“ because if I want to be a designer, an inventor of culture, and I want to invent interesting things, I have to start, I have to pay attention to what I find interesting
— Matt Webb (via)
The Insomniac's Tumbleog
A Constant stream of gibberish updated while you were sleeping and I was not
“ The definition of success for me is having the freedom to create what I believe to have the most value. Monetary success is only an enabler to that truer form of self-expressive success, and it actually takes very little money (in my case) to be free.
— Buster Benson (via)
User Experience Inspiration from Amazon
Shared by Jeremy Keith (via)
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Sort by Relevancy
It turns out that the only people who want to see reviews ordered by date are the author of the book and the people who wrote the reviews. It’s just not that valuable for customers. -
Gradual Changes
Amazon has changed a lot of over time. But most people don’t notice because the redesign happens slowly over time. This is in stark contrast to, say, Facebook’s sudden redesign. People don’t like it when things change suddenly.- Show the new design to 5000 non-cookied visitors per day. That means switching on the new design for 45 seconds. These non-cookied visitors are the least risky; they haven’t visited Amazon before.
- After three weeks of that, show the new design to 1 in 5 non-cookied customers.
- After another three weeks, show 5000 cookied customers the new design.
- Show 1 in 5 cookied visitors.
- Show everyone.
That’s twelve weeks to roll out one change.
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Finally, never forget the business. Jared will now share the secret of Amazon’s business.
You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.
You have to start with a great business model to produce a great experience.
Read the Rest: Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon
“ In college, they teach you to dress up for work and dress down for social gatherings. In the real world, you dress down for work and dress up for social gatherings.
— (via)
“ At the end of the day, you don’t end your strategy because other people don’t understand it. Not if you have conviction.
— Jeff Bezos (via)
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When companies look to hire new talent, they often go where they’ve gone before, because it’s convenient. When newly minted MBAs go job hunting, they often go to the placement office because it’s convenient as well…
…The problem is that convenient approaches rarely break through or generate extraordinary returns.
— Seth Godin (via)
“ We need hats. The hat of the scientist and the hat of the artist. You can only wear one hat at a time, which is why I didn’t suggest that we need gloves.
Fifty-seven wine experts couldn’t even tell they were drinking two identical wines.
In 2001, Frederic Brochet, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux, ran a study that sent shock waves through the wine industry. Determined to understand how wine drinkers decided which wines they liked, he invited fifty-seven recognized experts to evaluate two wines: one red, one white.
After tasting the two wines, the experts described the red wine as intense, deep, and spicy—words commonly used to describe red wines. The white was described in equally standard terms: lively, fresh, and floral. But what none of these experts picked up on was that the two wines were exactly the same wine. Even more damning, the wines were actually both white wine—the “red wine” had been colored with food coloring.
(via)
“ Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence.
— Merlin Mann
Only in the last ten years—thanks to neuroscientists and their functional MRIs—have we been able to watch the attending human brain in action
This has yielded all kinds of fascinating insights—for instance, that when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done.
“ What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
— Herbert A. Simon
