Design
-
Seven Types of Customer Experience Failure
•
1 min read
If you want a quick summary of my “Why We Fail” book in the form of two AI-generated voices discussing the seven main types of customer experience failure, then this podcast episode is for you.
-
Star Trek Is Now A Design Lesson
•
3 min read
This recent Klarna story is fascinating: The fintech firm Klarna is severing its relationships with two of the biggest enterprise software providers in favor of automating its services with AI. And the company says it could potentially eliminate more. Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently explained the rationale in a conference call, the financial…
-
Passwords Are Now Outdated
•
1 min read
There’s a lot to be said about how to secure our online information while providing a good experience; hasn’t anyone written this book yet? In any case, I think a good, uncommon, guideline would be: Do not use human memory To remember and recall takes work, and I’d rather not expend my precious attention and…
-
My Critique of the RGT Start Up Sound
•
1 min read
In this video I listen to the sound as it’s used in real life, talk about what the sound is intended to accomplish, and then give it a sound score. And then I try to improve on it. RGT is a great, freemium service that’s fun for cycling indoors. It connects to your bike and…
-
Track Buying Not Spending
•
2 min read
When I designed software for personal finance, I thought a lot about helping people simplify and understand their cash flow. One method I created is an exceedingly simple way to track spending on projects that my wife and I have been using for years. Most people track their money by tracking their spending. On the…
-
In the field of user experience design, we research users and often talk about the user pain points we’ve observed. When I use pain here I don’t mean inconveniences, as when I can’t find just the right streaming music playlist to match my mood. I mean tasks that emotionally hurt, such as knowing you need…
-
This Blog is Almost Old Enough to Drink in America
•
1 min read
Recently the web turned 30 years old, and I realized that this blog was started almost exactly 10 years after the web, making it 20 years old this month. And maybe that makes it a good time to start blogging again? Not really. Although I am losing faith in Medium and Facebook as places to…
-
Another book?
•
2 min read
I was talking with some folks the other night, one had written three books, another five. “It’s like having a baby,” they said, “it hurts so much you swear you won’t do it again, but you forget the pain.” I can proudly declare I stopped after one book. But but… there’s all these books that…
-
I just wrote up some of the lessons we learned building a prototype of a personal financial planning service: What Do Consumers Really Want From Financial Planning?
-
What’s Next for Digital Product Design?
•
1 min read
Working in the fast-changing world of digital product design, there’s always some new and exciting tools and techniques to learn. The flip side of this coin is that you must keep learning to keep up with the industry or your skills become irrelevant. So naturally it would be helpful to know how our practice will…
-
Designing Faster
•
2 min read
I’m at an inflection point in my career of building digital services and reflecting on two things: How can we design better? How can we design faster? While the thoughts are still in flux I’m going to set them down here and stew on them a bit. A Cadance is a cycle like a sprint,…
-
Here’s a chord chart for instruments that have three strings tuned D-A-D like the Seagull Merlin, Grand Strumstick, & DAD Dulcimers. Also known as key of D, or diatonic D. I had a few goals when designing this: Correct chord names Include chords in the root position (root note as the lowest note) and inversions…
-
It’s a brave new world of auto loans out there with many customer-friendly features that traditional banks lack. Some of the new student loan companies for example will pause your payments if you’re out of work. How nice is that? So when I was researching loans for a used car we wanted to buy, I…
-
Drugs I Like
•
1 min read
I like how this School of Life video reframes what a drug is and encourages us to embrace the drugs that make our life better. And that got me thinking about which drugs I enjoy. When I was younger I liked some which for several reasons we won’t mention. My needs are tamer now, I…
-
In my continued quest to simplify my life and reduce expenses, I discovered the MVNOs like Ting and Consumer Cellular that lease infrastructure from the big carriers have come of age. They have straightforward pricing plans that are a fraction of the cost, better designed websites, and better customer service as reported by Consumer Reports.…