Category Archives: blog

sxswi: stop listening to your customers

[ SXSW Bios ] #stopling @trammell @boltron Brief A common assumption among startup entrepreneurs is that listening to potential customers is the best way to find out whether your product or idea will succeed in the market. Honestly — don’t bother. In our ten years of user experience research for startups and big companies alike, …

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it’s not my job — the ultimate content strategy smackdown

Panel [SXSW Bios] #notmyjob, #notmyjob2 @halvorson @james_mathewson @evany @nathanacurtis @lwelchman Brief OK. So let’s say your business has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog (or lots of blogs), an email newsletter, some SEO stuff, and eighty bajillion landing pages you forgot about back when it was still funny to rick-roll someone. …

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programming and minimalism — lesson from orwell and the clash

[SXSW Bio] @jondahl Brief Programming is writing. A programmer’s job is to express abstract ideas in a specific language – just like the poet, the essayist, and the composer. But while writers and composers spend years improving their style, many programmers think style stops with “two-space indentation”. This needs to change. This presentation will discuss …

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In reply: “how to sell [web redesign] to senior management?”

I recently began working as managing director of the web department for an institution in dire need of a web overhaul. The institution is made up of about 20 colleges. Their sites – from the main website that serves as a gateway to the individual colleges sites – all need to be (re)designed and the …

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Surprise Value

Lack of a content strategy usually leads to stale content, unnecessary, useless, or uninteresting content. No one has been charged with its planning, care and feeding early in the process (only its generation right before launch). Information is separated from redundancy and noise due to its inherent “surprise value”. Richard Dawkins discusses the economics of …

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i can’t have a tablet for $500 (yet).

So the iPad is a large-format iPod Touch when people thought Apple would be entering the tablet market the same way everyone else has entered that market: re-working an operating system to a touch/large-format interface. People were expecting Mac OS X on a touch screen. Instead, Apple decided to expand the featureset of the mobile …

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an open letter to the wonderful developers at Delicious Monster

In July of 2009, Amazon.com demanded that Apple remove a new iPhone app from the makers of Delicious Library, an excellent Mac desktop application for managing your personal library. I grovel and beg… I mean, I outline some ideas for the way Delicious Monster could have their cake and eat it, too.