Archive for LinkedIn
December 17, 2009 at 16:40 · Filed under Ideas to grab, LinkedIn
Here is an idea I discussed with a colleague of mine during lunch and its up for grab to you.
We discussed how one can mix social media with a brick and mortar business and came up with this brilliant move :)
Imaging you are entering a salad bar that looks like an internet cafe. There are flat touch screens along the walls and big screens hanging from the ceiling. You go towards one of the screens and start mixing your salad. You simply touch the ingredients buttons on the screen and hit “done” when you are finished.
Now, the guys and gals at the kitchen start mixing your salad for you, while the system checks if anybody else in the history of the salad chain have chosen same ingredients, if no: Hey! you can name you own salad mix, the camera in the screen snaps a picture of you, you can write some lines that will be stored together with the recipe and next time somebody chooses the same ingredients, they will see that this is YOUR mix :) they´ve just ordered.
The screens at the ceiling show what other people are eating right now in the bar, they show what salads are most popular, and most rare ones.
Of cause there will be possible to log in into the system online from home, and see the list of all “your” mixes, you can discuss them with other users. You can browse the recipes of others, you can even order online or from your iPhone one of the existing mixes in the nearby salad bar.
The menu with the existing mixes is also available on the touch screens in the bar.
You can do this for pizza chains or other businesses. Hey, I think this will work, what´s your thoughts? Share them in comments.
April 15, 2009 at 11:01 · Filed under Design, LinkedIn
Every online company should always try to continuously improve their product. As head of development of norwegian classifieds website zett.no I’ve been looking at our competitors’ websites (finn.no and tinde.no) comparing our booking solutions.
Booking solution of finn, tinde and zett
Booking system is a heart of these applications since this is where the money comes from (at least from the private persons). And being such an important part of the system the way booking solutions work today did not impress me much (on either of the three websites).
I have documented the booking process on all three websites just the way they looked 8th of April 2009 (I’ll publish own posts on this later for: finn, tinde and zett).
So here comes the challenge:
In 6 months from now 15th of October 2009 I’ll compare them again looking at how the process have been improved. Every detail count, I’ll evaluate the changes then, but I can announce the winner already now.
The winner is our users! And a nice side effect of improved booking solution is our revenue!
I hope that finn and tinde accept this challenge, and that we will see great improvements very soon. I also hope that when the improvements are made, we will steal the best ideas from each other and do a follow up release taking our booking solutions to the top of usability, ease of use and performance.
April 14, 2009 at 23:28 · Filed under LinkedIn, Private
Here is the list of books and resources that I read recently that has influenced me in one way or another (in no particular order):
- Zen Habits – blog of Leo Babauta covering: achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.
- Get rich slowly – blog of J.D>. Roth sharing stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing.
- Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
- The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams
- Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm
- DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
- The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing by Jason Kelly
- Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle
- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
- Getting real by 37signals
- Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch
- The big book of key performance indicators by Eric T. Petterson
The list is never complete, so I’ll update the post once in a while…
April 14, 2009 at 13:42 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Just wanted to share with you all this sprint burndown chart:
Sprint burndown chart (click to enlarge)
How do you feel about it?
How do you think the team felt about it?
Do you think this was a good or a bad sprint?
Say what you think in the comments, I’ll update this post one week later with real answers :-)
March 13, 2009 at 22:15 · Filed under LinkedIn, SEM & SEO
I was speaking today at SEO howlers session at International Search Summit Oslo together with Andy Atkins-Krüger and Kristjan Mar Hauksson. We were trying to wake up the audience after lunch and I hope we done this well. It was quite fun (at least for me) and at the same time quite rewarding.
Following things were mentioned as SEO SEM howlers:
- URL rewrites (just take a look at elkjop.no product pages)
- Missing 404 pages
- Non existing pages returning 200 status
- Defending your brand reputation
- Supporting your offline campaigns online
- Doing the basics (titles, h1s, flash, etc)
- Use of negative keywords in ppc campaigns
I hope the audience enjoyed the session as much as I did :-).
March 2, 2009 at 9:56 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn, Web-sites
I launched http://kanosurvey.com a small project for the Agile community. If you use kano model for prioritizing your features, this site would be helpful. You can set up a survey and get your users/customers answer it in order to find out more about your features.
February 26, 2009 at 14:06 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Yesterday, I’ve been participating in a Debate about agile and usability.
Three Scrum Masters (I was one of them) and three UX people was sitting at the same table. Everyone of us should come with one suggestion about how to fit UX people into the scrum teams better.
Here is what’s been said.
Scrum Masters:
* Geir Amsjø: Use Feature Times (and sprint 0)
* Sergey Dmitriev: UX people can swallow their pride and contribute to the backlog
* Johannes Brodwall: UX people should become more versatile, so that they can contribute more
UX people:
* Jon Gunnar Wold: Developers should know their responsibilities
* Fredrik Matheson: Product Owner should be a pro
* Anders Fagerhus: UX people should stay one sprint ahead of developers
We had a really great talk and I want to thank all the participants. I also enjoyed talking to the audience in the free minutes: Miguel Calix (nice chat about combining PO and SM roles) and Marit Søholt Stokes about the importance of making the contracts better by having a paragraph or two about the customer responsibilities as a Product Owner (I really wanted to do a followup on this one).
