10 things to do for the success of your web site – the practitioner view

1. Know what is important. 1. Bring users to your site, 2. Ensure usefulness and usability, 3. Maximize trust. You will make much more money trying to bring users to your site and ensuring good usability than trying to have beautiful flash and look. Most users care only about finding rapidly what they are looking for and achieving their goals. They don’t care

On the Size of Font

Just back from SanFrancisco, I was trying to find an address in Montreal.
I had to slow down in order to read the street name. While slowing down, a car almost hit my back bumper! Hope it doesn’t sound familiar but I am sure it happens frequently.

Christine Whitman’s Nuclear Option

This letter was published in Business Week

“Whitman says: “Despite its controversial reputation, nuclear is efficient and reliable.” Yet since 1950 there have been 20 nuclear accidents. One was major (on Mar. 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor) and one catastrophic (on Apr. 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant). How can we say a major nuclear accident will not happen again?

Change Management : A Catch-22

The catch-22

The levels at which impacts of change are major are not understood while the levels at which impacts are minor are easily understood.

Why?

Human Error Part 2: Management Error

You arrive at home after a long day and you rush to prepare food. You turn-on the burner but oups !, you realize that you activated the wrong burner. You feel frustrated and tell yourself “I should have paid more attention”. If it is a new stove, you might tell to yourself “I should have look at the instructions”. Some might even blame themselves for this error.

Human Error Part 1: De la Concorde Overpass

In September 2006, a bridge collapsed in Laval (a Montreal suburb), resulting in 5 deaths. An inquiry, the Johnson commission, is trying to understand this event and prior incidents.

As always, multiple factors are involved in this accident: bad design, shoddy construction, poor repairs and substandard construction materials. These factors are always boiled down to human errors: a design, planning, executions or maintenance errors.

Apple, Steve Jobs, Innovation and Iphone

Apple is as hot topic in the business these days because of the Iphone. Apple’s innovation success is on the front page of The Economist July 9^th edition.

The Economist retains 4 lessons from apple:

1. Innovation can come from outside. In the case of Apple, the GUI (graphical user interface) was invented at the Xerox Park by a group that included Larry Tesler who later went to Apple to work on the Apple Lisa and the Mac. The Ipod OS (operating system) was designed by Pixo, an external firm. To do so, making a