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Venture Hacks has a great interview with serial entrepreneur Eric Ries that discusses the value of launching a startup with the “minimum viable product”: basically, the absolute most barebones product you can launch with while still being able to appropriately gauge customer interest, to avoid the common pitfall of spending months developing an idea only to realize that no one cares.

In spite of the fact that parts of the interview sound like it was recorded at a high school basketball game, Eric provides some great insight, even suggesting at one point to “launch” an idea with just marketing materials and an ad campaign, and no backing product. Based on the clickthrough/conversion rate when customers move to subscribe or purchase your product or service, you can reasonably gauge how the idea might do.

There may be an argument to be made about potentially losing those individuals as sales, but you can ask their email, make up an excuse, or explain that things aren’t ready yet and thus limit your costs to just a simple ad campaign and marketing/informational site. If you’re presenting the idea as you will once it’s built, and no one is clicking through, it’s a good indication that you’re going to want to tweak the idea or that you’re headed down the wrong path.

The interview is split into two parts, and I’ve embedded the first part below.

What is the minimum viable product? (Part 1) | Venture Hacks
Opening Board Meetings (Part 2)

Tagged with: Business, Entrepreneur, features, ideas, launching, minimum viable products, startups, Venture Hacks

Posted in: Cool Stuff

Once again, Facebook has released a complete failure of a feature set or upgrade and been hit with such a strong backlash by their users (who, they assure us, are listened to even BEFORE launching such drivel) that they have had to backpedal to appease the masses. Facebook seems to have this bizarre mentality that shaking the etch-a-sketch and slapping the user in the face is a great way to spring new changes, regardless of the thoughts of their users or their preliminary feedback. Beacon, un-restricted Minifeed, new Facebook, new Facebook again, rape-and-pillage privacy policies—you would think someone over there would suggest that they NOT continue to learn these lessons the hard way, as one time of baptism by fire tends to be enough for most people.

With the exception of the penultimate “new Facebook”, they have had to rollback or significantly change tack from their initial position of “this is new and you’re going to like it,” forced  instead to listen to their users, post a mea culpa and attempt to save face with the global press and the blogosphere collectively rolling their eyes at each new foible. TechCrunch has an idiotic post about how when Facebook listens to their users, God kills a kitten for bowing to the masses and “designing by committee”. Robert Scoble backed this up with a misguided treatise about how Zuckerberg is on track to score billions from these changes and how they shouldn’t/wouldn’t start listening to their users. I call bullshit. Read More »

Tagged with: baptism by fire, design by committee, facebook, FriendFeed, google, interface design, Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Scoble, scobleizer, Social network, techcrunch, twitter

Posted in: Design, Rants

Developing a “web 2.0″ application brings with it a host of new challenges previously unfelt or easily ignored with older, single-page-load-per-action apps. The browser has evolved from a simple page renderer to an application platform that busily executes JavaScript and receives, parses, and displays loads of new data without ever leaving the page. Developers are now struck with the challenge of ensuring their applications manage memory properly and efficiently—your JavaScript can leak memory, killing the user experience on your site, but also impacting the user’s complete experience with their system across the board.

To date, it’s been a bit of a struggle to manage memory, since developers are essentially forced to rely on their operating system’s memory managers to even monitor the memory usage of their browser. Even then, testing can be frustrating, as Firefox, for instance, stores all tabs in the same process. Google Chrome is multi-threaded; each tab is its own process. Chrome also features its own built in task manager, so you can identify which page is using exactly how much memory, CPU, and bandwidth. Even at its most detailed, the stats available only show aggregate memory and virtual memory usage—these abstract figures make troubleshooting individual pieces of your code difficult to say the least.

The folks over at Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab are looking to change that by building a memory analysis tool that helps devs understand exactly how their application is using memory, and the behavior of the cycle (garbage) collector:

We plan on the initial implementation of this tool to be simple. For memory usage, we want to introduce the ability to visualize the current set of non-collectible JavaScript objects at any point in time (i.e., the heap) and give you the ability to understand why those objects aren’t collectible (i.e., trace any object to a GC root). For the cycle collector, we want to give you a way to understand when a collection starts and when it finishes and thus understand how long it took.

Ben Galbraith and the team are soliciting help and feedback, so if this is an issue you’ve had to deal with in the past, make sure you comment.

A New Memory Tool for the Web | Ben Galbraith’s Blog via Ajaxian

Tagged with: browsers, firefox, Google Chrome, javascript, memory usage, mozilla, Mozilla Foundation

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Development

Just eight short months ago, Facebook redesigned the home page for a logged in user. At the time, I bashed on the News Feed, as it made a poor use of whitespace and seemed haphazard and disheveled. Facebook took to repair and tighten the design down a good deal, and I grew to find it functional, informative, and useful.

Facebook began rolling out their new design two days ago, and it’s frankly simply terrible. The first thing you’ll notice about the Facebook redesign is that it looks a lot like a basic Twitter page. Facebook talks a lot about how this new layout helps show a “live stream of your social graph” and a lot of other nonsense that would seem completely applicable if they were switching from the new design to the old.

The reality is that they are angering their customers by making things difficult to find, dramatically altering the aesthetic and interface of the site, and in many people’s opinion, taking a dramatic step backwards in usability. My exposure to this nightmare of an interface began just today, but I get a distinct impression that it won’t grow on me like the last changes.

What don’t I like? Let’s take a look: Read More »

Tagged with: angry mob, change, facebook, Homepage, lists, news feed, twitter, usability

Posted in: Rants

Design firm Squidspot has published a very cool and useful Periodic Table of Typefaces. They’re grouped roughly by “family” and “class” groupings, and ranked roughly based on their popularity from several different font ranks, though they’re loosely grouped in order to enforce the aesthetics of the table.

This will be very useful for anyone trying to play the mind-numbingly difficult Deep Font Challenge game. My personal favorite is Frutiger, followed very closely by Myriad. (Naturally, I also love and respect Helvetica and all its gifts to the world—I mean, it’s the only typeface to have a documentary produced about it, and is listed, quite fittingly, as the Hydrogen of the table.)

Periodic Table of Typefaces | Behance
Deep Font Challenge | via iLT

Tagged with: cool, Design, fonts, frutiger, periodic table, typefaces, typography

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Design

If you’ve ever spotted a dip in your Twitter followers count and wondered which of your faithful disciples haven’t been quite so faithful, sign up for Qwitter. It’s mind-numbingly simple: enter your Twitter account name and your email address and you’re off to the races. Qwitter doesn’t need your Twitter password since the follower information is already available, so they just basically run a diff and see who you’ve managed to bore away, sending you an email with their name and the (potentially) offending last Tweet that convinced your follower to bail.

Qwitter

Tagged with: Qwitter, Social Networking, twitter, Web

Posted in: Cool Stuff

I finally bought a Barnes & Noble membership today. Despite almost always buying my books on the Amazon, (a site I much prefer referring to with the definite article “the” intact because it sounds cooler), I occasionally will pick one up from B&N if I really want a book that. day. I was buying $55 or so in books, with one being a bestseller which means 40% off, so I was looking at just over $10 off with a membership. $15 for a membership, sure, whatever.

In trying to link my new account from the store with an online account, it prompts for a security question. I select “mother’s middle name” since things like “what’s your favorite restaurant?” are ridiculously inane as I’ll almost *certainly* forget what I entered, which will promptly be followed by feelings of wanting to stab someone. And then I enter ma’s middle name: marie. Nevermind that the security answer is CaSe SeNsItIvE, (because, clearly, I should also be forced to remember if I proper-cased my answer) it goes ahead and tells me:

Great. Now Barnes & Noble is calling me a liar AND insulting my mother. Swimming performance there, kids. [Really, the error message reads as follows: Your Security Answer is not formatted properly. A Security Answer must be 6–15 characters long, spaces allowed. Remember that Security Answers are case sensitive (i.e., "Dickens" is not the same as "dickens").]

The moral of the story? Don’t enforce ridiculous limitations on a security question if the user’s correct answer might violate those limitations. And don’t insult your customer’s mothers. (CrunchGear blogged about this too, some two weeks ago.)

Tagged with: amazon, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, fail, liars, mothers, passwords, Security, security questions, user experience

Posted in: Design, Rants

I posted about the Designing Interactive usability blog a few months back. Josh Walsh at D-I has compiled a nice list of 50 tips to a user-friendly website that you should definitely check out.

I agree with almost all of them, like Clicking on the logo should take you to the home page—this has become a convention most people expect on a given site, along with highlighting your current location in the navigation bar. There are a few, however, that I might nitpick, such as always underline links, except some navigational cases (unless he means either on hover or the regular state; I note quietly that the links on his blog are text-decoration:none and only underline on hover).

Either way, it’s a great, quick read with some things to always keep in mind when building a website, so take a look and subscribe.

50 Tips to A User-Friendly Website | Designing Interactive

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Tagged with: Design, designing interactive, tips, ui, usability, user experience, user interface, ux

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Design

Our beloved web analytics tool Clicky blogged about a pretty crucial SEO & analytics issue today: Google is rolling people over to a new AJAX-powered search, that pushes query strings AFTER a hash mark. So: http://www.google.com/search?q=what’s+my+referrer becomes: http://www.google.com/#q=what’s+my+referrer

The problem with this is that browsers don’t send anything after the hash mark (this thing: #) in their referrer string, since they’re used for named anchors. Since analytic tools use the referrer string to parse search keywords, this breaks that functionality for anyone on the “new” Google. Nightmare. It’s as if they’re effectively “commenting out” the rest of the query string from the referrer string–dark pool, that. Learn more about the ramifications here after the jump.

Read More »

Tagged with: analytics, google, google analytics, keyword tracking, keywords, Query string, referrer, referrer string, search, sem, seo, web analytics

Posted in: Rants, Tech News

In my review of Filttr, I mentioned that Facebook features some comprehensive friend sorting and grouping tricks that Twitter sorely lacks. But the feature is only slightly obvious, so I’m going to show you an equally obvious quick tutorial on the quick way to get a reasonable Facebook feed of People You Actually Care About, and setting that as your home page, to differentiate from People You Met At That Party That One Time or That One Girl (or Guy) You Shouldn’t Have Hooked Up With Who Keeps Posting Creepy Profile Pictures Of Themselves But Blocking Them Would Only Make Things Worse.

This is really simple: When you first log into Facebook, click the down arrow next to Live Feed. Next to Friend List Feeds, click Edit Feed, click Make New List, name it something cool, and start typing the names of people you really care about. Easy. (You can also manage all of this from the Friends page, from the top nav.)

Now, if you access Facebook via a bookmark, or through the Bookmarks Toolbar, you can click on the same arrow, right click on the Friend Feed, and use that for your new bookmark.

To be fair, this feature has been around since August 2008. Disturbingly, they broke the permalink functionality about two months ago, which drove me absolutely insane because it happened to be about three weeks into having changed my primary bookmark to the Friend List Feed. Facebook Support told me that they knew it was an issue and that they were working to resolve it and it looks as if it’s finally been restored, so you can now make the first thing you see when you log into Facebook the feed of people you care about. Or your “Keeping My Enemies Closer” list. Whatever.

(Bonus: You can also use Friend Lists to send blanket messages to groups of friends. To do this, just start typing the Friend List name when composing a message.)

Tagged with: bookmarks, bookmarks toolbar, facebook, feeds, Friend List, Friends, How To, minifeed, tips, twitter

Posted in: How To