Brandon Muramatsu

Posts of the Week for May 3, 2011

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Maybe I’ll start a new series on “Posts of the Week”.

  • Are your users S.T.U.P.I.D?: Stephen Turbek on boxesandarrows writes, “It is an honest question: how smart are your users? The answer may surprise you: it doesn’t matter. They can be geniuses or morons, but if you don’t engage their intelligence, you can’t depend on their brain power.” (NextDigest Design, April 29, 2011)
  • Real Wireframes Get Real Results: Stephen Turbek on boxesandarrows writes, “Real people don’t understand wireframes-Usability tests are done to get early feedback on content and functionality decisions from people outside the project team. These participants, unfortunately, are not sure how to respond to a wireframe.”
  • Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”: Jason Cohen of A Smart Bear writes,

    “So the principle is easy: Set the conditions of “yes” such that:

    If they say “yes,” you’re happy because the terms or money are so good, it more than compensates for the distraction, possibly even funding the thing you really want to do.
    If they say “no,” you’re happy because it wasn’t a great fit anyway, so it’s not worthwhile for a small return on your time and effort.”

    (NextDigest Hacker, April 29, 2011)

  • 13 Ways To Pull Off A Killer Demo Day Presentation: Jean Baptiste writes, “The best way to do a demo day type presentation is to put the entire delivery into three different acts. Entrepreneurship and delivering a presentation is absolutely no different than theater. You should look at your delivery as a spectacle that enlightens those in the audience, not a typical slide deck pitch.” (StartupDigest, April 29, 2011)
  • The purpose of gamification: A look at gamification’s applications and limitations. (O’Reilly’s Radar, April 29, 2011)

Where did these come from?

A couple weeks ago I was reading a post on TechCrunch (I think) where one of the commenters mentioned a new digesting service that he had started. His company collects posts from around the web and every Friday releases a curated digest of what the editors thought was interesting in the last week.

NextDigest is the company behind all of this. Here’s how they describe themselves:

98% of technology leaders waste time reading technology news every day.

NextDigest members receive a curated email of what you need to read in your industry every Friday.

Source: NextDigest. (2011). NextDigest. Retrieved April 30, 2011 from NextDigest website: http://nextdigest.com/.

Since I’ve been subscribed to the digests (they also do announcements on local startup events in Boston, SF, etc.) I’ve found at least one post per week to be interesting enough to read through. It helps that I had already found and read some of the posts the editors have included, so I know that my interests align with those of each digest’s editor.

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