Writing for Business Owners
Two Decades of Insights (And Still Going)
I’ve written more than a hundred articles about business, marketing, branding, and design for publications like Inc. Magazine and others, as well as for my own various blogs and websites.
“James consistently amazes me with his insights on design, marketing, and business process.”
—Troy Busot (Founder & CEO, Athlinks)
Articles
What’s Your Business Really All About?
“From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. From the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” (Roy Spence) Figuring out your company’s purpose is no easy task. There’s no formula for it. It’s subtle, and it takes a while to reveal it, identify it, and...
Are Wireframe Diagrams Obsolete?
I’ve been in the web industry long enough to have gone through a lot of major shifts, and we’re in another one of them right now. We’ve reached the end of the wireframe era. For those not familiar with the concept, a wireframe is a structural diagram of a digital page...
What is Design Thinking?
There’s a common thread between companies like Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Netflix and others that have successfully overturned decades of convention and built business empires around solutions that rendered their competitors almost instantly...
The 5 Key Customer Motivators
Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they...
The 50 Most Popular Brand Colors
While working on a branding project a few weeks ago, I happened to wonder what colors were most frequently used in brand identities. I started poking around online, feeling sure someone had already done this research and neatly organized the results. However, I wasn’t...
Product Design as Haiku
You probably already know roughly what haiku is — a Japanese form of poetry that roughly follows a pattern of 5-7-5 syllables (or, more technically, morae) — but you might not be aware of some of the more subtle constraints of this exceptionally restrained style of...
Project Management? Try Expectations Management
You take your car into the mechanic. They’ve told you it’ll take about an hour to fix, so you sit in the waiting room half-watching Fox News and flipping through an old issue of Car and Driver until they finish.Half an hour passes.Forty-five minutes.An hour.An hour...
The Hamburger Menu Doesn’t Work
This is a hamburger menu: It’s called a “hamburger” because it it looks roughly like a bun-meat-bun sandwich. (Others have insisted that it looks much more like a triple hot-dog, but they’ve thus far been unsuccessful in winning the public’s hearts and minds.) The...
Why Business Owners Fear Customer Research
Customer research is fundamental to the design process. It’s been well established that relying on assumptions alone leads us to make biased decisions that often fail to reflect the reality of the customer’s needs and wants, leading to poor results (including reduced...
The Experience IS the Product
Inexperienced marketers tend to fall back on a benefit-focused approach, believing they’ll win customers by listing their virtues (better products, better customer service, technical improvements, etc.)Unfortunately, most practical benefits don’t address the issues...