We have a slightly different perception of what designers are at 37signals. It is not so much about making things pretty as it is about figuring out what things should be and how they should work. That requires looking at the things themselves and not at the frame, or other elements that will fall into place naturally later. Once you have a really good message design, creating the rest in some ways is trivial.

Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals. Discussion on Ruby on Rails, simplicity, UI design, software development (no func specs!) and iterative product development. I liked the concept of the “epicenter design” when laying out an element, work outward from the core of the matter.

Condé Nast’s GQ magazine app, which was released two weeks ago, has ventured into entirely new territory. It’s what Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital, called a “replica” iPhone app because it qualifies with the Audit Bureau of Circulations as a digital edition of the magazine. That means app sales are included in circulation figures as “digital single copy sales.” The app presents the content of the entire December 2009 issue, reformatted and packaged with some exclusive extras, for $2.99 — less than the print edition’s cover price.

Appropriate for any weekly niche publication. Using the mobile capabilities to enhance the core content.

1. Drive: UX practitioners are part of the customer or product owner team
2. Research, model, and design up front – but only just enough
3. Chunk your design work
4. Use parallel track development to work ahead, and follow behind
5. Buy design time with complex engineering stories
6. Cultivate a user validation group for use for continuous user validation
7. Schedule continuous user research in a separate track from development
8. Leverage user time for multiple activities
9. Use RITE to iterate UI before development
10. Prototype in low fidelity
11. Treat prototype as specification
12. Become a design facilitator

I also liked some Agile quotes they had on successful software development:
1. Start sooner
2. Build less software

Passive
Passive organizations are in observation mode. You’re getting the lay of the land. Listening, paying attention, absorbing what’s happening around you. The goals here are to learn what conversations are happening around your company, competition, and industry, where they’re happening and how often, and start laying out your approach in line with what you learn.

Responsive
Responsive companies are taking the first step in engagement online. They’re still listening, but they’re also making forays into responding to the active dialogue. Usually, that means basic responses to company or brand mentions, but it can also mean contributing to industry conversations on social networks that are of interest and strategic focus.

Engaged
At this point, your company is ready to not just participate in existing conversations, but to start a few of your own. That can be anything from starting a blog to foster home-grown dialogue, to initiating conversations on your community or social networks like Ning, Twitter, or a Facebook page. The point here is that you’re leading the conversation, not just following where it goes.

Creating
Creation is a step beyond engagement. It’s more than just conversation. It’s the generation of meaty, useful and valuable content for your community and potential community. Blog posts are the beginning, but here we’re looking at a full content marketing strategy that includes development of independent content designed to be distributed and shared for the purpose of establishing a thought leadership position in your industry.

From a very informative series of articles by Amber Naslund, Community Manager of Radian6, a social media monitoring and metrics software company.

One company, American Express, has a division called OPEN that is exclusively dedicated to the success of small business owners and their companies. The growth of these businesses in turn means that OPEN will succeed, and the company has realized that social media has become a priority for small business owners

The forums initially grew as an extension of live events, face to face networking extended online.

“our goals are the same… to be a media organization that produces great content for our users, wherever they wish to consume it.”

Innovative way to separate markup from content in order to make content more portable for any re-use.

Nice graphic on the evolution of traffic to CNN.com. 9/11 doubled previous highest page views, but elections are always big draws as well. Nice to see the democratic process is still a big concern to a lot of people. (h/t daringfireball)

Shows a disastrous trend line for paper circulation numbers. Comments discuss what events precipitated big decline in 2006, since Internet news has been around for a while, obviously. It could just it took readers a while to cancel local subs since they typically were a small expense.

On the advantage a magazine has in an online world

“What’s interesting to me about magazines is magazine, not just us, but a whole host of other ones tend to be ones where people, you read them leaning back. You read them on the sofa, you’re reading them at Starbucks. Newspapers tend to be things where you’re leaning forward. It’s like the Internet, stuff where you need to get news quickly. We’re a slightly more reflective, and it’s interesting in Britain — is that Sunday and Saturday papers are doing quite well because people have more time to read them.”

Also related to what purists say about the tactile experience of reading an actual book, rather than on screen. The context of having mindful time to absorb/experience what you are reading versus the multitasking crunch of reading emails, news, tweets, etc.

focus on using emerging social technologies for transforming businesses, instead of merely reaching out to customers.

Nice to see the shift from social media as something we “do” to a way to do business better, like BASF. Good links in the article to Anne McCrossan and Gauruv Mishra.