For the past few months, I have been using Balsamiq and loving it. It doesn’t have everything I want, but it has plenty and the design is charming. I am sketching designs very quickly and effectively. However, last week I had a new challenge. There were a series of sketches that strung together to form…
Since 1995, I have only read non-fiction. I am not suggesting that everyone do this. The non-fiction books I read fall into two categories: Biography/History and Science/Theory. Some bio/history books are fantastic, like Robert Caro’s books about Lyndon Johnson or Robert Moses. He is my favorite author with a ridiculously high Pulitzer prize average per…
I just finished Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. It was a very good read and I recommend it to anyone looking to understand how people think. The author is a behavior economist and scientist. Basically, that means he does tests to see how people act in the real world. For example: How much to people…
Last night, I finally had a chance to sit with a developer and try and style something inside of an Adobe Air application, using Flex 3. I have about 1 hour of that under my belt. Here is what I learned so far: Flex 3 is a mess for styling. In HTML, I feel like…
The other day, I needed to use a desktop sharing tool. For the last few years, I had a corporate version of Gotomeeting. It worked pretty well and even had a conference call number that worked most of the time. I wanted to find the same thing, but free, and without the conference call number.…
Yesterday, the topic of competitive analysis came up. I quickly Google’d the topic and realized that there was virtually nothing out there. I am shocked that there isn’t a SaaS product that crawls the web gathering competitive analysis into one spot. The UX would be pretty straight forward. In fact, I quickly (15 minutes) whipped…
One day, I want to build the best Product/Project/Task/Bug/Community Management software ever. But for now, I have to live in the real world. At Marketo, we used TargetProcess for bugs and mild product management. We used Helpstream for community and case management. At Adchemy, we use Jira for bugs and VersionOne for product/project management. There…
Metcalf’s Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. In English: The Internet with 10 people on it isn’t that valuable. Add a million people it’s much more valuable. Add a billion and things really kick off. Look at these…
Recently, I have seen a spike in the traffic to this blog. Google Analytics is a great free tool to monitor traffic. Just seeing the increasein traffic made me feel warm inside. Like the way a stage actor feels when they get a round of applause. It was a near doubling in overall traffic. I…
In a Muppet Mood, I guess. Still this is brilliant. I love Animal (about a minute in). Go Muppets!
Years ago, Alan Cooper pioneered the concept of personas, which are basically fictitious people who represent the customer. They are stand-ins that are used to create empathy for the real people. They are created by amalgamating different characteristics of potential customers into one pretend person. Personas are very useful for decision making, especially for the…
You have to hand it to Google. They innovate. They come out with stuff that is new and different. I like that about them. It makes me want to use and buy their products. Google Wave is a great example. What is Google Wave? I imagined the conversation when they pitched the idea. In my…
This is just unbelieveable. Look at this Gateway Netbook from Verizon. First of all, $99! Are you kidding me? That is ridiculously cheap. It’s got the same power as my EeePC that I bought for $350 and I carry with me all the time. Plus it’s lighter! Second, it comes with Verizon wireless built in. …
Katie lost her flip phone. We just upgraded it last month and we didn’t purchase the insurance. d’Oh! Some kid picked it up and started calling all his friends saying, “Dude! I just got a new phone, this is my new number!” Katie was disappointed in the lack of goodness in her fellow citizens. Ok,…