Props to Doug for pointing out this free course called Mastering Systems Thinking. Am giving it a go!
Stockport Council published Towards a digital solution to reduce delays in transferring patients to social care.
Hurrah for Adele Gilpin and the West Northants digital folk for working in the open on their new blog!
Dan Hon writes in his newsletter about the imminent enshittification of Substack. This is not news I want to hear. I replied on LinkedIn:
I guess as well as Quora the other comparison is with Medium, which started out offering an amazing user experience for writers and an ok one for readers, but now seems to want people to log in just to read content.
The problem at the moment is that the experience for writers on every email platform I have tried recently has been so awful, it’s pushing people towards Substack, despite the fact that there are these warning signs for readers.
I’ve been coping with the slow death of Twitter by making more use of my blog, and maybe I ought to start archiving newsletters on there too, just to keep an open web version always available.
So expect to see a slew of posts on here soon, copied and pasted from my newsletters 😀
AI isn’t a drill, and your users don’t want holes –
The Tyranny of the Marginal User – this is excellent:
What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user – the billion-plus-first user – and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.