That consumer (and prosumer) products ultimately succeed because of how people feel about themselves using them. Ego analytics, surprise and delight, and hooks to appeal to our laziness, vanity, and selfishness in the first mile of product experience are the biggest secret in product.
Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checki... See more