Category Archive
for: ‘Design’

During the last startup weekend, a friend pointed me out to a fun tool for creating  typographic word clouds called wordle. Today, I decided to play more with it and I gave it the testimonials that clients left in my LinkedIn profile.

After some tweaking to the fonts and colors, here is what the output looks like:

Click on the image to see it in full resolution.

Few weeks ago, one of my friends asked me to help him hire a full time designer for his startup. As it takes a theif to spot a thief, it takes a designer to spot a designer.

There are of course questions that I ask about the person’s background, experience, style and ethics. There are the common questions that I ask in every design interview: describe a product you love, how would you improve it, describe a feature you hate, how would you fix it, etc…

But the one question that helped me spot a bad designer has been the simple request of redesigning something common and simple. Like a pencil.

This is probably one of the trickiest design questions because it doesn’t involve much design. Pencils have been arounds for centuries, and people are very comfortable using them. Is there something wrong with them? I don’t know. But that’s what I’d like the person I am interviewing to ask. This question is mostly about measuring the designer’s ability to ask good questions. The quality and quantity of these questions will help me understand how much the designer wants to understand who he audience is, how they use the product, what they like about it, what they hate about it, how much they are willing to pay for a better pencil, etc…

Design, like many things in life, is about getting over one’s previous experience, learning and conditioning to open one’s mind to different possibilities. When I was at school, I wasn’t taught to ask the right questions, but to find the right answers for the questions I was given. In learning design, I learned that the quality of the answers I am getting depend on the quality of questions I am asking. And that the sooner I reach an answer and I decide that it’s the right one, the more I close up the potential for innovation and creativity in finding the best solution.

Next time you interview a designer, ask them to redesign your favorite product, and listen carefully to the questions that they ask. The more curious they are to learn about you, not just the product, the better chance they have in helping you get your product design done right.

Last year has been good. It’s been actually good beyond our wildest expectations.
We met great people, worked with amazing startups, and enjoyed designing a wide range of exciting products and services.

Here are some of the highlights of 2008:

• In January, blist was shown to the public for the first time in Demo 2008.  Blogs raved about the product, its slick user interface and its ease of use, and Kevin Merritt’s presentation became the #1 most watched video on DEMO’s website. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences for us given the amount of work and number of iterations that were put in the product up to that point.
• In February, we started working with Delve Networks (formerly Pluggd) on their new platform and user interface. We worked with the executive and product teams during 6 months to create user experience roadmaps and innovative UI and interactions. In June, Delve showcased their new user interface which was received with great praise and provided the company with a competitive edge over existing platforms.
• In February, we also started working with inCampus on the new version of the product. We provided them with strategic design and product planning advice that helped them compete against existing products and win student’s audiences in several universities.
• In May, we started working with UStream TV on the redesign of their product. UStream is one of the most fun and exciting team to work with. Two months later, UStream released a redesigned homepage, and numerous social and viral features were added to the site.
• In August, we met with the DocVerse team who told us about their plans to take over the document collaboration world. We loved their vision and charisma so much and committed to helping them realize it. DocVerse was one of the product that we surprised ourselves with the outcome, being one of the most fruitful and elegant projects we’ve worked on so far.
• Finally, in September, we started working with Stuart Skorman and his team to bring the ClerkDogs vision to reality, solving many conceptual and visual challenges and accelerating the product release, which was raved about in the press and blogosphere.

At the end of the year, we realized that we worked on a social mainstream database, a media publishing platform, a social commerce application, a web streaming site,  a document collaboration software, and a movie recommendation engine.

That’s a handful of diverse projects that we never imagined working on in just one year. And we learned a lot from working with driven, positive entrepreneurs who want to change the world. Their charisma has been a constant inspiration to us, and their attitude towards problem solving always reminded us why we are doing this in the first place.

But what we learned the most, is that no matter what we are designing, the goal is the same: to empower people to do more than what they imagined themselves capable of doing in the first place. To make them unleash their creativity and enjoy some blissful moments of flow. To create extensions of their minds that enable them to express themselves and connect with others.

That’s the power of good design. And that’s what we strive for in every moment.