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As the ecosystem of devices proliferates, with the iPhone and Android platforms coming into their own (along with the ever-impending iTablet), we’re seeing a single feature become the most important and critical piece of new technology: syncing.

If you sync seamlessly across devices, people will love you for it. It’s why I love the Apple ecosystem. I add a calendar event to my desktop, iPhone, or...

I’ve set up a new Flickr group with the express intent of aggregating examples of microcopy, that tiny copy (often shorter than a sentence) that helps clarify, explain, reduce commitment, or otherwise assuage someone performing (or considering) a task. You can find the group here:

Flickr: Microcopy

Creating the group was prompted by Relly Annett-Baker, a web copy-writer from England who is puttin...

The big question everyone has with Twitter is, and the very first one that John Battelle asked Twitter CEO Ev Williams when he interviewed him yesterday, is “What’s the revenue model?”

And the answer Ev gave is exactly the same one they’ve been giving for a year now, which essentially is: “We’re not focused on revenue. We’re focused on growth”. When you hear a CEO say something like that, you kno...

A few months ago we held an event called Testcase at Betahouse in Cambridge, MA where we asked four startups to come and user test their web sites with local folks who showed up. Despite the super informal user testing method we used, we clearly saw that each startup struggled with communicating the value of their service. This is a common problem…founders have a really awesome idea but it just is...

One of the guiding principles of interaction design is to support existing behavior. This means to figure out what is already happening, what activities, tasks, and interactions people are already doing, and build support for them into software.

This may not seem like a glamorous way to approach design, but from my experience it’s the fastest way to make people happy. Let them do what they alread...

In many industries people pay lots of money for a qualified lead. A qualified lead is a person who has expressed interest in a product or service and meets general buying criteria. For example, my neighbor told me that in the real-estate business agents often pay 1% of a resulting home sale for qualified home buyers. If someone can send an agent a home buyer who is serious about purchasing and eve...

Two apps, Posterous and SignApp, have a novel way to communicate how easy it is to start using their product. I call it the strikethrough method.

It’s a simple feature: the designers simply cross out one of the normal, expected steps of getting started with the service. On the home page of the site they show the usual, expected step of creating an account and then put a red line through it. Easy....

Just a quick update on my latest project. I’m self-publishing a new book about creating great sign-up experiences. It’s called Make them Care!. (you can get reminded when it’s published here)

Since going out on my own two years ago I’ve worked on many different kinds of projects. Some small, some big. Some simple. Some complex. But even though projects vary in lots of ways there always seems to b...

Here is the slide deck from a talk I gave last week at Delve, a two-day masterclass held in Brooklyn, NY.

The talk is in three parts, with each part focusing on a specific problem in software. Each problem is a major hurdle in what I call the usage lifecycle, or the stages people go through as they use and adopt software over time. These three hurdles come directly out of the work I do with client...

Sometimes asking the simplest of questions changes everything. The other day I was talking with a designer about a home page redesign they were working on. They were talking about the aesthetics of the design, how the current version looked like junk and they wanted to make it beautiful.

A worthy goal, to be sure. The world needs more beauty. But then I asked: “what metric do you hope to improve ...

For many people in the web design industry, design projects have a specific start and end date. The end date specifies when the design (the mockups, code, or custom CMS) will be delivered. After the end date, the engagement is over and both parties move on. This way of working grew out of the print industry and as creative folks migrated over to doing more business on the Web they’ve brought this ...

I’ve heard it said again and again, but I had never seen an actual quote in which Steve Jobs says that Apple doesn’t do market research. I finally found one.

It comes care of this excellent article arguing why you can’t innovate like Apple.

Here it is:

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s reta...

I’ve given a few talks recently and by far and away the one idea that is resonating with people is the idea that the behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for.

It’s a simple statement, really. All it means is that what is happening on your web site or in your web application is a result of the current design you’ve created. If people are gaming the system, then your design allows...

Yahoo recently redesigned their home page, the most visited page on the Web. The redesign came along with lots of media coverage: Yahoo (and the media who covers them) seems to place a higher weight on redesigns than most other organizations.

The new page looks really nice, with clean lines and a nice, editable left-hand navigation bar that allows people to prioritize which applications they want...

So yesterday Amazon bought Zappos. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explains in this video why he is so enamored with the company he is acquiring: he loves their culture.

As the news broke, Seth Godin asked When you buy Zappos, what do you buy? and points out that culture can be freely had by anyone building any sort of company.

As for me, I am reminded of a recent conversation I had with Brian Kalma...

The best way to innovate in design is by solving today’s problems…if you’re successful then you’ll soon be asked to solve tomorrow’s as well.

In Chapter 2 of my book Designing for the Social Web, I introduce and talk about what I call the AOF method. AOF stands for Activity, Objects, and Features. First you determine and research the activity you’re going to support. This helps you identify the s...

As a consultant, I am often in the role of critic when I begin working with a new client. My job is to find out what is wrong, what isn’t working, and suggest ways that it could be better.

I’m fine with this because for folks who live in the trenches, objective, critical feedback is valuable. I’m still surprised at how strong the expert blindness is on certain projects: the people who have built ...

I love this quote I read recently:

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote this in reference to a story published last week about a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley who wrote a report on teen’s use of technology. The report got tons of press from the likes of Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the Guardian, in part for statements like this:

“Every teenager has some ac...

I recently stumbled over a great set of quotes about writing curated for an English Composition class. Since I’m writing a fair bit lately (a new book, in fact) I couldn’t stop my mind from inserting “design” in the place of “writing”, as the two disciplines are often so similar. Below you’ll find some of the better quotes rewritten in this way. (disclaimer: I make no claims of originality here…I’...

Fred Wilson makes a good point about how to think about relationships online. Instead of treating people as either taking some important action (the one we want them to) or not taking it, Fred reminds us there is a spectrum in between.

“looking at your user base as either non-active or transactors is the wrong way to think online (and maybe offline too). Just like bookstores use cafes to bring pot...

I was recently chatting with an entrepreneur who was considering building a leader-board for his social web app. The purpose of the leader-board, he told me, was to display those users of the app who were most active, with the idea that this would incentivize them (and those not on the leader-board) to participate more. With the lure of climbing the leader-board and sitting at the top, users would...

Having recently returned from An Event Apart Boston, I have lots of new design ideas to think about and explore. But one idea kept rearing its ugly head in conversation after conversation I had there: the economy.

The economy has reached those of us working on the Web. I think we were insulated for a while, since building software is so important for business these days, even when your business i...

I’ve just returned from speaking at An Event Apart Boston at which I gave a talk called Designing with Psychology in Mind. The event was top notch (as you may have heard) and I’m extremely honored to be among the distinguished speakers.

Thankfully, the conference coverage was excellent. Jeremy Keith wrote up a great set of notes (including notes for my talk). Two attendees created tweet tracker ca...

I realized the other day I hadn’t posted about my Designing for Sign Up talk from my trip to Webstock back in February (amazing conference, btw). Well, the Webstockers have gotten the video up, and here it is…enjoy!

(You can also grab the slide deck over at slideshare)

Joshua Porter at Webstock 09 from Webstock on Vimeo.

In case the video streaming is choppy, you can download the video from th...

Exit points are the critical points at which you lose valued users. Are you keeping track of yours?

Andrew Chen, who writes the excellent blog Futuristic Play, has a nice post explaining exit points, those point in which people decide to leave your product/service/app: 25 Reasons People Stop Using your Product

Exit points really resonate with me because they are clearly part of the Usage Lifecycle, the lifecycle that users go through as they use your product or service. What makes the lifecycle useful is that it focuses us (the designers) on the major hurdles of use such as sign up, getting started, and ongoing engagement.

Going down another specificity level from hurdles are exit points. As Andrew explains:

“In the customer lifecycle perspective, you look at the product from the perspective of a user that has a series of experiences starting from newbie and going into an advanced role. In addition to looking at the success cases, looking at the failure cases is informative too – you want to analyze your product for potential exit points and relate them to both quantitative and qualitative measures.”

Here are some examples of exit points:

• “I don’t understand how this is valuable to me”
• “I don’t have any friends here”
• “I only use this site to manage contacts, not do anything productive”
• “This site is too distracting”
• “I keep getting messages from people I don’t know”
• “It’s not worth the effort”

Exit points don’t get enough attention. In my experience they’re remarkably stable across a population for a given service. In other words, there will be common exit points that your users have…there will be clear trends that you can design to prevent. The problem is that these exit points aren’t always visible, and here’s the key issue: exit points often don’t happen while someone is using your software. In fact, exit points can occur when someone is far away from your product.

While they’re relatively stable within a product, exit points are different for every product. And they are very specific, having to do with the context of use. Additionally, exit points are different depending on what stage of the lifecycle someone is in. If they are using an application for the first time, for example, they are going to have different exit points than when they’re a long-time user. Other things to note about exit points:

• These trouble spots aren’t necessarily interface design issues
• They can happen away from the service, merely in the mind of users
• They happen because of the behavior of others
• They are sometimes a decision based on lots of interactions, not a single one
• Sometimes they’re nothing more than passing fancy

Some exit points are vague and difficult to design for (”It’s not worth the effort”). You might need to get more information before knowing what to do design-wise. But others are easier to design for (”I don’t have any friends here”).

Do you know what your exit points are? Are you keeping track, watching trends, and designing to prevent them?