Author page: Kim Vallee

The Value of Design: Why Everybody Should Care About Design

value of design

For me, making people’s life simpler, knowing when to think outside of the box, finding a solution that delights the customers while being profitable are at the heart of everything a business should do. This is why I love design. As an entrepreneur, design plays a big role in the toolbox I use everyday to tackle challenges, discover opportunities and solve problems.

Although more and more companies are starting to understand that, we still need to educate executives and business owners about the value of investing in design. This is why I applauded the making of this video by the Design Council in UK. The video explained, in plain language, how adding design to their process can lead to more revenues for small businesses.

Content Marketing: How to Produce Quality and Quantity

balancing quality and quantity in content marketing

There is no doubt that you can’t expect to become influential if you publish something once a week or even, once a day. The need to often produce and publish quality content can be overwhelming for brands. But it doesn’t have to be that hard. Part of the solution is to better manage your efforts. The way that I achieved the right balance between quantity and quality is by being a curator and a content producer. In fact, each function fuels the other.

The first order of business is figuring out what you can do to share relevant tweets, statuses and posts to your followers. What I found out through my consulting work is that companies have many sources of meaningful information that they don’t put to use. This is where collaboration between several business units at your company can save you time.

For example, talk to the people who follow the news on your industry at your company. It doesn’t have to be their official job. Ask them to feed you the best stories to read, to write about and to share with a comment. Most news should not be about you but about topics that are relevant to your customers and prospects. Make sure to tell the people who follow the news what you are looking for so they can bookmark the right stories and pitch you the right ideas.

Preparing Our Kids for the Job Market of Today and Tomorrow

As an entrepreneur, a citizen and a parent, I am concerned about our education system. I question how we educate kids, and more importantly, how we can give kids the best chances to succeed in life and at work. I am not alone with that concern. Homeschooling and the emergence of digital schools are an indication that some parents and students aren’t happy with the current school system.

Many thinkers, like Sir Ken Robinson, are looking at ways to change education from the ground up. Yes, the conversation goes further than whether kids should use a tablet in the classroom. It is the entire system that must be adapted to a new reality. Changing a few pieces at a time won’t work because there will be missing pieces. For example, you need to have applications and train teachers about the possibilities of the iPad. Turning the old books into a digital format won’t cut it. Teachers will need to reinvent how they teach their courses.

What we need to do is rethink the curriculum, the teaching methods, the tools that teachers and students will use, the workshops, and how this impacts the design of the classrooms and the school. We should also rethink the school calendar and the activities. More importantly, we must rethink the purpose of education in 2013 and beyond.

Why Kids Need Day Care on Top of a Family Life

Deciding whether or not to send your baby to day care is not an easy question for parents. When faced with the costs of high quality day care, many parents argue that the take home pay of the second income, usually the mom, is enough to justify the expenses. In my view, they failed to include the benefits for the kids of attending day care in their equation. Here is my thinking.

My role as a parent is to prepare my children to become happy, independent, caring, open-minded and productive members of the society. I believe that being in day care better prepares my son for the real world.

e-Commerce 101: Simple Tips to Convert Shoppers into Buyers

ecommerce basic rules

It is no secret that conversion rate is a main concern for any retailers. Still, I found that many online sites fail at being pro-active when it comes to answering the most frequent questions of buyers. To illustrate what I mean, let me share the online purchase that I made this morning.

I can’t use my KitchenAid food processor anymore because the security element that is inside the main bowl handle is broken. This prevents the motor from starting. Since we couldn’t fix it, I decided a buy a new bowl. I prefer to order it online instead of driving through traffic to get it.

My Job Title Quest

looking for a job title

Like everybody else, I sometimes get stuck on a problem. It is nothing huge but this particular problem bothers me. I updated my job title on LinkedIn several times over the last few months. It is not that I can’t focus. I can. And it has nothing to do with the fact that, as many owners of a new business, I wear many hats.

My problem is that what I do is unique. No matter how many times I looked for inspiration at job descriptions in job search sites, how many times I talked to people about what I do, how many times I sat down to write it down, I can’t find the right job title to describe what I do.

Twitter Cards Fill a Gap in Social Sharing Tools

sharing tools missing source

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to Pulse, Feedly, Share This and similar tools is that these aggregators, readers and sharing tools don’t automatically include the Twitter handle of the author or publisher of the content that you wish to tweet. This self-promotion technique has to stop.

Some will argue that adding the right Twitter handle only takes a few seconds. It is true if you sit by your computer. To them, I will reply that it is another story if are on your iPad or iPhone and you don’t recall the Twitter handle of the author or the publication. Since 30% of Web traffic comes from tablets and smart phones these days, this is not a problem that we cannot ignore anymore.

Why I Would Always Take Great Doers Over Thinkers

reduce waste with smaller team

I started my tech career in a team that averaged 30 to 40 persons. When I became partner of my first software consulting firm, I sought a way to build better quality products in a shorter period of time.

This meant reducing waste. Our methodology relied on establishing strong development standards, rapid prototyping, usability testing, and discussing real-case scenarios with the developers before they started coding. Each project was handled by a small development team. We created a work environment where any team member could easily ask help from the other team members when they needed it. We also established development standards. This was before people heard of agile development and way before the lean startup movement.