I use the concept of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (love that name) to attempt to describe how you should position your product and your customers. In the picture, you can see the different positions one could be in. A1 is when you are doing something easy and you have enough skill…
Lately, I have been really frustrated with Antivirus programs. The user experience is usually painful. I manage dozens of machines from friends and family and at work. I install antivirus all the time and have used alot of them over the years. Here is my rundown of the bad and…
The presentation last night went well. Very talkative bunch, but they asked good questions. I had a good time and hope they did too. My slides can be downloaded here as a PPTX or PDF versions. I don’t like putting them on Slideshare because they only support PPT, not PPTX.…
All weekend and yesterday (and today a little), I have been fighting off a cold of sorts. Haven’t eaten, slept most of the time, aches and pains. The worst thing is not being about to think clearly. It’s like driving in thick fog. You can do it, but it’s more…
I just couldn’t help myself. I had to install Windows 7 on the Netbook. I upgraded the ram from 1G to 2G for just $25 from Amazon. It took an hour or so to install. No upgrade is allowed from XP to 7, so I had to do a clean…
Jewish High Tech Community Ask my mom, I am not a good Jew. Not kosher, never go to temple, I celebrate Christmas (although we like to call it Winter Solstice), married a shiksa, kids will not have Bar Mitzvahs (great story) and disdain organized religon. However, I can honestly say that…
“Say hello to my little friend!” I just go my new netbook, the Asus EeePC 1000 HE. It is slightly heavier than I expected, but not too bad. The screen is 10″ and seems plenty big for what I need. Just to be clear on my purposes, I need something…
Marketo launched it’s Lead Management 3.0 product this weekend. It has been a long time coming (- been working on it for 4 months). The scope was pretty big. We refactored the entire UI from top to bottom. We improved usability in countless ways. The graphic design is polished and…
I have been getting more interested in Twitter, since Digsby makes it much easier to tweet. Coinciding with this interest, I have gotten more followers. Each one with a little email announcement. Many of these followers are wierd. By wierd, I mean that they have a strange pattern on their…
UX is all about human psychology. Here are some key truths. People are dillusional optimists. Whether it’s estimating how much work something will take, stock market speculation, gambling, or any other predictive test, people will always exaggerate their chances of success. It’s hard-wired into most of us. How many times…
I saw this image on Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood, which borrowed it from Thom Holwerda. on this page. I redrew the image using Balsamiq. Since, I saw it, I have been internally using this metric for a slew of other topics besides code. American Idol. For each contestant, I used…
We have been using MediaTemple for a while to host Marketo’s public website. They have a great design sense and cost twice as much as Bluehost, but we hoped that the added expense would mean better quality. Recently, we moved from their DV to GS services and got put on…
I love watching/analyzing people argue, including with myself. It is the key attribute of human civilization. We all have points of view and opinions. I have thought deeply about the key differences people have and how to deal with them. In the end, we all want to “win” the argument…
Lately, I have been itching to use a custom font for my headers. One of my unwritten rules of powerpoint presentations is to use an interesting font. Times New Roman and Arial are just saying to your audience, “I didn’t feel like taking 5 minutes to make this interesting on…