This was some interesting user research Dawn uncovered about how people wash dishes today vs. when Dawn was invented.

My jaw dropped from surprise. From years of "the customer is always right" and "just say yes.". It isn't customary to hear someone say to one of your customers "It doesn't sound like you should even be paying us". My reaction wasn't from someone being abrasive to my customer. It's shock from someone sowing doubt in my customers mind why they even bother paying me.

I look at this discussion here. You're arguing with me. I haven't felt it abrasive at all.

It's not something I'm advocating.

Thanks for reading the post Jim! I think "agitate" and "aggressive" might be strong words through that don't describe what I'm actually encouraging. I'm pretty sure our customers don't get that feeling from us. There are ways to challenge people's thinking without making them feel like we're "aggressive" and we just want to fight. I realize though in the wrong hands that nuance might be tough. And given the media/political climate we live in today: I can see why "argue" = "aggressive"vs "argue" = "debate". But you are definitely right. I don't argue that anyone should be intentionally aggressive or agitate their users :)

Hey James, thanks for the reply! Well, it's not exactly easy. I've been doing design optimization for years. You should see the stuff we tried at Highrise that never got to see an article because it didn't move the needle.

As for proof, there's not much else I can give you because I'm not going to share at this time my Google Analytics screenshots. That might be a great idea though. I'm just not ready to give our competitors everything about our business. But one bit of proof hopefully is my track record of sharing the wins and the losses over my career. For example, I've shared the wins of marketing I've had with Highrise like this 35% bump

https://m.signalvnoise.com/marketing-design-how-we-got-a-35-bump-in-our-conversion-rate-at-highrise-96abe6d91818

And the things I screwed up:

https://m.signalvnoise.com/choking-under-pressure-what-we-can-learn-from-those-who-have-and-how-to-avoid-it-9234916dd1fb

And funny enough I have an article coming soon about screwing up our conversion rate just recently with another experiment.

As for the common design methods, they sure are! But of course, no one seems to do them. I also have a series of landing page design videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoU-PFauVXDYyzRz2bUMHj2JbuR8M6cWn) and it's funny how often I repeat myself. Just because it's "common" for you and me, doesn't mean all the folks looking to learn how to design their businesses better know this. I think that's a big problem for a lot of us. We think everyone knows all this stuff we know, so it's not worth teaching or blogging. "Everything goods already been said" Right? Sure seems that way to me too sometimes. But I still go out there showing my own examples, and it proves to reach a pretty large audience who hasn't seen this stuff before about social proof or testing or designing forms.

Hope you stay tuned for more. And thanks again for reading through it all!

Thanks Jay!

Thanks! Yeah pumped about it. The interviews took some deep time and attention, but the changes to the copy were easy after that. The next redesign is taking a bunch more effort. But nice to see easy changes = 35% improvement.

Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products

This is one that hasn't been rehashed over and over. Premise is simple: find tasks people have, create recipe lists of people doing those tasks, remove steps for folks. Really great way of organizing your thought in here on making products people are going to find super helpful. Has been a key thing in my own work.

Hello! Thanks for posting this Gadzhi! I'm happy to help anyone I can with any questions or whatever is on your mind! If there's any questions too that you want Jason or I to tackle on the show, please shout. Would love to fit them into our discussions.

Thanks Paul! Highrise is getting a lot of love too since we've spun off from Basecamp. Please feel free to reach out (nate@highrisehq.com). How can I help? Not just on CRM stuff, but would love to be of service to anyone here in the community.

Where do you go for web design inspiration? Dribbble, etc?

Anywhere but other web sites.

The best places to find inspiration is to look outside of the domain I'm designing for.

Some of the coolest stuff I find other companies making are so far outside of their domain. For example, Wrigley's Gum studies paint (e.g. how do companies create such white paint) in order to find ideas on making better teeth whitening gum. And paint companies are studying nature (e.g. how do lily pads stay so dry) to understand how to create stain resistant paint.

Draft, which has done very well for me, was designed by taking a lot of inspiration from the Kindle Paperwhite. I paid a lot of attention to how Amazon provides menus, buttons, functions on top of reading, while still keeping reading the main focus and without distracting folks with lots of chrome. For colors that I used for the color palette, I spent a lot of time combing through art books and even taking photos of things at the Art Museum in Chicago, namely my favorites from Van Gogh.

And now with Highrise I spend a lot of time looking at anything but CRM/address book software. Instead I spend a lot of time looking at paper notebooks. How do those old Daytimers work or Franklin Covey planners. How does my parents rolodex of index cards work for them so well still today?

Of course I'm still looking at Dribbble and all the other web sites I come across to stay fresh. But the true bursts of inspiration I got creating things like web software for writing, was looking at anything but other writing programs and web software.