Design
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Are Amazon’s Drones Crazy or Awesome?
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2 min read
Rosenfeld Media asked me my opinion of Amazon’s idea to use drones to deliver packages. Here’s a short excerpt from the interview: Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, the man knows how to touch off a media storm. Which is precisely what ensued after Bezos told 60 Minutes that Amazon is testing the use…
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My book, Why We Fail, is out!
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1 min read
This blog has been quiet for so long because I’ve been working on my first book, and it’s finally published. Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures is about websites and consumer electronics that were successfully launched and hailed as great designs, but failed unexpectedly when people used them, plus my attempt to explain…
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The Skinny on Life Insurance
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2 min read
As I work on Nickel I realize that normal people don’t understand life insurance. It’s so important to protect our families from financial problems and yet frustratingly difficult to understand. So I tried setting down in as few words as possible the process of getting basic coverage. Here’s my first draft: Life insurance pays your…
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In another case of it’s the experience not the design, Consumer Reports found that BMW and Harley Davidson motorcycles were three times more likely have have serious mechanical problems versus a Japanese brand, but their owners were more likely to buy that brand again. On the other side of the coin though, when asked whether…
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Uncertainty, Argh!
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2 min read
I just heard a talk at Lean Startup Machine NYC by Jonathan Fields, author of the book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance. It was only about 20 minutes but had maybe the highest useful content density of any talk I’ve ever heard. Here’s a few notes: A startup at the beginning…
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“…cause failure really, really sucks.”
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1 min read
Diane Loviglio, FailCon’s Associate Producer, interviewed me for the FailCon blog. We chatted about why it’s a good time to learn from customer experience failures, how one company recovered from failure, and my advice for startup founders.
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Ray Dalio: High Performance by Avoiding Failure
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1 min read
John Cassidy penned a powerful piece for the current issue of the New Yorker titled, Mastering the Machine: How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund. Part of Dalio’s success in creating massive financial returns while controlling risk stems from his financial wisdom, but the success of his 1000-person organization that runs…
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What We Know About Failure So Far
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1 min read
I’m in the research phase of my book on customer experience product failures and I’m pleased to find several books on failure that will inform my work. I’m collecting them in a list on UX Zeitgeist: Oh Noes! Books About Failure. I’ll be adding reviews of each book I read. So far, Being Wrong is…
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I’m Working on a Book Titled “Why We Fail”
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1 min read
…Real Stories and Practical Lessons from Experience Design Failures“. Learn more at the book site.
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My Product as an Equation
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1 min read
One of the most important things I learned when becoming a product manager was being able to see my product as an equation. In the startup phase it’s easy, there’s just costs and they’re often tangible: people, hardware, software. Then you add marketing in various forms each with a different cost/revenue profile, then revenue streams…
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Another Readability Business Model
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3 min read
I’m a huge fan of the ‘old’ Readability — I hit a button which sucks out the content of a web page into a nicely formatted view, then I usually hit the Evernote button to save it for reading on my Macs or iPhone. The Readability folks recently amp’d the feature into a business. They…
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A Universal Usability Test, Take 1
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2 min read
In one of the darker corners of my mind I imagine a future where there are a set of laws and industry standards that dictate the acceptable usability of digital products and services, much like medical or engineering standards. I have to think that as we grow increasingly reliant on computer technology for our safety…
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Twitter was a slow hunch
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4 min read
Part of my research into concept design is to look at where successful products and services came from. Today, it’s Twitter. Lately I’m also perusing Stephen Johnson’s thoughts on Where Do Good Ideas Come From. In this context it’s interesting to read here and here about Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s years of experience creating software…
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User Experience Areas Explained
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1 min read
Can these disciplines be explained in two sentences? Click for a larger version…
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After studying concept design for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that the single best thing designers can do to come up with better concepts is to do more of them. Generating more options increases the chances we’ll find better ideas. With that in mind, I perked up while reading What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?,…