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10 guides that will help you design better products

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They say February is a great month for listing your most popular posts, so here's a list of my most popular UX/UI guides.  Have fun! 1.   The definite guide for writing and designing text in mobile apps Text is an integral part of your design. Handle it wrong and your entire design will suffer. Luckily for you I've collected 40 rules of thumb to help you overcome this challenge.  No, don't thank me - read it and share. Be a friend! Link:  40 rules that will help you design your text like a pro .  Bonus link: 13 additional tips for improving your UX writing (with examples) 2.   How to design data tables that don't suck Every serious product has at least one big data table, and yet, too many B2B products fail to deliver decent user experience in their tables.  What's so special about this guide? Nothing. Besides the fact it's the best guide out there.  Link:  20 rules guide for creating user-friendly data tables and grids . 3.   The all-in-one guide to high-conver

Five product management guides to start the week with

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Feeling nostalgic, I decided to round up my top 5 product management guides. It's a quick trip down memory lane with my post popular posts. Let's dive in!  1. Product-led Growth Product-led growth has been around for years, but many product managers still struggle to implement it properly. I've put together a short guide to kick start my reader's knowledge about PLG - so if you're not sure about it - this 10-minute read will get you up to speed. Link: Product-led growth - the pocket guide every product person should read 2. MVPs Fed up with the endless "Is this really an MVP?" debates? Jump into my ultimate list of MVP flavors and settle those disputes once and for all. Link: 10 shades of MVP (or: how to develop a product without developing a product...) 3. Early adopters Noticed a shift from your first users to the later ones? You might be in the early adopter's trap. Dive into my guide on early adopters and their impact on your product's success.

Same data, different stories: How to manipulate the graphs to support your narrative

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  Know that feeling when you're trying to create a narrative and support it with data, but data doesn't play along?  We’ve all been there, tweaking our graphs a little bit - stretching here, bending there… massaging the data to support our story and emphasize the trend... without lying of course. Manipulative graphs are 100% accurate but misleading. They show true data but go through some “tweaking” to better support the story being told.  In this post, I’ll teach you the dark art of manipulating your graphs without losing too much credibility.  And if you’re on the receiving end, this post will help you  spot dishonest graphs  immediately, so nobody could fool you with those cheap tricks.  Spreadsheets and reports lovers - this post is for you! Data trimming  They say trimming split ends can make your hair look healthier. It's the same with graphs.  For example, if your sales are slowing down, you can drop the most recent 1-2 months. If someone asks, you can always say y

The host syndrome: what is it and how to avoid it in your product

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Imagine you walk into a barbecue party and just when you’re about to grab a beer and sit down with some old friends - the party host jumps at you, gives you a long tour around the house, brags about the renovated pool, forces you to try out all the appetizers, and introduces you to his neighbors that you’ll never see again.  I call this phenomenon " the host syndrome ”. The host syndrome happens when the host tries too hard to impress the guests and make them aware of the efforts made to arrange the party and appreciate things nobody cares about, usually resulting in the exact opposite.  Like many  cognitive biases , the host syndrome creates a blind spot that turns the host into an annoying creature. This phenomenon can be found in software products too. For example, product creators (AKA the hosts) often push their product features too aggressively, causing their guests (AKA the users) to feel uncomfortable and lose interest.  Let me walk you through the hosts' metaverse (w

These tools will boost your ChatGPT productivity in 2023

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Unhappy with ChatGPT standard app? Feel like getting much more out of this amazing Generative AI technology but the tool slows you down, or is not friendly enough?  Check out these alternatives/additional tools to get more out of ChatGPT: run multiple prompts in parallel, add fresh data to your chat results, and get inline links to the original sources - enjoy!  1. ChatGPT + fresh content + source links = Bing! Wow! Microsoft has been pushing Bing and Edge aggressively since the AI craze started, and I'm impressed with the results! I installed Microsoft Edge on both my Mac and iPhone and activated the integrated Chat module. So now I have the new Bing (which is basically ChatGPT on steroids) as a standalone app, available on desktop and mobile - for free!  Bing adds some nice features to the chat experience such as inline links, sources, and follow-up questions - those extra features provide a superior user experience to the standard (and pretty lame) ChatGPT. Here's what happ

The Visionary's Curse is real. Here's how to deal with it

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  Ever worked with a CEO or a founder who went so far with their vision that it made you lose faith in them?  Or maybe it was you caught in a situation where your employees didn't share your vision?  It's called The Visionary's Curse ; a phenomenon that refers to the tendency of visionary leaders, entrepreneurs, and product managers to become overly focused on their product vision and ignore important feedback and data points that may contradict their assumptions and indicate that their product is not meeting customer needs or is not viable in the market. “Being a visionary is a blessing and a curse, you're blessed to see things other people are not able to see but you are cursed to sit in it alone” -- David Banner The curse is real and dangerous   It takes endurance and persistence to build successful products, but going overboard can backfire in various ways:   Leaders get caught up in their own assumptions and ignore market feedback  The vision becomes too big to fee

New job? New rules! 4 don'ts when entering a new workplace

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Some things should not happen in a new workplace...  Entering a new workplace is a professional challenge, but it's also a tough social exercise.  Here are a few things you should NOT do in the first few weeks on the job:   1. Don't share your thoughts with anyone Keep a low profile.  Even if you see problems right away and want to jump in and fix them, try to keep your thoughts to yourself. Your coworkers may have been dealing with these issues for a while now, and don't need the opinion of an outsider who has yet to be there to understand the whole context.  Talking too soon will make you sound arrogant and make a bad first impression. So shut up.  Life tip: before you speak up, make sure you know the topic, know the audience and have something meaningful to say.  That's right, and as a new member, you probably don't know enough about the topic, don't know who you're talking to, and might say something stupid... So instead of speaking up, write down your

How to summarize any webpage using Siri and ChatGPT

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[ UPDATE : as of April 2023 , using the ChatGPT API requires a paid subscription. See instructions below] TL; DR: OK listen up! This little shortcut is a game-changer! It takes anything you have: a link, clipboard text, or sharing of a website and uses ChatGPT to provide different types of summaries according to your need!  So if you're looking for a way to summarize long web pages (or long text blocks) into short summaries or bullet lists - there's finally a shortcut for that. The shortcut is really flexible and can help you in various scenarios so keep reading for more information about how to use it.  Install Smart Summarizer (Don't forget to place your API key in the right place 👇) The long version + how to configure The shortcut scans the content of any given website and summarizes it using an opening, a list of bullets, and a closing section.  This shortcut can be used from any web page (from your iPhone or Mac) through the Share menu (you'll have to add it to yo