Insights from Nebo

1. 5 Simple Ways to Get Better at Creative Tasks Faster
2. Why Traffic Signs Don't Work (And What You Should Learn From It)
3. Everyday Life: An Interview with Helge Tenno
4. There's a Difference Between Hiring People and Recruiting Talent
5. 5 Factors That Determine How Quickly a New Idea Spreads
6. Everyone's a Publisher, What's a Brand to Do?
7. The Internet Hasn't Killed Middlemen (And It Never Will)
8. The Best User Experiences Are Invisible
9. The Real Reason Good Companies Have Bad Websites
10. Online, Actions Still Speak Louder Than Words

Publishing

• Favorite Kindle E-Book Price: Free

Visual

• Phillip Niemeyer Pictures The Past Ten Years

Design

• The Beautiful Art of Japanese Web Design

Interactive Marketing

• 10 Signs You Don't Understand Web Analytics

Check back next Monday for some good reads and visuals, or follow us on Delicious for a heavier load.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

- Henry Ford

Focus groups are frequently used to predict consumer reactions to things like movies, tv shows, and new products, but focus groups have a track record full of failures. So why do we keep using them?

According to Daniel Gross, focus groups have become ingrained into our approval process more for the sake of decision makers than for the sake of consumers. Focus groups have fixed costs, are timely, and most often used to affirm preconceived notions: "See, they agree!"

What focus groups don't do is accurately predict how consumers will react. According to Gerald Zaltman, author of How Customers Think, 80% of new products fail within the first six months, many of which go through focus groups.

So, why do focus groups fail? Focus groups fail because:

1. People can't predict what they want and don't understand their own motives for making decisions.
2. Consumers have other motivations for answering and participating in the group than contributing to the end product.
3. Focus groups address symptomatic, surface level issues rather than the root problem.
4. The social dynamics of a focus group have an effect on people's answers. Whether it's because they desire to maintain their image, give the appropriate answer, or just fit in, people often lie when they are put in situations with strangers and asked questions.
5. Focus groups assume consumer input is valid, regardless of the individual's relevant knowledge or experience.

Programming

• why programmers aren't paid according to their productivity.

Design

• The decade in design by Good Magazine

Usability

• According to Jakob Nielsen, usability is like cooking. Anyone can do it.

Psychology

• What Makes Us Happy? The Atlantic's most viewed online article ever.

Check back next Monday for some good reads and visuals, or follow us on Delicious for a heavier load.

This year we got tired of keeping an e-mail list we didn't use, so for the holidays we finally decided to kill it...literally. Take a smack at him if you dare.

There's a new tradition at NeboWeb, and it combines our three greatest passions -- food, thinking, and the web -- all into one exciting weekly morning get together. Each week we'll be having a "Brains and Bagels" cross-functional training session to keep our colleagues educated on the various workings of the office, and we'll treat ourselves to some bagels too, because, well mainly just because we like bagels.

This week's Brains and Bagels session incorporated a high level overview of PPC marketing mixed with a more detailed introduction to creating a successful AdWords campaign. The goal of these sessions is to raise awareness in various departments on what the other departments are doing. That being said, this presentation isn't aimed at PPC marketers, but rather designers, developers, copywriters etc. If that sounds like you, or you're just interested in PPC marketing, enjoy!