I recently spoke at the Content Strategy Forum in London about the importance of which words used in an interface. The difference between Facebook’s Like and Google’s +1 seems superficial, but ends up influencing the behaviour of the users. Choosing the words you use to define actions in an interface is the most important part of interface design. In “Getting Real” Jason Fried wrote that Copywriting is Interface Design, yet five years later copywriting is almost always where interfaces fall to pieces.
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I was 16 years old, working in a gas station and had just received my first bollocking from my manager. I was disgusted.
What do you mean “improve”? I charged him correctly, didn’t I?
My manager looked at me, disappointed…
Yes, Des, you charged him correctly. But a fucking vending machine does that! And they show up on time; they’re more accurate; I don’t pay them by the hour; and they’re never hungover. Your job is to do something that a vending machine can’t do. Your job is to make our customers happy; to give them a good experience; to bring them back here again. Get it?
Read this post at Smashing Magazine
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The Swiss army knife is a remarkable product. By combining many products of low utility, it becomes a product of some utility. One of the rare occasions where a core product is improved by bolting on mediocre features.
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Andy McMillan released the first issue of The Manual, aiming to take a fresh look at design on the web. Each issue includes essays from influential writers, designers, and developers both newly established and well known. What follows is my review of issue one.
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There have been many discussions about the state of online publishing. Andy Rutledge argues that digital news is broken. Oliver Reichenstin asks if we should offer “business class” news. Dustin Curtis points out how pathetic online offerings look beside their print equivalents. They’re all correct, and each post makes strong points. I just want to weigh on one final piece…
Why did we let web advertising get so fucking ugly?
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Gathering useful timely feedback is a challenge. One we’ve addressed quite well with Intercom. But when you get all that feedback, what do you do with it? Let’s face it, we’re all sick to death of receiving vague emails saying “Thanks, we’ll certainly consider this someday“, only to never hear anything again. I often wonder if app owners ever do anything with the feedback they get. Are they trying to improve their product with the survey , or is it just all just a façade to look busy.
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What follows is a brief extract from the book “The Secrets of Consulting” by Gerald M. Weinberg, a wonderful book on the do’s & don’ts of running a professional services company. The Orange Juice Test is a technique for letting you decide which consultants are worth hiring.
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User communication is hard. Especially at scale. Whenever we’re mailing a large user group, the anxiety in the office matches that of a labour ward. Nervous pacing, constant questioning. It’s the one time I consider taking up smoking. The worry isn’t that our users won’t like the message. The message is rarely bad news. The worry is that once we click Send there is no turning back. If six thousand people don’t understand what we mean when we say”We’re now transferring customers to our new plan.“, we’re gonna hear about it. Six. Thousand. Times.
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In 2007 I was sitting in the boardroom of one of Ireland’s renowned universities listening to a group of stakeholders fight over the label used on a web-form. One side thought the users called it an RFPN number while the other was adamant it was a “Prop Number”. The conversation grew increasingly heated, one side demanding we usability test both and the other pointing at me saying “We hired you to solve this sort of problem“. I snapped out of my daydream quickly.
They watched horrified as I went to the corner of the room and started ringing professors, administrators, and researchers. After 10 phone calls, my research findings concluded that it didn’t matter what label we used. No one fills in that part of the form anymore. They didn’t even know what it was for.
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One of the really nice features of Intercom is that you can see the location and local time of your app’s users. We use their IP address to determine roughly where they are. To do this we use the free MaxMind dataset and accompanying geoip gem. From our experience the free dataset provides excellent results down to city level.
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