This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

“Do you want people to think your product is awesome…” if you do then you will have happy or maybe even very, very happy users.

”...would you rather they felt awesome about themselves because they used your product”. If you do, then you will have fans. Look at Apple.

I’d prefer something like this: “Your product changed the way how I work”

We struggle with this when making our demos.

First, we hate the cartoony demos that show stereotypical characters and “how clever the animators are.”

Then, we struggle with just this exact thing. We agonize over if the video is about “What the software does” versus “what you can make.” It’s something I’m never fully happy with and I do, literally, stay awake nights worried about this idea.

This is a great point, and one I don’t think I’ve dealt with well enough up till now. I wonder if this idea is part of why the new Highrise design has done so well.

When I worked in sales we were always taught to listen twice as much as we talked. Part of this was so that you understood the prospect’s problems, and part of it was because people like to be listened to. They want to feel important.

I tend to design “out” the product until I have to bring the users attention to something like overdue invoice or the need to approve someone else’s work etc. m

Software should never be a barrier in any way to getting my work done; it should always maximize my efficiency and effectiveness and let me be the star because I was able to complete my work quickly and better than ever before. Software engineers should never fall into the trap of thinking a feature implementation is good because it allows an activity to occur, somehow. That’s not good enough; this isn’t 1980. Accomplish this and you’ll do very well. Almost no one does.

Normally I don’t go for these sayings, but this is interesting, you’ve really got me thinking now. I can think of one of our apps that definitely makes their content look great, another one of ours I’m not so sure about.

Do you know, I still miss Kathy Sierra and the creating passionate users thing.

@Richard SO much! Creating Passionate Users was probably the best blog on the net for many years. I still follow her RSS feed in the hope that it will be revived one day.

I think is a really interesting and possibly even a philosophical question. Can you even separate these two things in a UI? If your App is there to present other people’s information (e.g. Twitter) then it’s all about the content, but it’s also about the App, which is made up of the content…?

And what about the UX?

I’d like Pavel’s quote:

Both those options sound too narcissistic. The goal of any product should be, “This product improved the way we work.”

I am the star of our product and our product is awesome. Did you see the big “W” on Sunday… that is getting it done right there!