Posts in Making Things Special

There is a large market for business books. The shelves of your now closed local bookstore, and the virtual shelves of your thriving online bookstore are filled with these books. Invariably they all promise to tell you how to do something — create a successful business, hire the right people, get a great job, and […]

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression” or so they say. And when you’re designing a piece of software, this is certainly true. If you turn customers off of your product with a lousy first experience, it doesn’t matter how great the ongoing experience is as they’ll never have it. That […]

The hierarchies created in large organizations are like gravity. They are natural law. But just because you can’t have a large organization without some degree of hierarchy (and many of the resulting ills that come with it), doesn’t mean that all hierarchies are created the same way. In some ways, the most important thing you […]

Often we get tasked to help a company design a product that has an established (and successful) competitor. It’s hard not to want to deconstruct what the competitor does, copy all the things that make it successful, and then add your own “special sauce” to your version and hope for the best. Unfortunately, this strategy […]

The technology industry is filled with engineers. Logic and reason as the tools they love best. This makes sense. Programming is essentially a logical puzzle. However, when it comes to user experience, these tools are not always the right fit. When a piece of software isn’t performant, we measure it’s speed, its footprint, and make […]