Amir Khella - Stories about design, business and life

Lean Interactive Requirements – The End of Specification Documents

One of my most dreaded tasks as a program manager has been writing product specifications. It seemed unintuitive that, after brainstorming and discovering the details of the user interface and interaction, the best way to describe it all would be screenshots and endless pages of pre-conditions, action, post-condition, edge cases, etc…

I wasn’t surprised that developers didn’t like reading them. Spec review meetings used to feel like one of the scenes from office space – and I didn’t even have my red stapler.

[Video] iPhone running an interactive Keynote prototype

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Many people who downloaded the iPad Keynote prototype asked if it’s possible to create something similar for the iPhone. I spent a couple of hours yesterday to put together a quick prototype for the iPhone – it was my first time, so it took around 30-40 minutes to finish on Keynote and export to the iPhone. I am very pleased with the results:

Cheap and fast interactive web prototypes with Apple Keynote

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Apple Keynote has become my favorite rapid prototyping tool for putting together iPad and web interfaces, and testing them with real users. It quickly replaced all my previous prototyping tools, and I am constantly discovering new tricks and hacks to prototype more productively.

First, let me thank you for all the feedback that you provided about the iPad keynote prototyping. I hope that the hundreds of developers who downloaded the theme template are finding it useful.

As promised in the last post, here are some additional assets (all created in Keynote) that I’ve been using to rapidly prototype web applications and demo them within my presentations.

How to prototype interactive iPad applications in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote

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How long does it take to go from idea to prototype that you can test with users? A month? A week? Few days? How about 30 minutes?

What if you can prototype your next idea quickly and cheaply without using any special wireframing or design tools?

What if you can send your prototype to friends to play with and give you feedback, without having to worry about uploading it to a server or making sure they have the right platform?

What if you can embed that interactive prototype within your product presentation, and click through it to show your audience how it works, rather than overloading their imagination with bullet points?

And what if you can do all this without writing a single line of code?

The challenge with existing prototyping tools is that they require you to become a designer in order to create a good looking, interactive prototype. By taking design out prototyping, you can focus on simply placing components on a page, editing their text, and create links between components and other pages. And contrary to popular beliefs, a prototype doesn’t need to look ugly or rough, especially if you’re presenting it to a prospective client or investor.

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Finding the G-Spot: startup lessons from Lady Gaga

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I was intrigued by Lady Gaga’s latest music video, Alejandro, and I started thinking about what makes her so spellbinding to millions, and whether startups can learn to create their own spellbinding success.

Lady Gaga’s best feature is her voice. Her strong and unique voice will likely capture your attention if you hear to it on the radio; when I first heard Bad Romance in my car, it sounded interesting; it was different than the other songs playing on the station. It broke the monotony of my drive. And the song kept repeating in my head for the rest of the day.

Then there is the form. Lady Gaga consistently delivers each of her songs in a unique style that complements her voice, her feature. Each video is interesting, polarizing, shocking, intriguing and provoking in its own way. You can’t help but watch. And if you can’t watch, you switch it off and later you may talk to your friends about how weird or abnoxious it was. Your opinion would make your friends intrigued enough to check it out, and they may agree or disagree with you. Either way, Laday Gaga made you listen, made you look, and made you talk.

The Apple Hierarchy of Needs

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Docverse acquired: An Inspiring Success Story

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Working with Docverse has been one of the highlights of my career. When I reconnected with Shan and Alex after they moved from Seattle to San Francisco, and heard their pitch, I got totally hooked by their vision for the product; what excited me wasn’t just how great their technology was, but how focused they were on providing the most intuitive and transparent user experience. When I asked them during the kick-off meeting about the limitation of current technology, they both answered – almost at once: “Don’t be limited by what we have. Let’s focus on designing the best user experience, and technology will follow.” And they delivered on every word in that promise. We always refined and picked the best designs to have, no matter how difficult they were to implement. This is the holy grail for any UX designer: to have a carte blanche for envisioning the best thing, knowing that there is a team of wizards who will make it happen.

The Elephant in the Dark: A Story

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Once upon a time, there existed a village that was completely inhabited by blind people.

One day, an elephant came to the village.

Since none of them had ever seen an elephant before, they all gathered around the animal to figure out how it looked like.

Customer Development Hacked: How to find and interview 10,000 customers in one day

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If you’re creating a new product, a question might be lingering in your mind: How do you find the right customers to interview?

Here is one of the traditional methods for conducting customer interviews:

1. Make an educated guess about your target audience’s demographics

2. Look in your contact list and social network for people who might match your criteria

3. Create an online survey and send them to these people. (better, ask them for a phone interview)

4. Ask for more recommendations and introductions.

The biggest flaw with this method is the assumption that your contacts provide a valid sample of your target audience; At best, you might get few answers that help you refine your questions, and your criteria for interviewing future, and at worst, you might end up believing the wrong answers because they happen to support your idea.

So what’s a better strategy?

My four steps to the epiphany: Lessons learned from creating a minimally viable research product

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In the summer of 2004, I had my first entrepreneurship experience in an unlikely place. I was still working on my PhD, when I received an invitation to spend the summer at Microsoft Research. Some of the finest researchers there have been working my topic of interest, and I was eager to see what they’d been working on, and to contribute to it. So I took the blue pill.

After the first day orientation, I went to my mentor’s office to find out which project I’d be working on. When I sat across the desk, he peeked at me through the stacks of research papers and notes, and said with a big smile: “Well, here you are. You’ve got 12 weeks to spend with us, so come up with something useful and exciting!” I looked at him waiting for a specific task, and he proceeded ” You’ve got access to hundreds of researchers and thousands of employees. Make good use of it. Good luck!”. He then introduced me to the rest of the team members, and showed me the way to my office where I would spend the next 12 weeks coming up with the next big thing. Or at least, that’s how I felt back then.

On the following morning, other interns were already printing out research papers, looking at source code, and discussing tasks among their teams. I didn’t even know where to start. I was scared and excited.