Author: mpullen

This is a beautiful explanation. Every time that I work with a new product manager or business owner I always explain that I ask a lot of questions. When we are working together, I am going to explore the constraints and boundaries of the problem. When I explain it that way they do not feel… Continue reading Innovation Is About Arguing

This article makes the case that with the increase in data, there is a greater need to make decisions on the data and therefore a need to better represent the information for human consumption and decision making. “Manually analyzing data is time consuming but is often done in order to maintain core business capacity, operational… Continue reading Big Data Analysis

The product design sprint: a five-day recipe for startups – Jake Knapp/Design Partner, Google Ventures http://www.designstaff.org/articles/product-design-sprint-2012-10-02.html Day 1: Understand Dig into the design problem through research, competitive review, and strategy exercises. Day 2: Diverge Rapidly develop as many solutions as possible. Day 3: Decide Choose the best ideas and hammer out a user story. Day… Continue reading The product design sprint

I was reading about and watching some Youtube videos about lean entrepreneurship. The ideas that were in there are not much different from what you encounter in some of the conversations about agile and lean software development. With each of these things there seems to be something missing. Because the whole idea of lean is… Continue reading Lean design for entrepreneurship

How do you handle the cyclical nature of design in your company? Every software company I have been in, the design projects are like a snake swallowing its food whole. One big project pushes through and then you just have to wait for it to digest. The projects come in the beginning of whatever cycle… Continue reading Cyclical nature of design in a software company

Help in many of the applications I use are pretty clunky and have not changed much in years. Jack Moffett posted 3 articles of what he learned from how complex games provide help. No one reads help – integrate your tutorial – make it so the user can learn the product as they are working… Continue reading Help

FF Chartwell Using OpenType features, simple strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The visualized data remains editable, allowing for hassle-free updates and styling.

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To 2. People Have Limitations 3. People Make Mistakes 4. Human Memory Is Complicated 5. People are Social 6. Attention 7. People Crave Information 8. Unconscious Processing 9. People Create Mental Models 10. Visual System http://uxmag.com/articles/the-psychologists-view-of-ux-design by Susan Weinschenk

Sometimes it takes so long in an enterprise software company to see the fruits of your work. Here is one case for me. Portfolio+ is the white label of the product I worked on here for the first year. My job was to clean up the navigations and make the product usable. At a minimum… Continue reading My work in the news

Shouldn’t all interactions be instantaneous? Why wait for the app to do what it wants. “give the Instagram user a feeling of responsiveness, even when someone’s phone is trapped on a lousy connection. Instagram Always Pretends To Work Loading Content Based On Importance, Not Order Anticipating The User’s Every Move” http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed

Even thought he was focusing on Google+ I thought the multiple ways of publishing using different services was useful. “I publish both a daily and a weekly email newsletter without doing anything. It just happens. Everything I write on Google+ is automatically posted on Twitter and Facebook, and it’s made available as an RSS feed.”… Continue reading Many ways of publishing

“This page presents an idea for exploring practical algebraic problems without using symbolic variables. I call this tool a “scrubbing calculator”, because you solve problems by interactively scrubbing over numbers until you’re happy with the results. Background: This work assumes a Soulver-like environment for interactive arithmetic, and picks up where Soulver leaves off. If you… Continue reading exploring practical algebraic problems without using symbolic variables

Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html?_r=2&ref=technology ” But Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganannounced their… Continue reading Online education

“When technology was inherently and unavoidably complex, it was forgivable that solutions weren’t elegant and simple. It was at one time understandable that finding and visiting a new doctor could take weeks, or searching for enterprise information wasn’t successful. But with a myriad of elegant and simple solutions entering the market, users are learning to… Continue reading On Simplicity

“Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and… Continue reading Solve problems: designer or MBA?

“TED-Ed’s new free platform allows anyone to “flip” any video on YouTube by adding custom content to play alongside it, making it possible to turn any piece of video content into a teachable moment.” http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679742/ted-eds-new-video-tool-allows-anyone-to-create-video-lessons-online

http://blog.intercom.io/criticism-and-two-way-streets/

Can crowdsourcing pick the best stocks or do they just tell you the most popular? It would be interesting to see some research on this? Some people find crowdsourcing very useful for getting their search results as an example. Just because many people like something, does it make it right or good? Is there wisdom… Continue reading Crowdsourced Financial Advisors

If your product makes your users feel stupid they will not want to use it. Ask them questions like “On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident do you feel using this system?” Get to the heart of things with your questions and you will no which way people lean on the usability of… Continue reading On Measuring Usability