A List Apart

Issue № 359

The best digital products are human—in content and in design. Learn to keep it real with product discovery and fluff-free content.

Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery

by Rian Van Der Merwe ∙ 4 Comments

Brasília is a remarkable, bizarre city. An architectural gem built to be Brazil’s “shiny citadel,” it’s now known as a violent, crime-ridden, and congested city—because the architects who designed it weren’t thinking about the millions of people who would live there. This myopia echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where we see monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them—and the VCs who are scouting them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rian van der Merwe shows us how to discover before we build.

Being Real Builds Trust

by Steph Hay ∙ 23 Comments

Tons of products and services are the best, easiest, simplest, smartest things ever. They also all increase profits, decrease costs, and save you time. And as a result, they all sound the same. These kinds of qualifiers overrun our content because we’re constantly looking around at what everyone else is doing, rather than being honest about who we are. But trust inspires confidence, and it’s confidence that compels decision-making. Steph Hay shows us how to win customers by being real with our content.

More from A List Apart

Columnists

Rachel Andrew on the Business of Web Dev

You Can’t Do Everything

In any given day I can find myself reading up on a new W3C proposal, fixing an issue with our tax return, coding an add-on for our product, writing a conference presentation, building a server, creating a video tutorial, and doing front end development for one of our sites. Without clients dictating my workload I’m in the enviable position of being able to choose where to focus my efforts. However, I can’t physically do everything.

From the Blog

Matt Mullenweg on Yahoo-Tumblr

“We’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain.”–Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

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