Category Archive
for: ‘featured’
How to prototype interactive iPad applications in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote
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.
Finding the G-Spot: startup lessons from Lady Gaga
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.
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?
My four steps to the epiphany: Lessons learned from creating a minimally viable research product
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.
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 User Journey – How to Design for Ecstasy
Yesterday, I read a post on Derek Sivers’ blog about how drama can be mapped on a two-dimensional charts, and I was inspired to think about the user’s journey through a product in a similar fashion.
One of the most useful design practices to create good landing pages is to visualize each website visit as a journey that leads users to a destination. That destination is not just a goal that the user needs to accomplish, but also an emotional state that the user would like to experience.
It’s important to understand that the journey doesn’t typically start when the user reaches a product’s homepage. It starts earlier, when she identifies a need to have or accomplish something, or when she finds a recommendation from a friend or blogger to try a new product. When she comes to the site, she will have many questions in her head that she wants answered.
There is a wide range of emotions that users experience during a website visit, including: indifference, boredom, confusion, disappointment, curiosity, engagement, and ecstasy.
Let’s look at how a good design can create an ecstatic user experience:
From corporate design to startup design: A love story
This is a story about a designer who left his corporate wife and fell in love with a startup chick.
View more presentations on SlideShare.
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.
