Kelly Sutton and I usually come up with one or two interesting ideas each week, and usually while we’re grabbing a cup of coffee. Last night we launched one of them. CourseBoss is an assignment sharing and collection service for university professors.
If you’ve taken the step and launched something, you’re well aware that irrational excitement for new ideas is usually temporary. We wanted to build CourseBoss inside of that honeymoon period, so we gave ourselves a hard deadline of 2 weeks. Instead, we actually managed to go from idea to launch in 11 days.
Twitter Only Launch(via SEOmoz)
- GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 78 seconds of the first tweet.
- Tweets with more than 3 RTs were indexed 325% faster, along with 125% more of its products and post indexed than tweets with no RTs.
- Average indexation of the post or product was different depending on number of RTs
Twitter links may be nofollow, but there’s definitely search value in them. The gentlemen at SEOmoz have discovered a positive correlation between the number of retweets, index speed, and pages indexed.
The UX community is certainly divided on this point. There are those who will defend the lo-fi wireframe to the death, swearing off high fidelity wireframes as visual candy and premature over-designing and emphasizing the importance of not getting “design” mixed in with Information Architecture and functionality at this stage.
And then there are those who swear by the hi-fi wireframe. Their argument being that these artifacts are the easiest way to get a client/user to understand the full context in which a product or service is to be interacted with and function.
However, the truth is neither of these implementations (nor any variation in-between) is the be-all, end-all way to wireframe. As with anything we do in designing the user experience, it all comes down to context. What do you need to accomplish with the wireframes? Who is the audience? Are you over-designing when you should be more focused on the pure interaction and user task flow? And, conversely, should you be providing more of an authentic experience for the user to have familiarity and leverage their experiences with similarly designed elements?
There is no right way to wireframe. You must understand the context and the requirements for the project and move ahead accordingly. Know that regardless of the fidelity of the wireframe, it is still simply a tool in the design process that you can utilize to quickly get feedback, prove out your design decisions and help you make a better product.
Ask people who say innovation what they mean. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved everyone in the room hours of time. Using the i-word is often a cop-out for clear thinking. They are trying to signify creativity, without actually being creative.
Found in a hacker news thread, this reply echos my thinking on the missed opportunities in SaaS. It’s also why it upsets me to see so many smart people working on so many social products.
Enterprise software sucks.
We don’t talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entertainment, etc., etc., etc. and you have tons of stuff. But you don’t see it and rarely think about it. Kinda like most of the iceberg being underwater.
And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. Enterprise software is so bad that there are multi-billion dollar industries devoted to consulting on how to use it, how to share it, and how to store it in data warehouses and harvest it. It’s so bad that lots of people have to dump the data out of their enterprise systems and into Microsoft Excel just to get anything done.
When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that’s where the money is.
What banks were in the 1930’s, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.
The Sirens of Social have seduced too many good minds to build and crash startups. There are too many brilliant problem solvers who aren’t developing brilliant solutions for business. Enterprise software is particularly awful. Imagine the progress that could be made and the money that’s being left on the table. They could be blowing competition out of the water. Sad.
