While developing our new product Breezi, I don't think there has been a theme more common that struggling to make decisions without having visibility. Breezi is a product that has thousands of paying users. It's not the use cases that ... Continue reading

The UI that we design exists within the ecosystem of all the applications that people use everyday. By definition, a good UX happens when a user can figure out the critical action items without having to struggle. We have to remember ... Continue reading

Product development it really hard. Outsourcing product development is harder but it can be easy, if you pick the right people to work with and learn to let go. It's tough because you're putting your entire company at stake when you ... Continue reading

Let's start with... do enterprise clients care for "trying" products before they buy it? Yes. They do. They just don't know it's ok to act like that. We have lots of bad IBM-like examples of conducting business. Most people will make ... Continue reading

There are lots of ways for going about determining a good market. The critical part bout picking a good market isn't size. It's finding a market that is a good fit for you YOU. You defined as you + the product ... Continue reading

Today, I was reading a story on small farmers and the food industry on Slate.com when something was really bothering me. My internet was slow for some reason so I first got the story. A few seconds went by and ... Continue reading

You spend so much time getting your visitors to your page. The idea is to keep them there with this plugin. We developed the idea based on top of another plugin that opened to the side. We think this is ... Continue reading

This script was used on Crowdvoice.org as a way to guide first time visitors through the UI of the voice pages. We decided that we could use this same idea for most of our own upcoming projects and maybe you ... Continue reading

CrowdVoice is open sourced because it is a platform that can be used for anytime where the crowd-sourcing of news can be of value to an audience that is highly engaged on a particular topic. We're constantly working to improve ... Continue reading

Here is an idea for an application that we would like all publishers to adopt. Most of the features suggested would be best utilized when using the iPad or some kind of touch interface but it would still be functional ... Continue reading

Dear Publishers, Owning the experience should be the highest concern in the age of platforms such as facebook for publishers (not aggregators). For those of you who have failed to fully participate within the platforms that your users are active in, you ... Continue reading

The steps outlined below are meant for B2B organizations that use a sales force. Assumption: You've already narrowed down your list of marketing channels. If you haven't, do your homework first and then follow these steps. Step 1) Write down ... Continue reading

A topic that doesn't receive much attention is friction: the underlying variable that controls whether a user performs an action or not. Stop paying attention to pretty designs and start paying attention to metrics (you need to track flows, not ... Continue reading

We're just about 3 months away from releasing a new product that will allow service providers to manage their web presence and make more money online, and we want lots of feedback to make it the best product possible. We're ... Continue reading

I'm always suspect of events that promote "networking" as a highlight of the event. Don't get me wrong - I love meeting new people and starting relationships through networking, and I'm far from an introvert. In fact, building my list ... Continue reading

Hello Dotspots, The gist: Stop focusing on the FF extension -> provide the same functionality to Bloggers w/o the extension + let them expose DotSpots to their audience instantly. I've played around with your service quite a bit but stopped updating my ... Continue reading

Firefox has somewhere upwards of five thousand of addons that can do just about anything to make your browsing experience more enjoyable/productive/fun/whatever. The addons highlighted below are mostly for the technical aspects of web development and design, but be ... Continue reading

Generally, cross browser testing is a huge pain for all parties concerned, because of the variability involved in testing a website to ensure clean compatibility among innumerable browser and operating system configurations. Making a site IE6 compatible is every developer's ... Continue reading

The internet has an overwhelmingly large selection of applications that vary in utility, cost, usability, rate of upkeep, and compatibility, and it's cumbersome to navigate through all the options to find what's best for you.  The sheer number of results ... Continue reading

Since we've expanded our services and launched our new site, we've had a hard time explaining our full capabilities to our clients. We spent a great deal of time on our services page but we wanted to go a bit ... Continue reading

You can use UI to promote use or deter it. A great example of how limiting UI can lead to users getting lazier and not doing something that you don't want them to do.  In PayPal's case would be depositing ... Continue reading

Earlier this week I attended a great conference, FailCon, which solely focused on showcasing failure stories and advice on bouncing back from now successful web start-up founders. The likes of Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal; founder and CEO of Slide),  ... Continue reading

Building and maintaining your presence in social media, across multiple platforms, can take a lot of time and energy. You're likely struggling to stay on top of your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and YouTube profiles (and perhaps a host of ... Continue reading

If you're looking to build your community and increase the amount of quality content and dialog among users, you definitely want to have methods in place to cultivate a strong base of influencers. Similar to community managers, influencers are your ... Continue reading

Over the past several months, we've been hard at work on an application that leverages Twitter to both aggregate and deliver targeted data to thousands of users in real time. Throughout the day, data is scraped, parsed, and turned into ... Continue reading

The retail industry on a whole is falling terribly behind in connecting the in-store customer experience with social media and e-tailing to drive customer engagement and sales. The opportunities that exist to leverage the integration of the online- and offline-experience ... Continue reading

I haven't seen anyone use Flash as a wireframing tool, so I thought I would share this with everyone who might be looking for a way to keep your wireframing object oriented without having to limit yourself. I find all ... Continue reading

There's a wide variety of niche social communities and social networks on the web that have gained impressive user bases and a deluge of compelling user-generated content, but most have failed to develop a sustainable and healthy business model...outside of ... Continue reading

As you may know, we recently opened our new digs here at 444 Townsend Street in the beautiful SOMA area of San Francisco, just two blocks from the CalTrain depot. We luckily have quite a lot of room to grow, ... Continue reading

We started building Flutter about 2 years ago. When we first started, it was just 3 of us in an office that we were sharing with another company. WordPress was one of the first platforms that we were building CMS ... Continue reading

So last night I attended an event put on by Wharton in San Francisco. To my surprise, the event was actually full of great content. The speakers included Samir Arora, CEO of Glam Media Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo Ben Nelson, CEO of ... Continue reading

Let's face it - cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all event sponsorships don't add any value for attendees' experience, don't really provide any quantifiable results for the sponsors, and are generally a wasteful endeavor on all fronts. I'm talking about sponsorships that only ... Continue reading

Manufacturers have sunk a lot of money into large investments that are not being leveraged to their full potential. There is room for higher ROI on that expensive equipment. Continue reading

The thrill of being at a lively, inspirational event where I can make meaningful connections and share exciting news about my company and our projects is practically unmatched in my book. Being in an atmosphere surrounded by passionate and intelligent ... Continue reading

Most companies know they need to get involved in social media at some level, but they’re unsure of the best approach. Which communities should you take part in? Who can best manage your social media efforts? How can you measure ... Continue reading

The search So about 4 months ago we set out to open our third office in San Francisco. I didn't fully grasp how tiny San Francisco really was until recently. It is tiny. Its 7 m x 7 m and even ... Continue reading

You can't change your contact information on your business cards when you move. You also can't change your website url, position, or address unless you feel like spending your weekend crossing out 500+ cards and looking unprofessional. You're often times ... Continue reading