On March 5, Tufte was appointed by Obama to a panel to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which monitors the way the $787 billion in the stimulus package is being spent. Tufte’s initial work will be on the recovery.gov website, which is the primary way the board will conduct business transparently to the [...]

Build every feature any customer would ever want: Apparently, by having all the features anyone can ever imagine, “eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy a competitors’ product”. That’s a wrong conclusion and a really bad idea. Software that tries to be everything to everyone generally sucks. It becomes bloated, hard to use, and [...]

A Good Experience blog post by Mark Hurst has an amusing and insightful post on strategy as opposed to tactics: Why is finding direction (or strategy) so rare, so difficult? One reason is that creating the strategy is different from execution. You have to stop and take time to find the direction. You can’t run [...]

“Designing well is not easy. The manufacturer wants something that can be produced economically. The store wants something that will be attractive to its customers. The purchaser has several demands. In the store, the purchaser focuses on price and appearance, and perhaps on prestige value. At home, the same person will pay more attention to [...]

As we dealt and continue dealing with the fallout from so many executives making such terrible decisions, the simplest advice seems the most appropriate. Figure out what you care about and devote yourself to that purpose. Stay the course, even when your colleagues wander off course. And never forget that if something sounds too good [...]

According to Bill Buxton on the article On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter, it might be useful to think of design in terms of four layers, each demanding a progressively larger investment. Design awareness can and ideally should be something that every employee of a company makes their best effort to acquire. I would [...]

Excellent post about the term “entrepreneur”, saying that it is loaded with outdated associations. However, the lack of a new term is significant in itself. These people are not entrepreneurs because they don’t spend their time managing a business. They spend their time writing, painting, making toys….following their passion. They are writers, painters, and toy [...]