Month: March 2015

Your Two Jobs as a Manager. Set clear expectations and reduce uncertainty for your team.

How to Collect Customer Feedback That’s Actually Valuable. A look inside how the team at Intercom collects and synthesizes customer feedback.

The Technium. A fascinating interview with Kevin Kelly from last February. It’s a long read, or an hour-long video, but so worth the time. One of my favorite nuggets was, “Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.”

User Onboarding Isn’t a Feature

If you think of onboarding not as pointing out the weak parts in your interface, but instead as the holistic approach to delivering more value to more signups, then it becomes extremely clear that your onboarding experience must keep pace with the evolution of your product and the evolution of the market it serves.

User Onboarding Isn’t a Feature.

2014 was a good year for Basecamp support. Noah Lorang recaps what last year looked like for the Basecamp support time. Their median response time astounds me. Pretty impressive work from a relatively small team.

Verizon Live Chat

I shared this on Twitter earlier but wanted to log visually here. Verizon’s live chat support has three shockingly poor things wrong with it.

The text is large, blue, and Comic Sans.

The text is large, blue, and Comic Sans.

The form is broken in Safari as you get this big bar over the text field.

The form is broken in Safari as you get this big bar over the text field.

The tab title is "Engagement Window." Eww.

The tab title is “Engagement Window.” Eww.

I reported each issue to them, of course. Unfortunately they said, “we do have issues with the Safari browser” and suggested I use Internet Explorer.

A different work, not a better one

Much of the criticism and feedback artists hear is really about the wish of the critic to describe a different work, not necessarily a better one.

How Do You Know When You’re Done? by Scott Berkun.

Documentation, Support, and Customer Success. Simon writes about how documentation is a psychological band-aid in how it calcifies habits and shifts responsibility.