When you can delete a friendship or start a call depending on a slip of a pixel…...

Continue reading "When are buttons too close?"

It gets your content up higher by default.  Those of you on UI design threads with me at Telligent know that pushing content down is a pet peeve of mine.

Continue reading "A small reason to like Chrome"

Your ROI may be based on new member registrations, but you can’t forget about treating your existing members better.  They are going to be your strongest advocates. 

Continue reading "Treat existing site members better than new ones"

This post highlights the tools you need to be a PM today in order to ideate & define the products & specifications you own.  If you need more than this you are doing it wrong.  The idea is to clearly communicate the goals & intent of your specifications well enough so that your development teams can start their own iterative cycles rapidly.

Continue reading "The only tools you need spec software in 2009"

There are plenty of good lessons to take away from the following deck by Randy Farmer . Context Is King: Lessons from Online Communities View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: communities incentive ) To me, a big one was that you can't cross the streams of content in feeds to the point...

Continue reading "Don't cross the streams in online communities"

One of the most thrilling aspects of purchasing the 3G iPhone was seeing the size of the power adaptor.  Seriously, having been a Zune/Blackjack user for the last year, it was a relief to find out that the adaptor was lighter & smaller than the actual device… by a large margin.  The design...

Continue reading "The power of functional style"

Here are two bits from the user registration process at Digg that makes them a little more human. and...

Continue reading "More Fun with Users... from Digg"

I don't know why, but lately I'm a sucker for things like this......

Continue reading "Smile"

Something that's never really discussed in the visual age is the voice of your product or Community.  Words are just as important as important as the visual design and layout.  The language of your product educates, informs, and sets the tone of the environment for the user. 

If your software sounds angry it might have an impact on the user perception.  On the flip side, every one of these e-mails has the potential to be an important customer touch... make it a good one.

I'll pick on ourselves for a moment to demonstrate.  The following message is received by a user of Community Server 2008 when they are rejected by a group owner for membership...

Continue reading "The voice of your product or community"

Don't tell my dev team's but today is the first day I've felt like I could catch my breath since taking on the challenge of building up a Program Manager foundation at Telligent. That means that it's a good time to talk about what I've been working on as a way of looking back and thinking about improvements...

Continue reading "Creating a New Breed of PMs at Telligent"