Ultracompact Web Product Guidelines

I just discovered this list of web product guidelines by Leah Culver. Not sure if I understand all of them ("a medium is not a grande"?). But I love how spot-on and compact some of these insights are ("one important item per page", "nobody changes the defaults", "use it yourself").

Culver's original blog post is here.

Making up Emails for Mockups

When mocking up communications software, you have to make stuff up: You want to show a realistic inbox, messages that seem real, and clearly illustrate the use case you’re trying to support. Mockups help others grasp what you're building, and they help get you rolling on the prototype.



Photoshop and Corel Draw are my friends, and it's easy to find design inspiration on the web.

But how do you come up with the data? Some ideas:

1. Use your own email. Duh. Sounds reasonable. But you don't want your confidential emails in your business plan. The girlfriend might not appreciate the shoutout. And startup founders’ emails do not represent a common use case.


2. Enron Corpus. This is good for business scenarios, with some small problems: No attachments, no sender names (although you can make them up), and the depressing emails towards the end of the company: "Dear top management, please don't fire us now!". Use the Trampoline Enron Explorer to get to the data.


3. Celebrities. Great for consumer email scenarios. My friends at Google used to mock me for including Natalie Portman in most mocks, but People Magazine is your friend: Just use your personal email and add celebrity names. Added benefit: If you choose the right celebrities, that will trigger positive emotions with people looking at the mocks.

If you have a more ideas, let me know.

The Cost of Switching Your Logo

When big companies change their logos, brochures have to be reprinted, signs changed, and trucks repainted.



About a week ago, Xobni switched to a new, lowercase logo. It eliminates the dash above the o: Since the Bill Gates demo, the short o has fallen out of favor. In addition, the new lowercase format allows us to mirror the logo on our homepage to make the "inbox backwards" connection obvious.

After Bryan created the new design and put it up on the website, I decided to switch our logo everywhere else. Original estimate: 1 hour.

I changed the logo in the product, our internal Wiki, the bug tracker, Nimda, and even ordered mousepads with the new design. Then, I figured out how to change our logo on Wikipedia, and even wrote an email to Crunchbase asking to change our logo. Total time taken: 3 hours! And I'm sure the old logo still lingers somewhere.

If this small change takes hours even for a startup like ours, I can see what corporations spend those millions of dollars on.