I can barely remember now, but before the age of MapQuest (and, subsequently, Google Maps), if I needed to go somewhere I’d never been to before, I rarely planned my route. If, for example, I wanted to go to a furniture store in a suburb on the other side of town, my process went something…
‘h’ is for hypocrisy. If the premier selling point of a hybrid vehicle is fuel economy, then you have to wonder why Lexus won’t reveal how economic the 600h actually is. This information is nowhere on the Lexus website or in most of the 3rd party reviews. It took me some digging, but I did…
A couple of times in my career as a User Experience professional, I’ve worked for bosses whom I considered to be ridiculously (some even dangerously) incompetent. One recent boss would stroll in at 10 am and leave at 3 every day. Even during his limited hours, we rarely saw him, and I can’t remember him…
The guys at 37 Signals have a list of what they call “red flag” words that often come up in business communications and can get teams into trouble. Words like “only” and “can’t” (as in, it should only take you a day to add this feature, and we can’t ship the product without it) lead…
In my post yesterday, I questioned the value of “process” in web and software development and discussed my successes and failures both with and without it. The biggest problem with process is that it deludes people into thinking they have the fundamentals in place to guarantee a successful project. Process is too often a crutch…
UPDATE: There’s a Part 2 now. When I started in the web development business about a decade ago, I worked at a small agency with a few smart people, and we were basically winging it. As the dotcom bubble expanded at a frenzied pace, we grew along with it, and inevitably we had a couple…
Starbucks To Begin Sinister ‘Phase Two’ Of Operation read the headline from The Onion. That was 2001, and Starbucks was heading for world domination. Seven years later, domination is accomplished, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The stock price has slumped badly, reflecting drops in both sales and general affection for the…
I read a lot of blogs, which I organize into a number of categories. One of those categories is marketing, which is a fruitful domain for bloggers. I thought I’d share the list of marketing blogs I find myself reading every day… Blog Maverick – The usually long-winded, sometimes incoherent, but always colorful musings and…
Today I ordered a book called Information Dashboard Design from Amazon.com – my latest in a series of work-related purchases. Of course, whenever you buy anything from Amazon, they generously suggest other books you might be interested in… Amazon seems to recognize that guys who habitually purchase books on information design and software engineering need…