Industry News

There are two things everybody in business (say they) hate: email and meetings. So the past few years have seen a great many startups that try to re-invent, revolutionize, and strategerize the crap out of email and meetings. However, recently we seem to have come to a disappointing realization: email and meetings are the worst ways to get things done, except for all the other ways.

In Meet Is Murder Virginia Heffernan goes deep on the topic of meetings: why we hate them, what people have...

Ryan Schilling noticed Google showing a phone icon and phone number under some of the organic mobile search results. He posted a screen shot of it on Twitter. I was not able to replicate it on any of my devices...

The traditional way of building software focused on requirements, driven by a competitive view of the market, and responded to perceived needs with additional features and functions. Our new way of developing products focuses on people first: on spending lots of time with them in order to build an almost intuitive sense for their emotional journey. We design with that journey and those emotions in mind, and as a result, we can produce great products that people love.

—Jon Kolko,...

As you know, Google launched AMP in the mobile search results this week.

Back in December...

In late November/early December of 2015, I ran a survey of consultants and agencies asking deep questions about their structure, fees, employees, projects, and more. Thanks to responses from over 400 folks around the world, I’m able to share what I hope will be some of the most useful data from that project. Survey takers were primarily founders, owners, and presidents/CEOs of consultancies & agencies

To start, some brief disclaimers: All of the participants of the survey have been...

I worked with the wonderful folks at UXPin to write a short e-book on how to overcome some of the challenges of doing user research in large organizations. From the introduction:

Once a company grows over a certain size, the internal politics and number of people involved in every decision increase so much that it becomes virtually impossible to stay focused on fulfilling user needs and business goals. Instead, the focus turns inward to the opinions and whims of individuals inside the...

Google may be getting itself into hot water again with paid links. In 2012, Google Chrome was caught buying links and they ended up penalizing themselves for it...

I vividly remember the first usability test I attended. I was a brand new employee at eBay, and I walked into a dark observation room with no idea what to expect. I came out of that room 60 minutes later with the strangest mix of emotions—heartbroken that our product clearly had usability issues that made users incredibly frustrated, but also relieved and excited that we now had the information we needed to fix those issues. I became a usability testing convert for life, and have been making...

Daniel Zacarias’s Moving from Solutions to Problems is a must-read for all product managers, and anyone who’s involved in product prioritization. Daniel’s main thesis is that prioritizing problems results in much better products than prioritizing features—and I wholeheartedly agree with him. He addresses many issues with focusing on features, but the one that really resonated with me is that it’s much harder to prioritize features:

Products and features are versions of a solution to a...