Via the BettrAt blog: Hmmm. As it turns out, we (BettrAt) actually want you to be awesome at what you do. I just stumbled upon this by Kathy Sierra from O’Reilly radar. I always knew that Kathy was into helping users get better, but I guess I hadn’t kept in touch when she stopped blogging. [...]
I’m not usually a vegetarian jihadist… But I think i’ll give myself the license this time. Check out this NYTimes article: This woman was a vegetarian. She was a children’s dance instructor (and as such, I’m assuming she used her legs, a lot). Then she ate a burger at her parents house because she missed [...]
Late last week, the University of Michigan had their BOP conference, limited to a core and exclusive group of BOP notables (Patrick Whitney, Dean of the IIT Institute of Design, and BettrAt’s “Thinker-In-Residence,” was in attendance). I had a chance to catch up with a friend tonight I hadn’t talked to in several years and [...]
the answer is. no. fail. idiocracy, here we come.
If I don’t know you, I seriously doubt I care what you think about a product. Stop trying to make me buy it. If I do know you, and you’re trying to sell me something because there’s a monetary award attached to it, you’re either in some network marketing MLM scheme… and I’m probably not [...]
Yesterday, I (this is Ash writing) gave a presentation to all of the senior faculty at the IIT Stuart Business School about BettrAt and the future of informal learning. I think the presentation went pretty well (apart from me making a silly mistake with the domain and thinking that the site was down in a [...]
Nan Hu, Paul A Pavlou, and Jie Zhang wrote about J shaped distribution curves for product reviews in ACM. I found it interesting because it cuts across behavioral economics, technology, statistics and visual communication. For some time now, I’ve been interested in how companies can (or already do?!) positively or negatively use user generated content [...]
I have been evangelizing this book, Rapt, recently in small circles of friends. Like Stumbling on Happiness, it’s not a self-help book, it deals more with cognition, attention, and social psych than anything. I thought I’d take the time to post my interesting curations from the book since they are highly related to BettrAt. – [...]
via huffpo I guess they’re down but not out. They certainly don’t show you much, but check this out: The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of [...]
Okay, as promised, here’s my Pandora makeover. Don’t get scared off by the red text. Pretend this is an undergraduate design critique or something. Here are some things that Pandora might do to truly improve the experience for users and garner more revenue to boot. First, let’s take a look at the current state of [...]
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Lately I’ve been thinking about high concept pitches. I read pitching hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi, and I’ve looked over lots of stuff before that says you need to have the simple, high concept pitch. Here’s how it usually goes: ”We are the X meets Y” Most of the time, this is X.COM meets [...]
