When I design, I get user feedback with a technique I call Beta Fish. I make designs and then show them to prospective customers. They give me feedback and help me understand the nuances of the use cases. I do this by powering up Gotomeeting and screen-sharing my designs. I usually…
In every design, you make choices that take you down a road. Sometimes those road leads to peril, other times to victory, usually both. There is no way to know what destiny existed in the other choices. I ask my self those questions all the time. “What if …” Some…
This is a rough outline of what a great music program would look like (to me). First some equipment required: Macbook Pro laptops Adapter to plug in instruments Microphones Electric guitars Bass guitars Accoustic Guitars Keyboards Electronic drum kit Small (15w) amps Posters of rock legends Ok, now for the…
Go into any high school and look at the Art and Music classes. In all of the art classes, they ask you to make original art. They ask you to paint, draw, sculpt and teach you how to use those mediums, but they do not ask you to copy existing…
HR departments are supposed to do a bunch of good things. However, I think they don’t quite work out that way most of the time. Which kind of HR do you have? The “Avoid Lawsuit” Department From misconduct and harassment to injuries and workers comp, this kind of HR almost…
I’ve been listening to Freakonomics Radio and Planet Money on my car ride to work. Economics is a fascinating subject. It has just as much to do with human psychology as UX Design. One segment was by some guys who fixed Brazil’s hyper-inflation by inventing a new kind of money. They…
Choosing Icons is sometimes tricky business. I chose all of the icons in Marketo since 2007. Here are a couple of stories that help explain. Marketo Icon Glossary The Smart Campaign Light BulbThe most important icon in Marketo was the Lightbulb. When I first designed the system, I was trying…
I just spent some time talking to a user about a design I made. I walked her through it and we started talking about the possibilities. The worst version of this exercise is when the user says, “I don’t know.” in response to questions. The best version of the exercise is…
I just updated my LinkedIn App. Previously, I had complained that it didn’t work in landscape mode. They “fixed” that. So now, if I rotate, this is what I get. Do you see what they did? They just took the layout and flipped it horizontally. In other apps, it redraws…
I believe that you shouldn’t design in the chronological order the user will use the product. In other words, you don’t need to design the login screen first. You can pick a point in the middle. I call it an “anchor point”. This point serves as one of the important…
A colleague once asked me why Craigslist had become so successful with such bad design. Craigslist is a complicated company without a ton of information online. It doesn’t employee many people and has made a good deal of money. On the surface, it looks ugly. However, it has been very popular. Fascinating…
Yesterday, I was staring at my screen trying to figure out how a user would create and manage the object I conceived. I wasn’t even staring at a blank canvas. I was staring at a hole, a nothing, an absence of something. It was my job to get rid of…
When designing something new, you have to choose what it looks like and how it acts. One designer said to me, “It should be timeless and classic.” I disagreed. If you are designing something new, it should be noteworthy and contemporary. One example is the iPhone. Pick up an original…
For the better part of the last ten years, I have seen the world through the eyes of a demand generation marketer. Starting with Kelly Abner and working through thousands of others, my point of view was how to help them create more leads and nurture them through a funnel.…