I recently heard an interview with Jim Jarmusch in which he talked about how he considers himself an amateur filmmaker, even though he’s been making movies since the early 1980s. Being an amateur means loving your craft. I’m in. I’ve been a UX designer for a number of years, and what Jarmusch said really clicked with me. (Photo credit: Catherine McGann, 1996)

Curate will automatically generate a newsletter based on the content our customers are already consuming and sharing on their mobile devices. This is an article I wrote about how I stayed focus on the needs of the customer while designing Curate.

As a “startup,” our team was the perfect testing ground for a new way (well, new to us) to develop a product. Via the lean startup model, we knew that staying inside of a customer feedback loop was going to make the end product much stronger, which we all wanted. We took this idea one step further, because we decided that everyone on the team — developers (devs) included — were going to be exposed to user research in real time.

If you’re running a small business, your digital marketing is likely an important part of your business. Which means it’s a really good thing if people share content from your website or blog with their own networks. What condition is your metadata in?

I wanted my beta study participants   to take conversation cues from each other; my hypothesis being they would perhaps be more open, even unguarded, with each other than they would be with a research moderator like me. I wanted to become an enabler of the conversation, but not be looked to as the controller of it; that’s stifling. I wanted shared humanity.