Posts filed under “Product”
Google's Ad Targeting Quality is Damned Impressive
I noticed the ad below in Gmail today. This may seem unremarkable until I tell you that my office is on Eastlake Avenue in Seattle. Wow. From Google’s perspective, the best part of this is that because the ad in unobtrusive and relevant, it’s actually a positive experience for me. download the new rabbit hole [...]
Search Shortcuts in Yahoo Mail
I noticed a small menu called “Search Shortcuts” in Yahoo Mail a couple of days ago. This is a great example of a simple feature addition that has a huge payoff. alice in wonderland download People send photos around all the time and having one-click access to all photos in your email account is awesome. [...]
DecentURL.com is genius
This is definitely one of those ‘duh’ ideas. DecentURL was inspired by a reddit comment. Basically, take any URL, drop it in and you can create a pretty url that redirects to it. monsters HD stream part 1 So you can replace the following: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=2722+Eastlake+Ave+E,+Seattle,+WA+98102&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=41.682395,75.146484&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr&om=1 With: http://decenturl.com/maps.google/google-maps-jb-office Awesome.
Don't Lead Users Down Dead Ends
I mentioned in an earlier post about how Kayak provided alternatives for people who clicked off their site and then came back without finding what they were looking for. This is great in my opinion but shouldn’t be limited to off-site actions. Within your site, users should never hit a dead end. This means, for [...]
Great Posts about Comparison Shopping Engines (via Probargainhunter.com)
There are two great posts at Probargainhunter about comparison shopping engines which have great information about what users experience at the top sites. Highly recommended for anyone interested in this area of online shopping. Tips for smart price comparison shopping Price Comparison Engines – Small Fish, Big Fish the full black swan movie
How to make your site better
The best way to figure out what works and doesn’t work in your product is to watch a member of your target audience using it. Prior to our recent release we conducted a number of simple focus groups at Judy’s Book where we had people come into the office for individual 30 minute sessions with [...]
Randomness in your product (via Creating Passionate Users)
Kathy Sierra’s post on putting some randomness in your product is a great one. I think she hits on some great ideas about putting something unexpected in the product to delight users while still striving to create a product that is largely predictable and therefore allows the user to focus on their task and not [...]
Kill Features You're Not Improving
If there’s a feature on your site that’s not constantly improving, you need to bury it. This is really hard to do because current users of the feature don’t want you to take it away and internally, you’ve probably got a lot invested in it. Common things that come up: “What about people who are [...]
Functional Specs Matter
As part of the feature definition process, I’ve been focused on writing quick functional specs with wireframes and data requirements to facilitate discussions with developers and our tester on what we’re trying to accomplish from a product perspective. This process is proving to be extremely valuable, even in a quasi-Agile, get something up quickly and [...]
Right Click Preview in Gmail
If you’re using the Better Gmail extension in Firefox, you can get a right-click message preview in Firefox. The goal of enabling users to scan messages without unnecessary clicks is a noble one, but I don’t think it¬† should come at the cost of the expected right button behavior. I think a mouseover preview would [...]