An uncommon guide to designing user interfaces and interactive application prototypes using Apple Keynote
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How to prototype iPad apps in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote
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How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours
Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post last June became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats:
- Total time spent creating the minimally viable product: less than 3 hours
- Total startup cost: $47.50 ($5 hosting, $7.50 domain, and $35 wordpress theme)
- First paying customer within 10 minutes of launch
- Copies downloaded in the first 60 days: 1,491
- Page views on the original blog post: 40,894
- Unique visitors to Keynotopia: 19,235
- Link backs/mentions: 769
- Total product returns: 2
- Total variations/tests on the landing page: 29
- Made it to Google’s first results page in less than 2 weeks for the following search terms: iPad prototyping, iPhone prototyping, Android prototyping, Keynote prototyping, Keynote wireframes, …
- I’ve never sold any products in my life (except my old laptops on eBay and CraigsList).
The story:
I pressed the update button and took a deep breath. The website was finally online, and a surge of questions rushed to my head: What if it’s not good enough? What if people call me an opportunist for redirecting the blog post to a product page? What if no one wants to buy it?
How to create interactive iPad app prototypes in 30 minutes
How long would it take to go from idea for an iPhone or iPad app to a 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 learning any new tools or programming languages?
What if you can send your prototype to friends to play with and give you feedback, without having to install anything on their mobile device?
What if you can integrate your prototype into your presentation, and click through it to show your audience how it works, rather than boring them with bullet points?
And what if you can do all this without touching a design tool or writing a single line of code?
Docverse acquired: An Inspiring Success Story
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.
Customer Development Hacked: How to find and interview 10,000 customers in one day
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?
Which moment does your product own?
During a pitch practice at the Founder Institute, I heard something that really captured my attention and inspired me to think about product stories in a new way. After describing a scenario, the founder in the hot seat said:
“… I want to own that moment.”
I started thinking about which successful products own which moments in my daily life. Here are some examples:
- ” I want to share some files with my team”. DropBox owns that moment
- “I’d like to show you how I am imagining this interface”. Balsamiq owns that moment
- “I want to embed a form in my blog”. Wufoo owns that moment
- “I want to create a cool slideshow for my website”. Animoto owns that moment
- “I am starting a new client project”. BaseCamp owns that moment
- “I’d like to know what my friends have been up to lately”. Facebook owns that moment
- “I’d like capture some thoughts.”, Evernote owns that moment.
The eagle who lived as a chicken
One day a young eagle fell off the nest and was picked up by a farmer. The farmer was kind enough to bring the small bird to his barnyard so that it doesn’t perish. The young eagle found a good home with the chicken and grew up believing he is a chicken. He waited for the farmer to bring food, he quacked when a chicken laid an egg, and he enjoyed running around and sitting in a hole in the ground on sunny days. Life was good and comfortable, and the eagle’s wildest adventure was to run under the fence with his friends to that cliff where they looked at the mountains and wondered what lied on their other side.
If you love something, give it away
There is very little for me to say after watching this.
Listening
Today I asked myself: Whom am I listening to?
Every day, I am presented with dozens, if not hundreds, of voices and opinions.
The voices of news anchors, journalists and bloggers.
The voices of book authors and narrators.
The voices of actors and show hosts.
The voices of my teachers.
The voices of my family and friends.
Home
“Welcome back home”, the immigration officer smiled, before handing me back my green card.
I dragged my luggage and started walking across San Francisco International airport.
“Home?”, I wondered. “Is this now home?”
When we travel to different places, we typically have a place to return to. That’s typically home.
But those who move away from a place where they lived a couple of decades, before venturing to a new one to start a new life, will sometimes find it confusing to call one place or the other “Home”.
And when I sent my notice to the landlord yesterday that I will be moving out, I realized that once again I am moving from a place that I used to call home over the past year, to a new place that I will call home for another couple of years.
Useful advice from Lao Tzu
Act without doing;
Think without effort.
Think of the small as large,
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult,
while it’s still easy.
Accomplish the great task,
by a series of small acts.
Act without doing;
Think without effort.
Think of the small as large,
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult,
while it’s still easy.
Accomplish the great task,
by a series of small acts.
The human side of business
When I first came to the States, I carried with me a lot of stereotypical expectations nourished by the American media that I was exposed to before I arrived. One of them was about medicine. And of course, no show gave a better stereotype about it than E.R. My first month in America proved the medicine stereotype to be completely bogus. When I broke my toe by accidentally hitting the bed frame in the middle of the night, I did what I’d always done when I broke my finger playing basketball: I taped it to its neighbor. But then I thought that I might as well explore the marvels of American medicine and visit a clinic. The conversation went something like this:
