Give your customers a vision to aspire to
Understand what your customer aspires to (be / have / produce) and give them a vision that mirrors this. When you and your customer are working towards the same goal, you create trust.
If Apple has taught us anything about marketing, it's that we all have an idealized image of ourselves - and when we advocate a position to someone, let's make sure we're speaking to that idealized vision. In Apple's case, they are subtly pushing a clean, cool, modern version of power and class (through computers). What Apple does right:Read more
Build a better dashboard
Every product starts out as something great, and at some point, some percentage invariably end up as a single-page dashboard.
Despite their ubiquity in cars, (single-page) dashboards are useless everywhere else. When you're driving, you need to see one metric: the speed you are traveling. Yes other data needs to bubble up - particularly alerts about simple problems that are easy to fix and catastrophic if they are let go (low oil, low coolant) but everything else is either beyond the purview of a dashboard (tire pressure) or simply not important. How this metaphor got carried over to software I have no idea, but it has to stop.
In a business you have multiple metrics that you need access to immediately, and no one piece of information will give you the overview of your business that makers of dashboards hope it will. You have incoming emails from internal and external sources, you have financial statements, you have business transactions (at one or more points per day), you have projects that need managing - and on and on into the minutiae of the particular business. Read more