Achieving Simplicity in Design, Technology, Business and Life
Book review: The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) by John Maeda.
In one of my posts in the Thoughts and links section I said I would write something about this book by John Maeda, a graphic designer, computer scientist and MIT professor. I bought it after watching the author’s talk on simplicity patterns at the TED website (also embedded at the bottom of this post).
SEO and Usability - True Love
For the last half year I’ve been doing search engine optimization (SEO) for mbl.is. During this time it has become more clear to me that SEO and usability have a lot in common.
Usability is all about helping users to find what they’re looking for and if they get lost tell them where they are and provide them with an easy way of browsing to another page.
Let Customers run Customer Support
Hjörtur Smárason posted some interesting thoughts on customer support:
The more activity there is on your forum, the less work it is to maintain it. Another thing that happens when your customers start to interact is that they build up a relationship, not only with you and your product, but also with each other. They exchange experience and ideas regarding the use of your service or product and you actually start to build a brand community.
I think the best living example of this is Apple. Apple has managed to create a great customer community where the customers don’t just help each other with problems but even become the strongest marketeers of their brand.
Saving huge amount of money on customer support and having thousands of people doing free marketing for you. Can you ask for more?
About Ólafur Nielsen
Ólafur Nielsen is a web developer from Iceland. His interests include product design for the web, technology, marketing, search engine optimization and web analytics. He has worked at Morgunblaðið newspaper doing product development for it’s website, mbl.is, since 2006.
Thoughts and links
- 1.05
I am half way through reading The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda, a graphic designer, computer scientist and MIT professor. I bought this book after watching his talk on simplicity patterns at the TED website. For the rest of the night I’m going to try to finish it. I’ll write a post about the book next week!
- 29.04
According to an article by Jakob Nielsen, eye tracking studies show that right-justified lists and menus make scanning more difficult.
- 28.04
Want to know what makes a design “Googley”? Check out these design principles at the Google blog.
- 25.04
Ólafur is back to work after having a day off on the First Summerday. The First Summerday is the first day in the summer month Harpa of the ancient Icelandic calendar.
- 24.04
Ólafur loves Monocle magazine’s website. Monocle is founded by Tyler Brûlé - also a founder of Wallpaper* magazine. The website has great videos, guides and articles, awesome design, great typography and video presentation. A video covering the Digital News Affairs conference caught my attention but now I’m reading the whole website. I might do a detailed post on this one.
- 24.04
I want to be able to post short thoughts and links like these but still keep my longer and more detailed posts at top here on left. The answer was Hemingway theme changed as shown in a tutorial at Design Intellection.