Industry News

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...

Numerous studies have found that every dollar spent on UX brings in between $2 and $100 dollars in return. Forrester revealed that ‘implementing a focus on customers’ experience increases their willingness to pay by 14.4 %, reduces their reluctance to switch brands by 15.8 %, and boosts their likelihood to recommend your product by 16.6 %’.

–Chloe Green, The business of user experience: how good UX directly impacts on company performance.

I am now seeing reports around the web that Google AMP, the web page speed initiative backed by Google, is now live in the Google mobile search results. It was expected to go live any time now but AdAge reported that it would be tomorrow. I guess it is going live today...

Horace Dediu has a characteristically astute analysis of Apple’s business model in Priorities in a time of plenty. The parts I’m particularly interested in is where he discusses how Apple prioritizes their product roadmap:

Conventionally, product development is filtered through a sieve of metrics, market sizing and impact on top/bottom income lines. These “financial” measures of success are considered prudent and optimized for return on equity (also known as the maximization of...

Cliff Kuang wrote an excellent article on Microsoft’s push for more inclusive design. From Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking:

Dubbed inclusive design, it begins with studying overlooked communities, ranging from dyslexics to the deaf. By learning about how they adapt to their world, the hope is that you can actually build better new products for everyone else.

What’s more, by finding more analogues between tribes of people outside the mainstream and...

Google has been testing four AdWords ads since 2006 and recently stepped up those tests in late 2015. Now, according to Search Engine Land...