Category Archive
for: ‘featured’
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?
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:
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.
D3 – Designing with Clients
Few months ago, we started experimenting with a new Design workflow that we called D3. D3 stands for Deep Dive Design. Prior to D3, we used a communication-intensive process where we involve clients and users in the input and output of each design iteration: vision, usability metrics, stories, tasks, requirements, brainstorming, sketches, wireframes, and visual designs. The earlier and more frequently we communicated, the better quality designs we got, and the happier clients and users were.
We then thought about raising the communication bar further, and wondered what it would be like to have clients as active participant in the design process. So we decided to invite each client to spend a full week on-site with us. During that week, the client brings marketing, business and engineering team members to our offices and we spend 5-6 hours a day together, working on the following:
Design thinking for startups
During the 2008 web 2.0 expo in San Francisco, I held a round table discussion about design thinking for start-ups. The premise of the discussion was to 1) learn the difference between design (the artifact) and design thinking (the mindset), and 2) to discuss how to integrate best practices for design thinking into the product life-cycle. Start-ups running on shoestring budget cannot typically afford big consulting agencies like IDEO. But that shouldn’t stop them from becoming design-driven, and use the available tools and processes to differentiate through design and user experience. If you’d like to get your company up to speed with design thinking best practices and tools, get in touch with me for an on-site training session.
[Update] This presentation is currently featured on SlideShare’s homepage
[Update 2] I’ve received numerous emails and comments asking about the video for this presentation. I will be delivering a webinar next month that will use this presentation as a guideline to discuss the topics covered, answer the most common questions that I received so far, and dive into some case studies. If you’d like to be notified when the webinar is available, please sign up here.
Delve Networks ranked among the top 50 Most Usable RIAs
Last year I worked with Delve Networks to design their user experience. This week, O’Reilly’s InsideRIA blog mentioned Delve as one of the most usable Rich Internet Applications.
Here is what Theresa Neil thought of the design:
Delve designers realized content creators weren’t interested in navigating through a bunch of screens to accomplish tasks. They have applied the one-screen-per goal philosophy which results in a lot less screens, each with deep interactions. To keep these rich screens from being completely overwhelming they have employed the following patterns: inline editing, dialog overlays, refining search, and progressive disclosure.
This is a very accurate description of our design goals. We were not interested in creating yet another digital asset manager. We studied the tasks that users wanted to perform at every step, and we took a task-centered approach in creating the interface and interaction. One of the unique interaction paradigms in Delve is that each screen contains a component that acts as a bridge to connect it to subsequent screens and tasks. Animated transitions are used to enforce that mental model for the user and keep them in context while taking them to the next part of the interface.
Here is a demo of Delve’s UI in action
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:
