Screen sucking is just staring at your computer screen.  You’re not getting anything done, you’re just mindlessly on the computer.

Sometimes we screen suck during our recreational time. It’s late, we’re at home, tired, and we’re just mindlessly surfing the internet.

But often we screen suck at work.  We’re faced with a problem, or we’re overwhelmed with the amount of work in front of us, and we just stare at our computer screens for hours, hoping to “grind it out.”

North America has a “sitting paradigm” for doing work.  Continue Reading →

EVERYBODY STOP. You’ve been sitting at your computer too long. Stand up, and walk away. Look out your window and pause. Take a breath.

“No one will tell you what to do. The secret behind business is that no one really knows what they’re doing. Business people often look like they know what they’re doing, but they don’t. That’s actually pretty empowering for entrepreneurs.” – Ryan Carson

The other day, I was picking my daughter up from a birthday party. The father of my daughter’s friend is an arborist. Essentially, he makes his living pruning and caring for trees.  He’s owned his own business for 12 years.

During our conversation he told me his business story. His first few years as a business owner were really tough. He’d grind and grind and grind, but wasn’t earning a substantial amount of revenue.

And then, he found his solution. He changed his phone number.

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You’ve decided to pay for something on the web. After hours of research, comparison shopping, and trying the demo it’s time to make the plunge. You click “Buy Now,”, enter your credit card information and you’re just about to click “Checkout.” And then you notice it. In the lower left-hand side, a little form field that says “Coupon code.”

You want to pay for this product or service. You were prepared to pay the advertised price; now you know there is (or has been) a magical passcode that could get you a lower price. You fire up Google, and search: “product name, coupon code.” You get pages of results: mostly garbage, some scams, and a few legitimate coupon sites. Unfortunately, the codes listed on those sites are a year old: you missed your chance.

Why do web apps and retailers do this to their paying customers? At the moment you’re actually ready to buy something you get a slap in the face: ”You’re paying full price, but if you had our magic code you wouldn’t have to.”

Simply put: this is bad customer service.

I’m not opposed to running a promotion, or offering a coupon. It’s the optics that matter. Instead of posting this constant reminder on your checkout page, remove the “Coupon code” field.

You can do this differently. Brad Sorensen had these suggestions:

Retailers would do better to give everyone a discount for a period or no one. [Or] instead of coupon codes, they should have separate referrer URLs for people with the code so you don’t feel like the loser who didn’t get invited to the party.

Exactly.

Recently 37signals opened their new office. It’s beautiful and functional… [but] I now believe Zappos’ chaotic and messy offices are much more effective at promoting happiness and innovation. – Ryan Carson, Think Vitamin blog post

In February, Ryan Carson of Carsonified wrote a post that compared photos from two offices: 37signals and Zappos.  His conclusion was that the flamboyant Zappos office produced happier employees.

This was timely for me; in November I was in Chicago and was invited to spend the day at the 37signals office.  Jason Fried gave me a tour, I spent time hanging out with the team, and I had the opportunity to do some of my own work in the office.

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Happy Pop bottle, circa 1983. Image courtesy of the collection of C.A. Weide. http://ca-yd.com

Happy Pop was a huge part of my childhood. Like many others in the Edmonton area, my family would go and pick up a crate of the brightly colored sodas every month or so.

The odd thing about cultural artifacts from the 80′s: you can’t find them on the internet! Search “Happy Pop” in Google Images and you’ll get pictures of Lanvin purses; but no shots of a Happy Pop soda bottle.

I’d searched everywhere; until one day I found Chris Weides’ website.  Chris, who is from the USA, has a huge collection of pop bottles.  I saw that he had a Happy Pop bottle in his collection and asked him if he could send it to me.

So here they are, the only photos I could find of Happy Pop on the internet!

Update: I just found a copy of the Happy Pop logo on Canada’s Trademark Database.

Stand while you work. After months of experimenting at home, I recently built myself a “standing desk” for the office.

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It’s easy to forget about our visitors and focus on what we want in our website: perhaps a pretty design, a robust online catalog, or a flashy animation. Let’s look at your site from your audience’s perspective.
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