Amir Khella

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.

(more…)

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?

(more…)

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:

“… and 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.

You get the point. (more…)

This is a story about a designer who left his corporate wife and fell in love with a startup chick.

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. (more…)

There is very little for me to say after watching this.

Based on a true story

Traffic on the freeway slowed down to a halt that Friday evening. Everyone was coming from the same direction and going to the same destination. After a long sunny week, clouds were starting to gather, looking down at the streets in sarcasm, and preparing the town for another rainy weekend.

He stops his car few inches away from the one ahead of him. He glances at the infinite line of cars that disappears in the horizon and realizes that the week won’t let go that easily. He turns on the radio in search for some distraction from this moment. The same songs that were playing last week are playing again. He turns it off and glances up at the sky. (more…)

There is a popular method used in the East to capture monkeys. The hunters place a bunch of bananas in a bowl with a narrow opening at the top, and they fix the bowl somewhere in the jungle. A monkey passes by and notices the smell of banana coming from the bowl. He inserts his small arm through the narrow hole, grabs a banana and pulls his hand out. But the hole in the bowl is too narrow for his fist holding banana to pass through. The monkey tries pulling harder but he only hurts his wrist against the sharp edges of the bowl. In the meantime the hunters are approaching slowly and confidently. They see the monkey struggling frantically and they smile at the sight they’ve witnessed hundreds of times before. The monkey is holding on to the banana so hard that it’s impossible for him to realize that it is the one thing that is standing between him and his own freedom. (more…)

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.

And the voices of my past and future. (more…)

“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. (more…)