Was privileged to hear user experience expert Jared Spool. Here’s the best of what he said: Best lessons Compared best and worst UX companies. The best had three characteristics: Shared vision of what the experience would be like in 5 years Everybody had spent at least 2 hours watching people use the product during the […]
A friend asked me for advice before conducting her first post-mortem. Here’s what I should have told her. All problems have the same root cause. When I state that cause, many of you will think I’m merely stating an obvious truism. But our inability to really accept this basic truth makes most problems much worse […]
Probably the biggest advantage of speaking at conferences is that it helps you establish stronger relationships with the other speakers. A side benefit this time was that Roger Dooley handed me his new book Brainfluence: 100 ways to persuade and convince consumers with neuromarketing. Some of the highlights: Time “wants” vs. “shoulds.” When most of […]
[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011] I happened to pick up my (nearly) 30-year-old copy of In Search of Excellence while preparing my PubCon presentation on High Quality UGC. A few points […]
Marissa Mayer led the user interface and web servers teams when she joined Google in 1999. Her titles have changed through the years, and have included Director of Consumer Products and finally Vice President of Search Products and User Experience; but essentially from 1999 through last week Marissa was responsible for product direction and decisions […]
In Bad Advice Yelled Loudly Is Still Bad Advice Lisa Barone took on Forrester and AdAge’s call for most businesses to wait before spending resources on FourSquare and its competitors: “I’m not going to lie, it seems absolutely ridiculous to me that anyone in this space would advise marketers take a “sit and wait” approach to […]
I was privileged to spend an evening at Google Haifa with: Yossi Matias, Head of Google’s Israel R&D center Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience Noam Nisan, Google research scientist Some Googlers demonstrating some of their products (Sadly I didn’t catch their names — anybody who knows them, feel free to […]
Ironic that immediately after David Brooks’ column criticizing the Tea Party movement for being too radical, Brooks publishes a column criticizing politicians’ lack of passion and commitment for fiscal responsibility: “To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we […]
Recent reports of quality content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The importance of quality content is going to increase, not decrease. If Answers.com (where I work) and Demand Media succeed, it will be because we succeeded in following Wikipedia’s model and creating high quality content that matches what users are looking for. What content does […]
Fantastic post today by Joel Spolsky Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? I could feel Joel’s pain. Essentially he was jettisoning the basic premises that had guided him for a decade. Joel came to the painful conclusion that there was only room for one big company in his market, and that if he continued only […]