A quick reader’s guide:Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug

Perhaps the best guide to web usability ever written, Don’t Make Me Think is a must read if you build anything that anyone anywhere ever has to interact with. Since its original publication in 2000, Krug’s book has been adopted as the holy word by user experience designers. The premises are surprisingly simple — for instance, you obviously don’t want to make your users have to think about how to interact with your software. But they can be applied at differing levels of difficulty. I was introduced to this book by experts who still keep it on their bookshelves, when I was just beginning to think about user experience.

It’s a very short read — even the second edition, with its three extra chapters, is easy to get through. Don’t Make Me Think is designed to be a very user-friendly book. It’s worth reading all the way through, at least once, but it’s a book that’s meant to be used, even more than it’s meant to be read. When you’re working on a large project, Krug’s book can act as a checklist that you should follow to turn out the best possible product.

Development: Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color?
If you set the background color of a document to “chucknorris” in HTML, the result is a red background. There are plenty of other strings that also produce color, but clearly, Chuck Norris takes precedence.

Funding: Is app-era pricing making software better, or worse?
There are days when app pricing seems like a race to the bottom: when mobile apps are priced at 99 cents, it’s hard go much lower. But considering the cost of creating new features for apps, it seems like the expense of adding a new feature must be more than the value a developer will earn back — which begs the question of whether this pricing model makes for better or worse software?

Operations: Are you out of sync with your values?
Building a company requires building a culture, preferably one that matches up with exactly what you care about. This article from Michael Bungay Stanier discusses what values make sense with your company culture.

Marketing: Better for whom?
Jason Cohen’s most recent post will make you look at the products you build with new eyes. If you’ve ever looked at what already exists in the market and you’ve decided that you can do better, Cohen’s question is crucial. Just who are you building a better product for?

Beyond Tech: And read all over
Jamelle Bouie’s article first appeared in The Magazine, but since its publication there and on Bouie’s site, it’s gotten a lot of attention. Bouie points out the lack of diversity in tech writing, pointing to the very real issues of having access to the networks that help people find jobs in this area, as well as education and other trends that should be addressed. The article has sparked extensive discussion, as well as disagreements from a lot of tech bloggers. Personally, I find the article hard to disagree with.

Our most popular link this week: What it takes to get in “trending startups” on AngelList

How is a business like an apple tree? Sharpen your pruning shears and find out.

Back in July, I wrote about our efforts to bring more focus and discipline to 37signals by parting ways with some of our older products. We were so committed to eliminating nonessential offerings that we decided to sell a service that was generating $17,000 a month in profit. "We're a small company with a small team," I wrote, "and we have to use our resources wisely."

Today, we're about to launch two products. Both of them are significant departures from the way we usually do things. And we have a bunch more ideas in the pipeline.

Whatever happened to that newfound emphasis on focus? Was that a mistake? Did I change my mind?

Let me explain--by telling you about my apple trees.

I live in Chicago but own some property up in Wisconsin. There's an old stone farmhouse, a couple of barns, some majestic oaks, rolling prairie, a river, and a few apple trees.

I've been trying to learn how to properly prune them. The trees are handsome and healthy, but if you don't pay attention, they can grow unwieldy and succumb to a variety of ailments. There are any number of reasons to prune a tree. You might do it to make it look prettier. Or you might trim one area in order to favor other limbs. It could be to cut away disease or to prevent a new disease from taking root. It could be to get the tree to generate more fruit.

So I'm regularly taking a saw or shears to my apple trees. Sometimes, when I'm done, I step back and am not necessarily pleased with what I see. In fact, a freshly pruned apple tree can be a sad sight, looking thinner and weaker than it did before you started. But that's an illusion.

In almost every case, cutting things back is a way of favoring what is left. You help the tree flourish by picking the winners. What's more, pruning opens up new opportunities for your tree. Light gets in where it couldn't before. Air circulates better. And new growth appears. If you did the pruning right, you've given your tree a stronger foundation for the future.

Now, back to my business. A few months after cutting back our product line, something unexpected happened: We sprouted some new ideas. During a discussion about one of our products, a couple of ideas suddenly emerged for new ones. I can't go into specifics just yet, but one is a variation on an existing product, and the other is entirely new, something we've never offered. We're finishing them up right now and are pretty excited.

I am convinced that these ideas never would have emerged had we shied away from cutting some of our old items. Or, to put it in more arboreal terms--as a business, you won't grow strong new limbs if you don't prune the old ones.

In fact, I believe that a healthy company is like a healthy tree: Well-developed roots (your vision), a strong trunk (your people), and vibrant leaves (your products) work together to convert the sun (revenue) into energy (profits).

Hokey? Perhaps. But I often find inspiration in nature. Besides, it's high time we entrepreneurs stop using those hackneyed sports and military metaphors. But that's a topic for another day.

“The desire to empower citizens directly is alluring in principle but can be very problematic in practice,” writes UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller in his latest Baltimore Sun column.

Schaller is referring to the practice of using ballot referenda to impact policy, rather than working through the legislature. He writes, “Last week, top Maryland Democrats announced their intention to make it more difficult to put statewide policy referenda on the ballot. The move is a clear response to Republicans’ success last year in putting to referendum policy questions in the hope of achieving victories the GOP couldn’t win in the legislature.”

But what, exactly, is the problem with this form of “direct democracy”? Schaller suggests, “Policy fights should be won by persuading the public to elect officials who will fight to pass laws, issue orders and appoint judges who in turn rule in accordance with public preferences. Circumventing the checked-power lawmaking process with referenda, or trying to manipulate the referendum process to embolden or thwart the other party, offends our constitutional traditions.” For these reasons, he argues, Maryland Democrats’ efforts to limit referendum access are right on merits, but wrong on motives.

Lisa Moren, Associate Professor of Visual Arts will be speaking as part of a distinguished speaker lecture series for Hexagram-Concordia, a “center for research-creation in media arts and technology,” affiliated with Concordia University in Montreal.

“Moren will present several projects that intersect technologies, phenomena and compelling narratives.” Her lecture and seminar titled “Phenomena, Ecology and Technology” and “Ecology and Economy: The Outback Stock Exchange” respectively, will discuss her personal art projects and works in progress, and their relation to current ecological issues including the health of the Australian Outback, the Chesapeake Bay and the BP Deep Water Horizon oil spill.

Learn more about the presentations, at Hexagram-Concordia’s website.