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Business Strategy is Simpler than You Think
Strategy isn’t complicated: define your aspiration, where to play, and how to win. Simplicity is key—brilliant strategies are often the simplest.
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Living in the Golden Age of Prototyping
Critics complain that LLMs generate low quality code. Maybe true. But, today’s LLMs are excellent at building the simplest applications: prototypes.
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What a Ropes Course Taught Me About Leadership
Sometimes I think back on precisely how blessed I have been in my career. It started in picturesque Malibu, California, on a ropes course that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. Here, I’ll show you a picture: Beautiful, right? Anyway, I landed this job after a few summers of training under a guy named Michael. He taught…
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On Risk and UI Design
Most designers and businesspeople are reticent to stir the pot when they’ve got a good thing going. When you’ve got thousands or even tens of thousands of people visiting your site each day, why take the risk of making a potentially shocking change? It makes little sense, right? Well, that certainly makes sense if you’re…
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HCI Students’ Questions: Answered (Part 2)
Let’s take a crack at a few more questions from HCI students. I’m going to give a real thorough answer to one question, and knock out a few more with a simplified response. If you haven’t done so already, check out part 1 of this article. What are professionals & hiring managers looking for in…
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HCI Students’ Questions: Answered (Part 1)
This weekend I returned to my design roots and met a ton of Indiana University’s current HCI/d students. I was pleased to be a member of the Alumni panel and was impressed by the questions that the students asked. I was so impressed, in fact, that I think many of the questions they asked are…
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The contenteditable HTML Attribute
Who needs form fields? Now that we have the contenteditable attribute, any element can be editable. Here’s all you have to do to make a field editable: <div contenteditable>This is editable content. Go ahead, change it.</div> Which acts just like this area (click the text to edit it): This is editable content. Go ahead, change…
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Generate Loooooots of Ideas
Sometimes people think there’s one obvious answer to seemingly vexing design questions. Plain and simple: this is wrong. Your gut instinct might be telling you that there’s only one way to go about solving a problem, but this is an incorrect assumption. When you try, and I mean really try, you’ll find many answers to…
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The Best Feature: Fun
Sometimes, you just want something to feel right. On the site I help design, that often means adding a lighthearted aesthetic. Implementing this aesthetic comes down to the details. Check out the icon below, taken from Groupon, everybody’s favorite $1.35 billion website: Who the heck is that woman? And why is she the face of…
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Please, Stop Sending Purposeless Emails
This afternoon, I received what one would think is an innocuous email: However, there are so many glaring mistakes in this email, it’s hard to choose where to start. How about this, I’ll start with two simple questions: Who sent this email? Why was this email sent? The first question is relatively hard to answer.…