dmils4

It sounds simple, but telling them you trust them to make a better product than your mockup helps a lot.

Give them creative freedom to solve your idea in their own way. You may understand the technical specifics and big picture of what you're trying to do, but acknowledging that they know their craft better than you do (that's why you're talking to them) and that you want them to design it out in the way they think is best - just saying that will go a long way. Giving them a mockup helps - but let them know you're ok with their interpretation veering from that.

Obviously if the person you're talking to is an awful designer, nothing will fix it; but if you have a good one - the ideas that will flow will make your product awesome (even if they aren't implemented in the end).

can you do an analysis of the average critic and user rating of movies by studio before WB acquired them, and after? I've been wanting to take a look at that for a while to see if there's any bias (neither result would be too surprising.. but would be fun to look anyway)

Ah - it's working now.

Some feedback points (just my feedback - this all could be wrong):

-the "what do you want to learn" input box should be at the top of every page. It drives your core value add more than any of the other stuff.

-The black/white contrast at the top of every page is very distracting and it's difficult to read. The color contrast aside, the header text on your content pages is unnecessarily too big and bold.

The copy needs some work - here are a few suggestions.

-browse by source: "browse by school" would be much more clear way of saying this (I know - some of these places aren't schools, but it drives the point home more clearly for non-technical people who think of source as an obscure reference to a credit in an annotated bibliography).

-clicking "Create a Plan" takes you to the login page, clicking "Start Sharing" takes you to the public plans page. There are disconnects in the language for both of these that might lead to a confusing user experience. You'll want to fix the language/messaging on the homepage buttons or the resulting page to make sure navigation is more consistent.

-I think the "share" section would be better off as "Add" - especially on the web, share has the connotation of somehow being connected to facebook/twitter/social networking. What you mean here by share (correct me if I'm wrong), is "add your own content to our database".

-I'd also rename "plan" to "schedule". Plan also has a connotation of being associated with payments (pricing plans, payment plans, etc). Which is the opposite of what your site is trying to do. Class Schedule is the more consistent term for what you're doing. Your "public plans" page looks like a pricing template at first glance.

Hope that helps - aggregating and organizing free content is an awesome idea that I've been waiting for someone to execute on for a while!

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"Automated vehicles will be able to travel the same streets and highways as human drivers, with only a red license plate marking them as robots. Once research on those automated cars is complete (which may take years), the Nevada Department of Motorized Vehicles will issue them a neon green license plate – an indication that the robot drivers are good to go."

Red = researching. Green = good to go. Got it.

Cool demo.

Couple points of feedback:

-the word description is bigger than the explore button. I don't think having the word description there is even necessary - it's obvious you're describing each of those companies in that section. I'd make the explore button a little flashier.

-navigation is confusing. Maybe make each of the images open up in a light box instead of creating a new page?

-The layout of all of the elements is a bit confusing - I feel like I'm on an infographic without any method to the madness. You clearly have different sections in here, office pictures, employee testimonials, available jobs, etc. Some sort of order might be helpful, even if it's just a tabbed interface. Might be worth trying out.

Hope that helps - I really like it. The guys at InternMatch are doing a similar thing for companies (http://www.internmatch.com), but they seem focused on college students vs. active full time job seekers.

Yea, there might also be more to this a/b test - they might be targeting users who are somehow prequalified for wallet (not sure how). If they're asking completely random users to enter their cc that would be very surprising.

It's also interesting to note that the primary goal here is cross promoting wallet (vs verifying the users identity).

You can also click the "not now" to opt out, in the test. When I first read this, I read it as Google requiring you to enter CC info to get an account.. not the case.

Nice - maybe enable caching? Seems like when you search for the same band twice, it does the search all over again. Obviously not necessary until there's a more practical use for it. nice job.

I really think (and hope) open source textbooks are going to solve this. While it might be difficult for OS books to catch on in places where there are market pressures from textbook publishers, in the countries this post mentions where the information just isn't available, there's going to be very little pushback/meddling. I'm really excited to see what this open source initiatives can do outside the US.

You might be right about publishers taking a smaller cut and thinking it's better than nothing- but my guess is that the publishers would rather get no cut (while shutting down anyone who monetizes by pirating their content) than let the information be available in places that can't afford it at their inflated prices (and for other reasons, I'm sure - not trying to oversimplify the complexities of this market). Publishers are already mad enough that they don't get their cut everytime Amazon sells a used version of their textbooks. But this is part of what Apple will solve in their textbook initiatives.

Awesome! This reminded me of a mashable article I read about a year ago : http://mashable.com/2011/04/18/qr-code-design-tips/

Kinda crazy that up to 30% of a QR code can be inaccurate, and it will still work.

Hey, real nice landing page. There's a bit of confusion in that your example doc is a tax form (which isn't typically a document you would collaborate on). Some users may be confused into thinking this is a rightsignature/echosign alternative.

Also - I'd probably add an about us page. Might just be me, but websites without an identity make me skeptical why the site was created. I see you guys have posted a blog post but adding something about yourselves can't hurt - especially when you're planning on dealing with people's sensitive info (again - going off the tax form example).

When did you launch this? There's a ton of functionality here - seems pretty well built out.

I liked this post. It's easy to overlook a great job on AT&T/Starbucks part, it is very user friendly.

Another point on this - there are several other coffee chains that offer free internet, but for most you have to ask for a code and it expires after an hour or two. Starbucks avoided that issue altogether, and I think they benefit more from it. It might be an intentional culture thing - by offering uncapped free internet, you risk have people turn your coffee shop into their office, but the customers who are going to turn your store into their office are going to find a way to do it no matter what (even if that means they have to ask for the internet code every two hours).

Have you looked at Ban.jo? (http://www.ban.jo) <-- sounds pretty similar, you might get some interesting insights from checking out their app if you don't know about it already.

It's a lot easier to grow from 1 to 11 than 1000 to 10,000. There's just no substance to your article without actual numbers that back up the increase. It's nice that you see social media as a contributed to your business- and nice that you want to share- but there's nothing actionable in the article.

Reminds me of Clients From Hell (www.ClientsFromHell.net). And a text only version of Dilbert. Nice!

Interesting article - but I don't think the writer gets it.

"We should focus on minimizing the downside of losing so that startup roulette feels less risky. After all, startups shouldn't just be for rich kids who can afford to take a chance on a big idea."

If more risk averse people began starting companies - would the ratio of success to failure change? My guess is that it would. Who knows in which direction.

There's always some BS stat in these articles about the percentage of entrepreneurs that succeed. Without a definition for what a successful entrepreneur is. How is that defined?

This article is a puff piece. Don't waste your time.

There are no hard numbers mentioned here, but your unimpressive facebook and twitter counts could hardly drive any meaningful amount of revenue (facebook: 74 fans, twitter: 105 followers). With those numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if your 1000% increase was an increase from 1 app purchase to 11 purchases.

This is a cool approach.

One tip - I'd make your signup box a lot flashier (the subscribe form and button are pretty subdued), along with adding a clear call to action. It's difficult to understand right off the bat that this is an email list you should join to learn more about how cool startups approach hiring.

"Tired of “nerf battles” and “rockstar developers” in job listings?" is much less clear than saying "Join our email list to learn how awesome startups approach their hiring." and then a byline below that listing some of the startups you've interviewed.

Just my point of view - could be wrong. Hope it helps!

Facts: a few companies have failed to monetize facebook store fronts, so they quit investing resources in them.

Conclusion: Facebook isn't a commerce platform that can succeed.

Facebook works for commerce. Most people just haven't figured out how yet.

Agreed on the rendering being off a bit.

That would be another cool feature for this - to pick your browser/OS to point out browser specifics bugs. There's already http://netrenderer.com/ for IE - but it doesn't let you do anything with the image.

That's obviously a very limited focus for a great general use app, but an idea.

It's more the annotation/cropping feature set that would make it valuable. Currently to mark up a site, I need to go to that site, open skitch, take the snapshot, then edit it in skitch, then save. Then attach it to a gmail message and send (or upload to dropbox and send the link).

If there was a cloud solution that could do all of this, and provide a link that I could just send someone - it's just so much easier.

It's funny - the no.1 selling point for this is that it removes Google ads and "cleans up" Gmail. But Gmail feels a lot more clean WITH the ads. Maybe you need to polish up your screenshots or add audio to the video - I see 11,000 people have this thing installed, it just doesn't feel legit.

My #1 question was "is this going to access my email" - like some Google integrated services do. Buried in your description was the line "This extension will never access, read, store, or transmit your personal data." <-- if that's true, I'd make that the first thing you tell people.

Just some feedback, hope it helps.

I like the concept. A lot.

It would be 100x more useful if you added a set of tools at the right that emulate Skitch, so you could mark up a screenshot and then merge the edits into a new image. I would probably stop using Skitch immediately.

Also - if you're going to use KISSinsights to ask your users questions, ask a meaningful question. The current question is pretty obnoxious. Just my $.02

So apparently Obama hurt entrepreneurs by funding Solyndra because every entrepreneur gives up when they see the government funds their competitor.

Apparently all entrepreneurs quit whenever their competitors raise more money than them. I'm glad an expert in private equity like Mitt Romney could clear that up for us.

MUCH better. You know what would be cool? If you implement an SMS service like Sendhub so people can text themselves the link. Just an idea..

By "testing" you mean.. showing what the image looks like at different sizes? I'm not seeing the point. Maybe I'm missing something though. Maybe changing the description line from "just upload your 512x512 icon image and we'll do the rest..." to something more explicit would help?

"work fast and break things." with "things" being.. the entire internet.

Cool. Yeah, my favorite part of turk is using it for more creative jobs like this, had to ask. You should make this a habit with your blog posts - I'd read every post, just to see how a turker interprets your startup experiences.

Nice one. And that's awesome. Do you have the mturk job writeup? Curious to see how the description matches the actuals.