon on why ideas matter…they are part of a plan. “In response to this pop culture misconception, it has become popular in the startup community to say things like “execution is everything” and “ideas don’t matter”. But the reality is that ideas do matter, just not in the narrow sense […]

Continue Reading: Get the idea?