There are three main models for selling software. You can hire a direct sales force. You can spend a lot on marketing and advertising. You can let your users sell the software for you, a technique commonly known as viral marketing. There’s a catch with viral marketing – users have to like your software.
Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-01-06]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Bad Usability Calendar From Netlife Research
What a great way to demonstrate 12 key usability concepts – creating a calendar where each concept is demonstrated. You’ve heard the saying – “If you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning.” Here is that saying manifested in calendar form.
Flesh Out Those Wireframes
Stephen Turbek, at Boxes and Arrows, tells us how to get better results from our wireframes. Wireframe prototyping can provide feedback early in the design cycle, reducing costs and improving the quality of the final software. By putting a little flesh on the bone, we can get even better results.
Foundation Series: User Experience Disciplines
UX, pronounced you-ex, is the shorthand for user-experience. It represents the science and art of tailoring the experience that users have with a product – in our case, software. UX is a relatively new term, rapidly overtaking HCI (human-computer interface) and CHI (computer-human interface) as the acronym du jour. There are several disciplines within this field, we’ll introduce each of them.
This Software Sucks! – Say Users
You need to read Scott Berkun’s Essay # 46 – Why software sucks (and what to do about it). His content is great, his style is easy and fun, and he has good insights. If his other essays are this good, he goes in the same bucket as Joel Spoelsky and Paul Graham for us. As Berkun points out, we don’t set out to write bad software. Here’s how we can avoid some of the different mistakes.
Top five usability blunders (and fixes)
Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold. Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users. Interrupt the […]
Getting Past The ‘Suck Threshold’
Kathy Sierra writes a great post in her blog, Creating Passionate Users, that talks about the requirement to make things interesting. The driving objective is to accelerate the user adoption curve – which Kathy calls the Kick Ass Curve. Any user is initially forced to focus on the tool, and […]