Industry News

There is a lot of speculation around the March 2019 core update that started on March 12th that it reversed what the Medic update did on August 1, 2018. While many sites did see gains after dropping from the August 1st update, many did not.

We all know the old enterprise software joke that “no one ever got fired for buying a Microsoft product”. But one of the important points in Auren Hoffman’s post on how Zoom is beating much larger competitors like Google Hangouts and Slack is that larger companies are not that unpleasantly predictable any more:

One of the biggest trends that is driving Zoom’s success is that companies are forgoing the full stack and buying the best-of-breed. The number of vendors the average company...

The March 2019 Google Core update that touched down on March 12th - we covered it before it was confirmed - is still very raw and fresh. So most of you know, when reading some of the early speculation and advice around this update - you need to be very skeptical. I just wanted to share what people are saying so you have it but be skeptical.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the Elezea Community about “Product Principles”. What they are for, when you need them, how they can be made more useful, etc. A couple examples given are Intercom’s set of guidelines for making decisions, Dan Ritz’s interface design values and my own company’s values.

The biggest challenge I see with principles like these is figuring out how to make them specific enough to help us make decisions. The further I get into reading Good Strategy,...

The first article I published on Elezea was called The dangers of “test and learn”. It was about A/B testing, it was badly written, and it went live on August 3rd, 2009. Since then I posted 1,238 links and articles on this site.

It’s ridiculous to think that Elezea is coming up on being 10 years old. It is not an exaggeration to say that it sparked most of my career development and helped me meet countless people who I would now consider friends. Starting this site was one of the best...

I am seeing plenty of signs from the SEO community, the tracking tools and so on that there was and is a Google algorithm update going on right now. It started on March 12th, yesterday and is continuing on today.

Google looks to be testing changing the ad label in their search results once again. The last time they changed it was in February 2017, when they went with a green outline ad label. This new test shows small black text labeled as "Ad" and that is it.

In The Value of Inconvenient Design Jesse Weaver discusses the role of user friction in design — the things that slow us down from getting a task done — and how the goal is not to remove all friction from our product flows:

The friction of the checkout process provides a check against impulse purchases and overspending. In a world where many people struggle to manage their money, these small barriers can be critical to maintaining financial balance. While the market would dictate that...

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall discuss some fascinating research about how people learn in their essay The Feedback Fallacy:

What findings such as these show us is, first, that learning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly. And second, that we...

My friend and colleague Garrett Dimon wrote about his experiences building and selling a product in his post Hindsight. He gives some advice based on what he learned. You might not agree with everything, but I think his perspective is really interesting and worth checking out. For example, on the balance between building product and doing marketing:

I don’t want to build an operational system to grow a business and then spend no time on the product. I want to design a company to build...