While it’s easy to imagine negative reviews leading to lost sales, they more often lead to increased sales of good products and increased customer happiness resulting from helping people make smart decisions
Yesterday I presented a short, introductory talk called “7 Core Principles of Social Design” at the Voices that Matter Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. One [...]

Continue Reading: Why You Shouldn’t be Afraid of Customer Reviews

The mere threat of social interaction changes our behavior…if you know your work is going to be put on public display, you’ll be much more motivated to make it good.
There is a moment in every blogger’s life when they realize that yes, other people are going to read what they have to say. Perhaps they [...]

Continue Reading: Learning 2.0: The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction

Well, if you’ve never run across one of the wonderful lists of Smashing Magazine, here’s your chance to not only check them out but also win a book in the process.
Smashing Magazine is holding a books giveaway that includes the following titles:

Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke
Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web [...]

Continue Reading: Free Books: Smashing Magazine Books Giveaway

In September, I’ll be speaking at the dConstruct Conference in Brighton, England. The conference is billed as the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.

Last year, dConstruct sold out in 6 hours!
Several reasons why I’m excited:

The topic is social. For Bokardoans, you’ll know that this [...]

Continue Reading: Speaking at 2008 d.Construct

It’s happening slowly, but surely. Design is becoming news.
Take the example of Facebook’s recently redesigned Profile pages. Huge news both for the users of the site as well as the developers Facebook is trying to court. The design decisions made in and around the profile are paramount to the future of Facebook, who is [...]

Continue Reading: The growing importance of Design

There is a lot of “social” talk these days, whether it’s social media, social marketing, or social design. Frankly, it’s hard to keep track of it all. When I get into a discussion with someone on one of these subjects, I rarely know where it will end up…are we talking about social interaction or something [...]

Continue Reading: A simple illustration of social design

Well, Designing for the Social Web has been out for about a month and I’m happy to report that the early reviews are positive. I can’t tell you how nervewracking it is to have a book out there…it’s such a mix of emotions generally…will they find it useful? Will they like it? Will they tell [...]

Continue Reading: Early reviews of Designing for the Social Web are in!

Over time, I’m having more and more conversations about the similarities between interface design and writing. Here’s a great quote from George Orwell, who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, that made me instantly think of interface design.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s [...]

Continue Reading: Interface design, writing, and sincerity

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