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Archives for June 2013

Google Reader Alternatives

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With Google Reader shutting down on July 1, here are the best alternatives in my view.

If you read this blog by RSS, thanks for subscribing and don’t let the Google Reader shut-down get in your way with keeping up! So here’s some info on how to make the switch to a good Google Reader replacement.

Feedly

It is super easy to switch to feedly. It easily transfers all of your Google Reader feeds, and the interface is very similar to Google Reader. Just go to the feedly site and it should be self-explanatory.

Digg

Digg has also launched a new reader that looks like it has a lot of potential. It looks like they are adding users in batches, so if you enter your email they will notify you when they are ready to add you.

Here’s more info on the Digg Reader.

General Info

And here’s a very helpful article from Tech Crunch giving an overview of Feedly and Digg Reader and some other alternatives.

 

Christians in Silicon Valley

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A good article by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today on how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are taking a leap of faith to create technology that makes you more human.

It turns out that there are lots of Christians in Silicon Valley, and it is very encouraging to see how they are thinking about things and what they are doing.

Here’s a key part that gets at the essence of what Crouch has found:

Like the other Christians profiled in this story, Saber and Munro are not in the least interested in starting or running a “Christian company.” And also like the others, they relentlessly ask how their Christian faith shapes the company they have founded and run.

That’s a conjunction that I find very interesting. These Christians have a holistic perspective. They realize that the gospel matters for all of life, and yet also realize that the gospel calls us to avoid being spiritually weird (for example, promoting yourself as a Christian company while doing bad work, and not realizing the mismatch). The gospel is to shape the things we do in real ways, not artificial ways.

This is a much better testimony to the gospel than the guy who hands out tracts at the water cooler but who nobody wants on their team because he doesn’t realize that God wants him to actually care about his job.

Here’s another great quote:

We see business as a powerful instrument for aligning the human experience with its original design….Poverty, sickness, environmental degradation—we think God cares about these things and wants to be involved. So we believe he will be present when we ask.

Well said!

Steve Krug on Usability

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Here’s a great presentation on usability by Steve Krug, the foremost expert on the subject by far. 

The focus of this presentation is on the importance of user testing. Most of the time, user testing never happens; or, when it does, it is done in way more detail that it needs to be, with scientific analysis of the results and a long report, costing about $10,000.

However, you can be just as effective with user testing by just testing three users, watching how they use your site while they think out loud (that’s the key). With just three users you will identify far more problems than you have the resources to fix anyway. Identify the top three, address those, and you will have made a significant impact.

Last: don’t do user testing as an add-on at the end. You need to do it throughout the process. If you do three rounds throughout the development of your product (website or anything else–I think all products should be user tested, even building layouts), fixing the top three problems identified after each time, that would be huge.

If you want to save time, the best way to watch his lecture is actually to click through the slides at the bottom. And, for more detail on what makes for good usability on websites, see his excellent book:

 

(HT: Matt Heerema)