Dear Company or Person That @Replies Me…
I might be in the minority here, but if you reply to something I said on Twitter because it triggered a key word search you’ve got going, chances are I’m not going to look at your product.
So, what will make me look at your product? If it’s awesome and one of my friends uses it and mentions it, I will look, and probably give it a shot. Make your thing great. Make it beautiful. Make it useful. Make it… well, awesome and people will talk about it. If you’re new to the scene, let your friends use it and—just like a shampoo commercial—they’ll tell their friends who will tell their friends who will tell me.
What will make me try your product? Make it easy. If your thing isn’t easy to try, then give me some great material to check out; a good blog, some well done videos, a screenshot or two. Just because it’s complex, doesn’t mean I don’t need it. So don’t hide behind that excuse. Show me. Invite me into your story. Make me understand how much I’m missing your awesome product.
David Desandro constructed a typeface called Curtis entirely out of CSS. It’s an interesting process, reminiscent somewhat of Fontstruct but entirely manual. Using the ‘Inspect’ view he provides, you can see the building blocks he used to create them. Really great stuff.
(Via coffeemakescreative)
Man, I’m just no where near nerdy enough for this.
Source: sneak
One of the problems with pageview billing is that it incentivizes publishers to distract you while reading.
Every time they distract you and get you to click on something else, they make money.
But if you’re simply reading their content, they make less.
So they take every possible opportunity to try to get you to read their stories, and then, once you try to do exactly that, they try to get you to abandon what you’re reading before you’ve gotten very far so you can go view something else before abandoning it and continuing the cycle.
You’re not readers to them. You’re “eyeballs”.
You’re not customers. You’re the product.
They really hate when you actually read their content. That’s what they’re communicating by distraction-oriented design: “We don’t respect you, and we’re trying to aggravate you as much as possible, but not quite enough that you’ll stop coming.”
Source: marco
Take the well-known example of the Toyota Prius. This hybrid car was not the result of user-centered innovation. Toyota started to design the Prius in 1994, when user-centered analysis and market data were pulling auto manufacturers in a different direction: toward heavy, gas-guzzling SUVs. The Prius was a proposal — a vision that came from a better understanding of the future evolution of the socio-cultural and economic scenario. Now, more than a decade after it was first launched, people like it, even if they did not ask for it when it was conceived. And thanks to its early start, Toyota is well ahead of its competitors.
Harvard Business Review: User-Centered Innovation Is Not Sustainable (via exmilitary)
This pretty much sums up why I’m skeptical about user-centered design and UX research: as the Prius example shows, as the recently re-circulated initial reactions to the iPod confirm, and as my early experience getting feedback on Birdfeed taught me personally, people generally only think in terms of what they know, so if you ask them what they want, they’ll tell you the same and more of it. I think that great products—the kind that change the world, the kind people truly love—usually have a strong, often counter-intuitive, point of view, so a methodology that relies too much on what people say they want, instead of trying anticipate what they don’t yet realize they want, seems like a poor way to invent the future.
(via buzzandersen)
Source: exmilitary
When a marketer presents us with a timely and valuable product or service we can really use we don’t think of it as marketing because we’re too busy enjoying the fruits of their labor. Similarly, the good work of UX professionals often goes unnoticed: great design is invisible to users because they’re too busy enjoying the good design to think much about it.
For too long, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence. And in the case of a book, that value is intrinsically connected with content…
…Of the books we do print — the books we make — they need rigor. They need to be books where the object is embraced as a canvas by designer, publisher and writer. This is the only way these books as physical objects will carry any meaning moving forward.
What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master? Maybe what they lose in market share in one area will be more than compensated for in another area. In a lot of markets, it’s gotten so bad out there that simply being usable is enough to make a product truly remarkable.”—Kathy Sierra
Eating in the dining room is the best…eating in the bathroom is…not such a good experience.
Source: 52weeksofux.com
