GBKS

I like what Whatsapp does. First year is free, then 99 cent per year. Here's their rationale: http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-...

That being said, stickers seem to work. Line makes 30% of it's revenue ($17M in Q1 2013) from stickers. More here: http://start.toshiba.com/news/read/category/Business/article...

The advantage of both stickers and subscriptions over advertising is that you don't need a sales team or the tech for serving ads and providing analytics.

Reminds me of the story on how "Settlers of Catan" was created.

"Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years..."

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_...

To counter some of the negative sentiment here, I had a great interview experience at Google. The only big negative was that the whole process took 5 months. But every step involved was very organized and the people were professional and thoughtful. The in-person interviews were also great and the questions were all appropriate. I did not take the offer for personal reasons at the time, but the process was great (except for those 5 months). As with all big companies though, there is a bit of luck of the draw involved, as the other stories in this thread show.

All these posts about raising large amounts of money make me wish for follow-up posts about how the money will be, or was, spent. Without customers, revenue, or product, how do you figure out how much you need?

I think of what my long-term goals are, then how the task at hand fits in the path to reach those goals. This makes it much easier to work through the boring stuff, since the motivation is drawn from the big, personal life goals.

One thing I'd love to see this evolve into is a timeline for each company. When it was started, when they received funding and how much, when they reached 10k/1m/10m users, etc. It could look like an Alexa/Compete/etc chart with these milestones added on top. This would make for a great research tool.

Wouldn't it be 518,400 monthly unique users? You're dividing 5,184,000 page views by 10 page views per unique, right?

That's quite an audience to build, and I think that's where a lot of effort goes. It can take a long to time to create and establish a brand and experience that people rely on and trust.

This has been discussed to death, but I'd like to add an approach that I haven't seen brought up before.

An HTML5 app/site can be a great MVP. You can build and iterate quickly and even launch it first as a mobile web site. Once you're happy with everything, you can use PhoneGap to turn it into apps. And later you can always build platform-specific native apps. It won't be the perfect experience at all stages, but it can be a more appropriate process for smaller teams. Plus, you can reach a large audience very quickly.

I actually like the question. I answer it honestly, and I always like to get honest answers to it when I interview people. After all, if you lie about your weaknesses, you might also lie about your strengths, and the interviewer might trust you less.

In the viral post, the Mom wrote "I need help" and "This problem is too big for me to handle on my own". That's really the key thing here, independent of how her marriage turned out or whether she uses a blog to vent. She's losing control of the situation and is concerned her son will do something stupid in an act of rage. Her post is a plea to the general public to help people with mental illnesses, because sometimes the people in their vicinity aren't able to. Making her look bad detracts from that message, but does not take away from it (IMHO).

Good to hear. 3 posts in my review were links to random funny websites related to the presidential election. Clearly not what I would have chosen as personal moments of 2012. Since I'm not that active on FB, it might just not have had enough data to work with.

I find the lack of humility in this page fascinating. Even though it's my account and my life, I have no control over what my top 20 moments are. The concept is great, but the tone (Facebook assuming authority) definitely rubs me the wrong way.

I use Basecamp because it's very simple. There are a few text docs that outline different aspects of the project, and I keep updating them as I go along (instead of adding new ones). And, as somebody else wrote, having three to-do lists ("Things to do right away", "New features", "Ideas") is also a good approach. If you have a little time you can pick off small things from the priority list. Stuff from the "Ideas" list either gets kicked out over time, or slowly graduates to "New features" and then to specific items in the priority list.

Generally though, I find that having a site out there and people using it is the best motivator to keep pushing forward. It creates a real sense of urgency and priorities, and you simply won't have the luxury of not focusing on the important stuff that affects people's experience.

The best way to avoid this altogether is to set the image width and height in the img tag. That way, content can be shown right away, even before the images are loaded.

Another thing to be careful with are social buttons, whose height may change after the initial item is rendered. That's easily avoided with a fixed CSS height, though.

Personally, I try to balance this by dedicating Monday mornings to the things I don't like doing - to get them out of the way for the week. I also try to have weekly "themes". So one week might be dedicated to a new feature, the next to marketing/support, the next to optimization, etc. That way you have a defined range of activities to focus on each week and you're less likely to stray off into the comfort zone.

The kids character, Thomas the tank engine, is a great example of this. It all started in 1942, with a dad telling his sick kid stories to cheer him up. The kid liked it so much, that his Dad turned it into short stories, and then books. Today there are 42 books, with the last one released in 2011, a TV show that has been running for 27 years, and kids all over the world know and love Thomas. And the little kid, now 72, is still involved in the franchise.

Full story on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Tank_Engine

Out of curiosity, at which Alexa rank range do you take new sites serious? 100,000? 50,000?

From a little bit of research it looks like piccys.com has 30 million page views with an Alexa rank of 8518, and weheartit.com has 850 million page views with a rank of 1367. So the top 10,000 seem difficult to get into as a newcomer.

Love the process, but not the final mock-up. While the grey boxes look neat, the visual format is inappropriate for bookmarks. If they use fav icons like the NY Times logo, you won't be ale to tell what the bookmark is about. Small screenshots of the pages also don't work since they become illegible and many times only ads can be recognized since they are made to stand out. So this concept should be validated with real content. I'd assume that a text-based version would be much more usable.

I'm looking forward to see what will come from this.

Since the article mentions the site redesign, I think this new design is not going to work out for them. The information density is too low, resulting in the site feeling empty and making it less interesting to browse around. I think they'll lose a lot of casual viewers because of this. My assessment may be wrong and I am curious to see how this plays out.

At the same time, Google has a much more transparent culture and it still ended up with the Nexus Q, which was swiftly put on hold just a few weeks after it was announced.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/31/3207482/nexus-q-consumer-l...

Sure, be nitpicky. My MBP downloaded and installed iOS 6 on my iPad, that's it. And it got it's own OS X 10.8.2 upgrade. It was so simple, that I barely noticed it. In the mean time, my phone just asked me again whether I want to install the system upgrade. And once again, it did the countdown from 10 to 0 and then got stuck.

Nice catch. It's a MacBook Pro (completely forgot about the existence of non-Pro MacBooks).

It is an HTC Incredible 1, I got it right when it came out (Wikipedia says it was first released end of April, 2010). It's most likely the same you have then.

I haven't rooted it, just used it as an average person would for Facebook/browser/weather/etc. It was very surprising to see the phone degrade so much over time.

I'd also recommend to base your decision on the overall service you get over the 1-2 years you'll own your phone. I've had an Android phone the past 2 years and am completely disillusioned with Android/Google/HTC. Everything is great for a few months, then issue after issue kept piling up.

For example, the first system update my phone had problems installing. It took two weeks of Googling and Verizon store visits to figure out that I had to do a factory reset for it to work. The second system update has been lingering on my phone for about 3 months. The install process simply never finishes, no matter what I do.

Second, apps simply stop working one by one. Flipboard doesn't manage to load images anymore. Wunderlist can't sync anymore. Installing Instagram breaks the built-in camera and gallery completely. Lots of random errors in other apps. The weather app stopped automatically refreshing. The alarm app doesn't go off anymore. Not to mention the application cache limitation to 150MB. So even though I have 500MB available storage, I can't install more apps, since they don't have room for temporary files. If that's full, apps simply stop working (only fix I found was a 1-hour phone-rooting process).

The touchscreen sometimes stops responding (off/on fixes that). Tapping a bookmark on my home screen loads the browser, but not the actual link. The phone randomly restarts at times. The unlock screen started misbehaving recently. And on and on.

In comparison, my 4 year old iPod Touch is more reliable and more fun to use than my 2-year old HTC. My 3.5 year old MacBook just upgraded to iOS6 and everything runs smooth as butter.

So my experience is that Android phones get worse over time, and Apple devices get better over time (or at least stay the same). Of course, your experience may differ, and maybe Android is more mature by now. But I'd highly recommend not to base a switch on a few features, but to take the overall service you will receive over two years into consideration.

What I do in those cases is to color the unchanged text in red or pink. That way anybody can see what needs to be done and help get things moving.

Honestly though, I think we need to take more responsibility in helping shape that copy. I've also had pretty bad experiences when the client had a dedicated writer assigned. My favorite approach is to, whenever copy is missing, go to a competitors site or Wikipedia, and copy/paste. At least you get an approximation, and it helps everybody who looks at the project start responding to and thinking about content. As UXers/designers/developers we might actually have a very good feel for content and are in a great position to get the process started.

An interface with Lorem Ipsum is like a portrait of a person without pupils drawn. It becomes abstract and all live is missing.

The Mac client is what made Twitter useful for me. It has a dedicated place on the desktop and I can peek in any time quickly to see what's new. Like a personalized news ticker. In contrast, I can't stand using the website. So this might reduce my usage drastically and turn me into a mobile only user.

The focus on the yellow phone is an unfortunate decision. The bright yellow creates extreme contrast with the black frame and background, and the white icons are barely visible.

A lawn mover still has cost after the initial purchase. You need to buy oil and gas, fix minor issues, etc, and at some point it dies and you need to buy a new one. Similarly, software needs to be maintained. Except, somebody else maintains (and even improves) it for you, and they need to make a living as well.

Google's habit of killing off versions of Android before they're dead is also inconvenient. But I guess it's easier to rip on Appple.