Jared M Spool News & Articles

As designers, we rely on communicating detail to our teammates and collaborators. Sometimes a picture is a thousand words, but often, we need more words and explanation to make those diagrams effective.

We had a chance to sit down with Dan Brown, the co-Founder and co-Principal of EightShapes, to talk about his experience with creating successful annotations. Here's what he shared.

Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse.

While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form's design made a noticeable difference in business. "You mean like $300 million of new revenue?" I responded. "Yes, like that." said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book.

In hard economic times, web-based applications are now an important element in an organization's survival and growth strategy. Recessions are all about cutting waste and focusing in on activities that will have immediate, positive outcomes.

Whether they are public-facing or used internally, web-based applications can touch every business function. Because of their inexpensive deployment and their ease of updating, they are ideal for short, targeted activities.

In a recession, these benefits become magnified. The trick, when developing web apps in a tight economy, is to keep your eye on the ball. When the team is focused on ensuring their designs produce solid business results, they get solid management support and help the organization keep things moving.