Salesforce.com has been a big part of my thinking over the past 7 years. They were one of the first SaaS B2B companies to get super big. (12,000+ employees) Additionally, they were one of the first B2B systems to have an app store and platform. I am a serious admirer of what they have accomplished. The…
We are tantalizingly close to having a car experience that is more akin to a train, bus or plane. We get in, we sit and read and when we arrive we get out. All we need is self-driving cars. I really want this world to exist, but there are many hurdles to work through. For…
In the corporate body, there are pressure points. These pressure points can yield disproportionate gain (or pain) throughout the enterprise. Corporate Acupuncture is the art of finding those pressure points and applying some UX love to generate big results. Sometimes, the pressure points are due to individuals. A great individual contributor can be leveraged on…
I was at an enterprise designer meetup last night. An interesting topic came up which was, “What are your enterprise design principles?” I thought I had collected quite a few over the years that have helped me design. Here they are with very short explanations. 1. Don’t move the cheese If a user knows how to…
I just finished reading Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz. (Author of the great book The Paradox of Choice. – not to be confused with The Wisdom of Crowds, also a great book.) Practical Wisdom is a decent book, but more importantly, it points the way to design our ideal civilization. The book points out how incentives are…
I need my phone to do about 2 things: Call Katie and Google Maps. I have a terrible sense of direction. When I was younger I would drive with paper maps. I would need to pull over every mile or so to make sure I was where I was supposed to be. The navigation feature…
I’ve been working on a new system for help articles at work. We decided to try a Confluence Wiki from Atlassian. I have to say, I have been pleasantly surprised by the excellent UX. They clearly have poured a decent amount of love into this thing. Here are some thoughts that come to mind: Mobile…
Yesterday, I showed my kids the meme of “planking”. Admittedly, this is a fairly dated meme, but they are young, so it’s new to them. Planking is a photo fad which involves lying face down with arms to the sides in unusual public spaces, photographing the scene and sharing the image online. In form, it bears striking resemblance…
My kid just broke his arm. He was on a skateboard for the first time. What could possibly go wrong? Well, he smacked onto the pavement and broke both big bones in his forearm. Luckily, he was only a block away and his brothers came and got me. I could see from 40 feet away.…
I’ve got alot of different kinds of computers in my house. A desktop from dell, a little Intel NUC, a Mac Mini, iPads, xBoxes, etc etc. I am not generally a Mac user, but I help my kid with his Mac Mini. He (11 yrs old) is a musician and plays drums and base guitar.…
I have been blogging for a long time. 17 Years, to be exact. In my blog posts, I will often link to an image or somewhere on the web. This is a terrible practice. Here is why: I just downloaded a wordpress plugin to find broken links in my posts. I have almost 600 broken…
I heard a phrase: People don’t buy shovels, they buy holes. It’s taken me a very long while to respond to this because it sounds so good. It rolls off the tongue and has an unexpected, logical quality. It seems right, doesn’t it. The only problem is that it is completely, utterly, 100% wrong. People…
An interesting thought experiment came up today. A company I know acquired another company for 8 figures. The purpose was Acqui-Hire. This is the practice of acquiring a company for the talent, not for the product. There were not alot of people in the company and the acquiring company immediately shut down the product. The…
I don’t need skype at work. So when my computer boots up, I right click on Skype and click “Quit” I was pretty clear of what I wanted, right? So why the heck does skype give me this window? Honestly, screw you skype! Stop bothering me. No other program does this. It’s annoying! As…