Industry News

Some interesting perspectives from Dharmesh Shah in Why Your Startup Should Ignore Your Onboarding Experience (For Now):

Great user onboarding makes users say, “WOW, this is awesome,” and recognize that your product is a must have experience. But these WOW moments don’t come easy. And the mechanics by which you onboard users is just a small part of whether or not they fall in love with your product.

The more substantial part of the equation is the value your product delivers...

David Travis has a good overview of collecting and analyzing usability testing data in How to record and analyze user research observations. This definition of an observation is particularly important:

Here’s the golden rule: an observation is a record of something you see or hear. Novice researchers often treat their opinions on what they like or dislike as observations. But your opinions aren’t observations — and neither are suggestions for new features or insights on how to fix...

Google is constantly testing different user interfaces, and as I covered yesterday at Search Engine Land based on a tip from Abramov in Almaty City, Kazakhstan - Google is testing a new mobile UI...

Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, is continuing to grow. The company has announced that 70 additional apps have been added, including those from Zipcar, Spotify, ABC News and restaurant bill payment through OpenTable.

Google shared the news in a blog post today. Examples of how all the new cards, as well as old ones, can be found on the Google Now site here. Below, a few highlights of the new apps. Return Your Zipcar!

Here’s how a Zipcar reservation card might appear, to...

Good thoughts from Martin Eriksson on how the PM is not The Boss. From Product Management is a Team Sport:

The bottom line is that everyone in the company owns the product, and its success or failure lie in the hands of everyone who touches it. A product manager’s job is to lead the team to tackle the product challenges together, to get the best out of everyone on the team when building the product, and to provide a gentle hand to keep it all consistent and going in the right direction.

So it is officially one week since the official launch date of the Google mobile friendly update.

I personally saw it go live but like I said, it was bouncing around and I saw it, it went away, saw it again...

Matt Cutts, the currently on leave head of Google's search spam team, posted on Google+ last night about a rosebush he planted a few years ago with his wife in his yard. He said it is the Yahoo rosebush...

Over the weekend, I've been getting lots of questions from webmasters if I noticed a Google update starting late Friday into Saturday and Sunday. Truth is, yea, there is higher than normal webmaster chatter around changes in the desktop search results...

Last Tuesday, Google altered the ranking of its mobile search results to favor sites that were mobile friendly. Since then, we’ve been waiting to see if “Mobilegeddon” really would have a big impact. For many sites, it appears not. But we do now have a preliminary list of “winners and losers” from the change for some sites.

The data comes from Searchmetrics, which regularly tracks a huge number of search terms and how individual companies rank for these. To figure out who “won” and “lost”...