Thought Episode 21 of This Week in Startups was great.  I was very interested in learning about Dr. Mark Goulston.  In particular, his insight into Firing as a Failure of Leadership should give all managers something to think about.

Some early discoveries from my early grad school career:

1.)  I’m old.  It’s been less than 5 years since I finished undergrad and I can’t believe all these punk-kids with their cell phones in class and their facebooking during lectures.  Back in my day, we just fell asleep in class…

2.) Starting a blog while working full time and starting grad school was probably not the best idea.

Going to try to figure out how to make regular posts.  Here come some posts about my shared items from Google Reader.

Interesting article on Blue Nile from the WSJ.

A couple of  points:

The author associates the site redesign to an attempt by Blue Nile to bring in new shoppers. Blue Nile was smart enough to discard the pink design (and design firm), so they’re not clueless, but shifting audience is probably not the best way to get more sales. How about better serving the men that come to the site? Try to catch some of the guys that are using your site to research and then heading to the mall. High resolution photos are a good start to a more accurate representation of the jewelry but how about some HD video of the jewelry from different angles. If you are competing with a mall, create a video of a ring on display and have someone try it on. A new look is nice but I really want more features and easily accessible information about the jewelry that I am looking at.

Also, it may take some extra work but the author of the article is wrong that you can’t roll out a new look or new features to a test audience. Yahoo is doing it right now with a redesign of the main page – Yahoo’s main page looks different on my work computer than on my home computer. You can test by IP Address (location), browser, new customer, etc. You won’t necessarily be able to control everyone that is in the group (cookies can be cleared, for example) but it may be interesting to see if a higher percentage of the test group makes purchases with bigger photos, hd video, more information, comparison prices, etc.

I wouldn’t classify myself as much of a contributor on Stack Overflow – I’m more of a lurker, really.  I’ve been listening to the podcast since the beginning and have really enjoyed watching the evolution of the site.  This week at work, I spent more time on the site than I have in quite some time, and I caught myself skipping over the Accepted Answers on the site and going down the page to read other answers; it seems as though an add has been affixed to the bottom of the Accpted Answer, for some reason, my brain was skipping over the entire answer like the whole thing was an ad.

Screenshot from a Stack Overflow page

I had to go back through the site to find a screen shot; the black “Got Splunk” ad seems to be the worst (at least to my brain) and the Server Fault ad didn’t seem to pose any issue at all.  If I take the time to build up some rep, a lot of these ads will go away.  However, the usability of Stack Overflow suffers due to these ads.

Designing Web Usability

Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielson is a must read book for anyone who designs, tests, or manages people who design or test websites.  Early chapters of the book detail dos and don’ts of page, content and site design that will primarily be of interest to developers and designers.  Later chapters provide strategy for the overall structure of internet, extranet and intranet sites which will be very helpful to managers who want to better understand how to leverage these technologies effectively.   It is an excellent reference manual for anyone who is working on such products.

For the most part, the guidelines in this book still apply today, even though the book was published in 1999.  However, Chapter 2 (Page Design) suffers more than most of the other design chapters from being out-of-date.  Page resolution and site loading times are still important issues for designers, but widespread broadband internet and newer widescreen monitors make these issues less of a problem for many sites.  To be fair, Nielson acknowledges that future technology advancements could have an effect on his recommendations by making predictions on what these advancements and their effects may be.  Chapter 8 of the book is devoted entirely to these predictions.  Despite these limitations, Chapter 2 is an excellent starting point for page design, even 10 years after publication.

Chapter 3 (Content Design) and Chapter 4 (Site Design) have aged a bit better than Chapter 2.  Chapter 3 is an good resource for people who are responsible for the content of websites, particularly corporate websites.  The book provides recommendations on best-practices for online text, headlines and documentation.  Chapter 4 lays out guidelines for organizing and designing the overall layout of the site.  Nielson writes that the two biggest mistakes of site design are not having a site design and organizing the site in the way that a company is organized, as opposed to in a user-centric fashion.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will make an excellent reference for those who are working on new corporate websites.  An outline is provided at the beginning of each chapter which makes finding passages regarding particular components of design easy to find.  These chapters on design are not quite as detailed as some books that are more focused on just design (like Don’t Make Me Think), though, so they may be most helpful to beginning designers, managers, or others who won’t actually be doing the “hands on” develoment.

The book moves away from public site design and into internal or extranet sites in Chapter 5 (Intranet Design).  This chapter is primarily geared towards management; the highlight of this chapter is the discussion of how a well-designed intranet site can lead to significant productivity gains for an entire organization.

Chapters 6 and 7 deal with accessibility for users with disabilities and international users, respectively.  These chapters will not be as useful as a reference as the the design chapters, but these issues should be considered by anyone creating a new site.  As discussed, Nielson makes several predictions of web usability in the future in Chapter 8.  This chapter isn’t particularly useful, but it is enjoyable to read the predictions for the web from an expert 10 years later.  Chapter 9 concludes the book with a summary of some of the more important recommendations of the book.

The value of a quality web design/usability book such as this is that it makes you think about what makes sites good or bad.  These books detail why certain design decisions are better than others.  The foundation that these books provide is essential to anyone making design decisions; design based on intuition or on other web sites often leads to choosing flashy design over effective site usability.  This book is a must-read for anyone working on the web.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

There is a lot at stake in the branding of a company.  As Al Ries writes in the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, branding is the “single most important objective of the marketing process.”  He supplements his point with example after example of cases of companies that have succeeded (and failed) at building a successful brand.

Some of these examples feel a bit dated after 11 years, but the Laws that are detailed are as relevant as ever.  The Law of Fellowship, the idea that a brand should welcome other brands in order to build the category, can apply to Google and Microsoft or Twitter and Facebook just as well as it applies to Coke and Pepsi or Kodak and Fuji.  The Law of the Generic, the idea that a generic brand name is the quickest way to branding failure, may be even more relevant to Web 2.0 companies than it is to companies like GE or Nabisco.

The book focuses on large companies, but a lot of the branding principles can be applied to the marketing of any business.  It’s a quick read that provides a lot to think about.

This is my first post on BoSchatzberg.com.  I’m new to blogging and, at this point, I’m just messing around with Wordpress and getting everything the way I want it.  At some point in the next week I will start with the actual posts.

I’m intending to write about my experiences as a developer and as an MBA student, but there is a good chance that this will just turn into another place for me to go on rants about baseball, Dana White, etc.  My goals are to improve my writing skills and to use blogging as incentive to read more programming and business books, through writing reviews or reports.  Over the last year, I’ve made my way through a good amount of the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program Reading List, so that’s where most of the early book reports will start.

Let me know if you have any advice getting started with Wordpress…