sa·cred cowAn idea, custom, or institution held, esp. unreasonably, to be above criticism. In UX circles, testing is above reproach. It is a self-evident good. Anyone who doesn’t test is a moron. Test early, test often, test even more, test all the time. Killing a sacred cow is a time-honored practice. It gives you the…
I am the first non-founder employee (2007) and head of user experience at Marketo. A few days ago, I had the pleasure of experiencing the Marketo IPO ceremony in NYC at Nasdaq. It was the first company I have ever worked at that went public. It’s rare and may be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for me. (Hopefully, I…
I really love Discover. They are always so nice to me on the phone. They have real people answer and they don’t try to sell me anything. There is a cashback bonus that goes directly into a credit in Amazon. I love it. Yesterday, I received my new card. See image above. One reaction: WTF?…
I recently was handed a special business card. The woman actually spread out a deck of cards with about half a dozen different styles. (Imagine she said “Pick a card, any card!” like a magician). They had all different images on the back, all original illustrations. She had them in 2 card stocks. One was…
I think my reading comprehension must be pretty bad. It would explain why I always Use PowerPoint with few words in presentations Write with fewer words on websites. Ignore long emails OK, I have to explain that last one. I don’t ignore it completely. When I see a long email, I immediately get up and…
I have been an avid user of Google Reader for years. I was stunned by Google’s announcement that they would shut the service down. Literally, I check it and read 10-20 times a day. I don’t like my news getting stale. But they are discontinuing it, so I needed to find a replacement. First, I…
I used to LOVE April fools day. It was a chance to make gullible people believe the craziest things. Pranks and humor is a time-honored part of the start-up world. Creative people love this “no holds barred” day of fun. My favorite prank was on my father after my third child was born. I told…
Today, I counted 9 unmatched socks. That’s 9 worthless socks. The problem is a UX one. They all look different. Because they all look different, if I lose one of the pair, I can’t match it up with another “same” sock. I appreciate socks that are colorful and let me express myself, but I also…
Very often, a market can be disrupted by a single UX improvement. That improvement may not be easy to accomplish, but when you do it, you often can build a significant company. Some examples: CRM Seibel was the dominant player in Sales Management. Salesforce.com comes along and says, “It’s in the cloud, not on premise”.…
I look at websites alot. People I am recruiting, companies I interact with, even just for professional curiosity. One of the key things I look at is the text. I look to see if the text is written for web readers or for someone else. My guideline is to make the text simple, sparse, to…
Recently Google “upgraded” their user interface for Google Images. I use Google Images ALL THE TIME. I am big on presentations with large graphics and I find their service invaluable. There is one spot, however, that is annoying me to no end since their “upgrade”. (Heavy use of air quotes and sarcasm there) Search for something…
On my design team, the main work product is PowerPoint storyboards. We deliver these files to Engineering. In a nutshell they include: Size of the PowerPoint depends on the complexity of the feature: The Good PartsI haven’t seen other people use this methodology, but it really gives a very clear way to describe the feature. It’s…
I originally typed my HTML in Notepad on my 75 MHz Windows 95 desktop. It wasn’t very helpful, but then again, HTML wasn’t that sophisticated at the time. This was in 1995. Very shortly after that, I discovered Homesite, a program by Nick Bradbury. Homesite was better than anything else and stayed that way for a long…
I like Microsoft’s new service SkyDrive. It’s like Google Apps and Google Drive. Inexpensive, tightly integrated with MS Office 2013. All-in-all, very satisfactory. However, I have one gripe. In the Word web app, it doesn’t autosave. The Excel one autosaves. The PowerPoint and One Note apps autosave. Even the Excel Survey app autosaves. Why the…