Thursday, April 29, 2010

Steven's Blank 4 steps

Here is my way:

  1. Describe a customer whom you're selling to.  Height, weight and the size of underwear, please. (Customer Discovery)
  2. How many potential customers do you have?  How big is your market? (Customer Validation)
  3. How are you going to sell to them?  Can you repeat it? (Customer Creation)
  4. Do it. (Company Creation

Does it fit yours model?

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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Tone does matter

The more urgent, ‘take control’ tone of Version B’s copy lifted add-to-cart button clicks a whopping 93% over Version A’s comfort-focused tone.

One more interesting A/B test that only with a minor copy change (featuring a major tone difference though) brought up actions by 93% over the regular marketing shit.

Good to remember.

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Monday, April 26, 2010

MPMM Software Giveaway

I have got a copy (actually, a few) of MPMM Professional edition that I want to giveaway to PM community.  While it's not about so trendy agile way, but more classic waterfall-and-all-around approach, one can find it super helpful in many occasions.

See the software brochure and download a free trial of it.  If you like it, read on, I can save you $495 (or $595 - whatever is on the price tag) and give it for free.

Let me quote a few things from the site:

MPMM Professional includes an entire methodology for managing projects. It steps you through every phase, activity and task needed to complete a project from start to finish. And it comes with all of the templates and examples you need, to save time. 
 
This edition also helps you customize your own project management methodologies. You can import your existing methodologies, processes and templates to manage them all in one place. And you can customize the methodology already included in MPMM, to use for your projects today. 

Sounds interesting?  It can be yours.  Absolutely free.

So here is the deal:

  1. Drop me a line to my Twitter @iwhite and tell me why do you want it.
  2. Follow me on Twitter @iwhite and subscribe to my blog live.prokhorenko.us. (I can't really check this and not like I'm going to, so it's pretty much voluntarily, but at least you know I've asked for. :)
  3. Spread the word. I have more than one copy available and I want to make sure I'm giving it to people who will enjoy using it.

That's it.  No strings attached.  I'll send you a registration code (you have to download software yourself) and you're good to go.

P.S. If you know me personally, it's even better.  Send me an email, and it's yours.

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Friday, April 23, 2010

Spatial Thinking

Most humans are used to spatial thinking. Even if - like mine - your desk is a huge mess, you can probably find your stuff pretty quickly because you just know where you put it. Each thing on your desk has a fixed place in space which does not change on its own. If you put something somewhere, it’ll still be there the next day, and you’ll know where you can find it.

My Desk (Partial Shot)

When designing user interfaces, it’s important to keep people’s ability for spatial thinking in mind. People can easily find things based on position. If a human puts something somewhere, he’ll probably be able to find it again if the user interface doesn’t move it. If possible, the user interface should always display things where the user put them, and allow for spatial organization.

This is one of the rare occasions when I see my thoughts materialized and verbalized by someone else, just like they need to be.

Good post about what you see daily on your iPhone and why is it so.

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AJAX Applications Crawlable

An easy guide from Google on how to make AJAX crawlable. Enough said.

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Pzizz?

Я, в большинстве своем, не страдаю тем, что не могу заснуть. Как правило могу, за исключением раннего утра. Встав рано, очень сложно снова заснуть. Могу потратить час-полтора, стало быть, проснувшись в 6-6.30, смысла засыпать особо и нет.

Поэтому "засыпательный" эффект треков Pzizz мне не интересен. Что интересно, так это 10-20 минутные "восстанавливающие и ободряющие" программы, который за короткий промежуток времени тебя могут взбодрить.

Попробовал. Во-первых, в рамках офиса что-то подобное послушать проблематично. Вернее, в принципе - можно, однако расслабиться не получиться. Во-вторых, все что я услышал, так это спокойная мелодия и "нежный и заботливый" голос гражданина, практикующего НЛП. В лучших традициях жанра. Собственно, это и все.

Прилива энергии и чуда не случилось. Однако, монотонство засыпляет. :)

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Email subject A/B test

Email Subject Line Test: Which Otherwise Identical Message Got More Clicks (Not Opens) – Dash vs. Colon?

VERSION A

VS.

VERSION B

alchemyvasm alchemyvbsm

Very nice experiment.

My gut told me version A is a better winner, as dash works as "call for action". And I was sorta right.

Version A made it by almost 15% over the version B in clicks, however, version B received more open by more than 12%. I don't have a good explanation for that, but that's an interesting thing to come by.

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Prezi presentations

It looks like a Grockit' product guy has used Prezi for making his presentation at Startup Lessons Learned (also streaming online here at http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned) and I would say it looks terrific (except the choice of a tiny font that people have big problems seeing thru online streaming).

I've got to try Prezi myself now.

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The cost of Toyota Prius 2004 ownership

John's Maintenance

2004 Prius (Iconic)

Last Updated: Mon. 3/23/2009

 

 2004 Prius - Scheduled Maintenance

 2001 Prius - Maintenance Data

 2001 Prius - Scheduled Maintenance

 Maintenance:  Changing Oil

 Maintenance:  Air-Conditioner Filter

 Maintenance:  Wiper-Blades

The most detailed log of all expenses for maintaining 2004 Toyota Prius: from new to 110K+ miles and counting. Keep in mind that according to numbers the guy is pretty frugal and knows what he's paying for. Anyways, a decent write-up.

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Hopside Down

Несмотря на то что я воздерживаюсь петь дифирамбы Лебедеву, это просто охуенная вещь. Рекоммендую всем любителям пива. :)

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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Work'em Hard, Burn'em Out

Scrum is designed so developers can work 40 hour weeks. No more death marches. If we are now burning through good product owners, we have just shifted the constraint.

Scrum does not detail the product owner's relationship with the world outside the team. If one person cannot stay on top of all the details, presumably that individual is part of a marketing organization that can. Like all good developers, Scrum only defines the product owner / team interface. What happens on the enterprise side of that interface is someone else's problem.

Nice thoughts on Scrum' role that it plays in making a world with less burn-out (if it ever does).

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Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Monetizing Social Games

RockYou presentation on monetizing social games from the recent Game Developers Conference.

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Daily GMAT questions

Every weekday, GMAT Hacks publishes a realistic GMAT practice question. In general, you'll see Quant problems on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Verbal questions on Tuesday and Thursday. You'll always be able to find them at www.gmatdaily.com.

Give today's question a try, and check your answer.

After several weeks of these daily GMAT questions, I'm opting out. They are too easy. But this doesn't mean I'm too good. Actually, I'm not. Really not. I'm still struggling. But I see no reason to waste the time for questions that typically take me less a minute to shoot, and rarely require to touch a pencil. Ciao.

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Web Usability Testing Tools

In the past few years, there has been massive growth in new and exciting cheap or free web site usability testing tools, so here’s my list of 24 tools you may need to use from time to time.

Gone are the days of using expensive recruitment firms, labs and massive amounts of time to create, deploy and report on usability tests.

By using these usability testing tools and others like them, you have for the first time a complete set of tools designed to tackle almost any usability research job.

From recruiting real users (with tools such as Ethnio) to conducting live one on one remote moderated tests (UserVue) to analyzing results of usability changes using A/B testing (Google Website Optimizer), there is a plethora of useful and usable tools to conduct usability testing.

Great and the most detailed review of usability testing tools. Craig saves you a plenty of time instead of evaluating these tools yourself.

On the other note, I've run an experiment on using Amazon Mechanical Turk for conducting UX tests. As I thought, it didn't real work out. About 80% of "robots" went the easy way and just clicked on the first selection available. And although they claimed to spend from 4 to 15 minutes on test (each), the control response points averaged less than 3 minutes for a test.

Few interesting facts. They did click on the first available option while running through the navigation-path test, however, they provided a very mixed responses for a final survey screen (one question with five answers pre-set). It looks like they felt like it'll be a good indicator of them bringing some value back.

The other thing, those ones whom I rejected from the final run because of too little of time spent or abandoning the survey (but claiming a completion), the good portion of them actually reached out to me by email fighting back. I guess they spent at least as much effort as was required for completing a survey just to bitch on me. :)

Take care.

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Monday, April 5, 2010

Steve Blank in Santa Barbara

Steve Blank, Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, will be presenting at the Fishbon Event Lab, Wednesday April 14 in Santa Barbara. The Event Lab starts at 7ish with a potluck barbecue, followed by the presentation at around 8:30.

If you have a chance, I urge you not to miss this unique opportunity to listen to the Silicon Valley legend coming to Southern California.

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Saturday, April 3, 2010

New routes in Rails 3

Here goes: everything you knew about working with routes in Rails 2… is history! With Rails 3, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, unlearn what you learned, and route the new way around. And this time, it’s faster, cleaner and a lot more Ruby-like.

Great overview of the routes functionality in new Rails 3, compared to what (you might got used to) in Rails 2.

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