The whole world is a user interface

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Flickr Creative Commons - Omad

Lately I’ve been working with two very talented user interface designers.

The problem with hanging around UI/UX folks on a regular basis, is that everything starts to look like a user interface.

I really do mean everything.

Driving around my neighbourhood, I find myself thinking that a turning lane in a particular spot would really do wonders to streamline the browsing, um I mean driving experience.

Waiting in line at the grocery store, I see the need for additional whitespace to accomodate the users shopping carts at the front of the store. Oh and the cashiers could benefit from a longer grocery input field so that they’re not left waiting from the customers to unload their shopping carts.

The ergonomics crowd have understood this sort of thing for decades. Complex machinery – think car dashboards – go through this process all the time. Its really only starting to trickle down to other kinds of products and experiences now though. Many have noted that we’re entering a golden age of design. I just hope that whoever is responsible for our road system gets on board.

On Social Manners

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Flickr Creative Commons - Tracey Hunter

Until recently, Facebook was for friends, LinkedIn was for business networking, and Twitter was for yelling as loudly as possible, while covering your own ears.

Lately the lines have become blurred, particularly since Google Plus was launched.

Facebook now has highly business oriented functionality, some of it third party (various networking and job apps, pages, plus the ability to follow somebody without “friending” them).

Many third party websites have integrated tightly with one or more social platforms.

And there’s significant convergence between platforms (they’re all gradually introducing features that replicate what the other sites are doing).

The result is that the way in which I personally use these sites has changed, and sometimes has resulted in my doing things that just might be considered rude in other contexts. Continue reading →

Why Failure May Not Always Be Good

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Flickr Creative Commons - daveschappell

The startup community has lately been enamored with the concept of “fail often, fail fast”.

The underlying notion is that companies whose business models aren’t functioning properly should “pivot” as quickly as possible, in order to minimize the potential cost of failure. In doing so, they hopefully eventually establish a business model that is market tested (if things work right).

The issue is that “fail fast” is a business aphorism, and like all such statements, it doesn’t always apply, and even where it does, there are subtleties.

What I’ve been noticing lately with startups that I’ve been working with are some troubling problems that result from blind adherence to this concept: Continue reading →

Group Buy “Is It Worth It” Calculator

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Everyone has heard horror stories about companies selling a coupon on one of those group buy websites, and then having a huge stream of unprofitable business, resulting in a massive loss. On the flip side, many companies have had great success from coupon campaigns.

We’ve put together a calculator (opens in new window) to try and assist anyone considering a group coupon campaign. Feel free to play around with its parameters to get a feel for when a coupon would be profitable – or not.

There’s also a new tools page that links to this calculator, as well as the previous CPC/PPC one. We’re open to suggestions regarding other tools that may be useful to businesses.

Firefox Toolbars – Some Tips

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I’ve been working on a custom Firefox toolbar for a really cool project that I can’t talk about yet.

What I’ve been finding is that the quality of documentation for developers isn’t good, and is both inconsistent and frequently missing important details (or hasn’t been updated to reflect changes).

I’m going to post a few things I’ve learned over the past few days that took far more time to figure out than it should have. Hopefully somebody else will benefit from my wasted time. Continue reading →