022 : Why you should have started a blog yesterday

Dann Berg by Michael ShaneIn this week’s podcast episode, I share how I escaped the retail world and got into tech journalism. It’s all because of a little personal website I started. I also explain how you, too, can benefit from starting your own website — even if you don’t want to get int journalism — and how to do it.

This is a special edition of the podcast because there’s no guest, it’s just me! I ended up getting so much feedback and so many questions about last week’s podcast that I wanted to tell my story in more depth.

If you don’t yet have your own website, you need to listen to this episode. When you’re ready to get going, I’ve embedded the first tutorial in my video course.

If you found this helpful, please use my Bluehost affiliate link to get your hosting and domain!

Check out the rest of the videos here!

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014 : The User Doesn’t Always Need It Easy with Mona Patel

Mona Patel Motivate DesignYou probably have an idea for an app or website, and you think that people would use it, but how can you find out what will really happen when you put your product out into the world? The field of user experience is about way more than laying out websites so they’re easy to use — it’s a combination of design, psychology, and science. You have to do research, create a hypothesis, test your hypothesis, and change accordingly. You have to figure out what the user really wants to do.

This week on the podcast, I talk to Mona Patel, the founder and CEO of Motivate Design and UXHires. We talk about what it’s like to found and run a UX agency and what entrepreneurs can do to instantly improve their user’s experience. We even peer out into the future a little, and Mona shares why she thinks virtual reality will completely change the way people experience the world. She says something I have never even thought about that completely blew my mind.

This episode will help you stop building products and start building products that people will actually use.

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It’s time to help your users do less, not more

We’ve just about reached the tipping point. The major technology companies of tomorrow won’t be focused on allowing users to do more — rather, they will allow us to do the same number of things but require much less work.

The internet gave rise to monster first-generation companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a slew of gaming and coupon businesses. These companies allowed people to do things and they could never do before, like keep in contact with all of their friends, stay up to the minute with global news, and farm little multiplayer digital worlds no matter where they were. These companies are all about doing more.

But there is a limit to how much we as humans can do in a single day. It was easy for these companies to acquire user’s attention when the Internet was still young — simply because there wasn’t that much competition. Now, we are running out of new things that people want to do digitally. Continue reading