My book, Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design, is now officially available for shipping from the warehouse, so those of you that ordered it through Amazon should be receiving your copies very soon.

Enjoy, and thanks for your support!

Got this book the other day, called Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design. It’s a humorous look at the everyday art of instructional design. Icons, signs, diagrams, instructions, and the like.

The authors found everything from technical diagrams from decades ago to pamphlets they stole from airplanes, and put it all together into an incredible collage of the things that make no sense at all and the things that get us through the day without getting killed.

Pick it up if you can and see how to apply it to the web. Applications that use signposts to guide people towards doing the right things work better than those that don’t, and this book is chock full of examples and inspiration.

In the past few years, I’ve become pretty damn good at turning one success into another, and I thought I’d share the strategy.

After my first (and only) review of a book proposal, way back as an unknown Flash geek, I mentioned I wanted to write, and the publisher asked me to turn in a proposal. Result: two chapters in Flash MX 2004 Magic. I did a good job on that book and bailed the publisher out of a jam at the tail end of the production process. Result: they recommended me to Lynda.com, where I worked on two other books and did a course and made some friends.

When I wrote the Flash Player detection article for Adobe (Maromedia at the time), I referenced a page on my site where I had implemented the technique on an eReader application I built. Result: ongoing (to this day) traffic to a page about a book I want to write someday called The Web Commandments.

Later, I wrote a series of articles for InformIT called “Designing the Obvious”. The publisher asked me, after turning in the very first article, if I’d be interested in turning it into a book. Result: the book. It’ll be out next week. Looking for an opportunity to promote the book, I pinged the editor from InformIT to see what I could do next. She proposed I write a second series of Obvious articles, this one as a series of clinics about how a web app measures up against the principles dicussed in the book. Result: the first one should appear online in a few weeks.

I could go on like this all day. (Of course, the best part about all this was being able to pay it forward by getting a couple of deserving friends into the publishing world to fulfill their own dreams.)

The point? When you have a win on your hands, don’t stop there. Find the next one. There’s always a next one. It’s usually right there, right in front of you.

You know that thing people say about not pressing your luck? They’re wrong. Do it. Press it.

You can now download a sample chapter from my new book, Designing the Obvious.

Need I say more?

Go - go now!

Today I attended an internal product training session - the one they teach to new employees in the call center. I’ve worked at GoDaddy for about 8 months now (as the lead of the Usability team), and I thought it would be interesting to see how new team members react to all the web apps and the overload of information.

Turns out the instructor gets students to actually use most of the applications. He hands out a list of tasks to perform in the apps and gives them time to complete the tasks. This lists ask students to complete just about every task we’ve ever tested in usability testing sessions.

My boss and I quickly saw the potential. They’re not targeted customers, these new hires, but they are people experiencing the applications for the first time. We had a built-in pool of testers this whole time and none of us knew it.

So, we’re going to create a short survey for each student to complete after using each application for the first time, as well as a survey about the student (so we can organize the results according to user type and such). We’ll use it as a success metric with which to create a baseline for rating each application.

At the very least, this constant and ongoing stream of feedback will help us show the rest of the company which apps need to be made highest priority at any given time and justify the resources needed to run those projects. At most, it can help prove to the company how vital the work my team does is to the success of the company.

When the right hand meets the left hand, good things happen. So what’s going on in your company that you don’t know about?