You might also like reading...

• Lean Interactive Requirements – The End of Specification Documents
• Escape Velocity
• Why A Launched Product Beats A Perfect Idea

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?

The following video shows a sample prototype created using nothing but Apple Keynote and Keynotopia‘s iPad prototyping templates. You can also see how I am testing the prototype on an iPad, tapping my way through different screens and dialogs.

Here are the UI elements I use in that presentation, which were all vector shapes created from scratch in Apple Keynote.

 

Why use Keynote?

The challenge with existing wireframing and prototyping tools is that you need to be a designer to create a good looking app prototypes. Additionally, most of them will help you create static screens, but not something that you can click through and test out.

Keynote includes powerful drawing tools, smart guides, styles, locking, and grouping. Master slides make it possible to reuse interface components across multiple screens, hyperlinks add “clickability” to the prototype, and slide transitions create cool interface animations with a single click. Finally, it works seamlessly with Adobe CS apps, so copying and pasting graphics works seamlessly across.

With the iPad prototyping templates for Keynote and PowerPoint, you can create a prototype simply by copying and pasting interface components on a slide, then creating hyperlinks to transition between slides, hence giving a prototype the needed interactivity and responsiveness to users’ actions.

How do you create a similar prototype in 30 minutes or less?

Download the iPad Prototyping template from Keynotopia , and install the file “iPad Prototype.kth” into <UserName> -> Library -> Application Support -> iWork -> Keynote -> Themes. Alternatively, you can double click the file to open it in Keynote, and choose file -> Save Theme. This will create a theme in Keynote that you can reuse to create new presentations, as shown below.

 

When you create a new presentation based on the iPad Prototype theme, you will see a single black slide. To access the assets, you need to go to the toolbar and click View -> Show master slides.

This will reveal the master slides panel above the slides panel, allowing you to click on a specific master slide and copy/paste assets into your slides.

Step 1: Sketching the user flow

To create your prototype, start by defining the different app screens that you will need and how the user will transition between them. I typically do this as a state diagram as shown below (Created on the iPad using Adobe Ideas).

 

It’s important that you get this diagram right because it will save you time doing modifications to your prototype later on.

Step 2: Putting together application screens

Next, you create a new slide for each screen, and copy/past components from the masters into each slide (Select a master slide > Select an object > Select target slide > paste object). Since all objects were created in Apple Keynote, they are fully editable (resize, change labels, change colors, add/remote elements, etc…). Each object is a group of building blocks that are grouped together. You can either double click on an object to select each sub-object, or ungroup using the Ungroup button on the toolbar, edit sub-objects, then group again. Grouping makes it easier to select and move objects.

 

Hint: After you’ve created each screen, you may find it at times easier to move the static components of that screen into its own master slide. That will save you time in making modifications in each slide if you decide to change something later.

After creating each screen, you duplicate (CMD+D) slides and add additional elements to them (pop-ups, fill text, …).

Step 3: Adding interactivity

Finally, it’s time to create transitions between screens. You do this by going through your state diagram, and for each slide, select the element that would transition it to another slide. For instance, clicking a picture shows the profile pop-up, so you’d select the profile picture (you can select all pictures in the slide), and in the Inspector -> Hyperlink select the target slide. Do this for every transition that you have in your state diagram. Keynote will add a blue indicator on each hyperlinked element in your slides.

 

Hint: Keynote is smart enough to know when you rearrange your slide, and will keep track of the right slide you link to even if you change its sequence order. Test your presentation frequently to double check that you’re hyperlinking the correct slides.

That’s it! You now have an interactive prorotype within your presentation.

Test it on an iPad !

If you’d like to test this prototype with users and see how they’d use it, you need to export it as QuickTime as shown below (This will prevent screens from automatically advancing if the user clicks a spot that’s not hyperlinked. You then open the prototype in QuickTime Player 7, and interact with it.

 

If you’d like to test the prototype on the iPad, you need to export the prototype as PDF, email it to yourself or put it in DropBox, then open it on the iPad. In the video above, I use GoodReader to show the PDF file.

Hint: Unfortunately, the Keynote iPad app does not support hyperlinked navigation, so if you open this keynote file on the iPad it will only advance sequentially. Bonus Hint: Keynote has an automatic tweening/animation feature called Magic Move. If you want to have fun by adding animated transitions, fading pop-ups in and out, you can do so by copying and pasting the shape across two slides, select both slides then selecting the effect as shown below. I found this feature to be unpredictable at times.

Final Words

Remember that a prototype doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to convey your idea better than your words do. Don’t over-engineer it, and don’t prematurely optimize it. Just put together something that users can see and play with. You will get many more insights than spending hours in focus groups, market research and surveys.

 

Next time you’re giving a pitch, remember to show more and talk less. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.

Creating prototypes is like doing magic: once you understand that all magic happens in the spectator’s mind, you can focus on bringing what matters to the audience. Everything else is a distraction.

If you think this tutorial is useful, or if you have any feedback or questions, leave me a comment below. I will do my best to reply to every single one of them.

Get The Templates Now

You might also like reading...

• What We’re Really Afraid Of
• How I Launched A Profitable Product in 3 Hours – Part 2: The Nuts And Bolts
• Don’t violate fundamental design laws – even when you are Apple

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.

Let’s face it, most products are boringly similar: A landing page with taglines, list of features, screenshots, a video walkthrough, and a big sign up button. Seriously, how many landing pages have you seen that are just few variations away from each other? How many times did you stop and think “Hmm.. Now that’s interesting!” How many products you look at that you actually remember enough to talk about?

The secret word here is INTERESTING; We’re not just looking forward to add more features to our lives, we want to make our lives more interesting. If people choose your product because it’s got better features or is a bit faster, that’s because they want to get the job done and proceed with the more INTERESTING stuff in their lives.

People don’t make their decisions rationally, by the time they are consciously making their minds, their subconscious would have already decided for them. If you don’t capture them in those first 2-3 seconds, you may lose their interest forever.

It’s not enough to be good. You must be different. And it’s not enough to be good and different, you must be CONSISTENTLY good and different. Remember these two equations:

Features + form = character

Great features + Unique form = Memorable character

Lady Gaga is a memorable character, and your product should also have its uniquely memorable character.

I previously wrote a post about the user’s journey how to drive users to ecstasy (and boredom) . And to drive them to ecstacy, you need to find the G-Spot (I am referring here to the Gaga-Spot). Your product’s G-Spot is where form and function intersect with a unique style. It could be a visual style (Mint), a language style (BaseCamp), your voice (Vaynerchuck) or your customer service style (Zappos).

Don’t settle for a boring landing page or a list of features. Don’t talk too much about yourself. Don’t use jargons like “state of the art”, “innovative” and “revolutionary”. Leave these diluted phrases to big companies, and find what makes your product unique, what makes your customers tick, and how you can address their problems in an interesting style. Understanding the human side of business, knowing what people NEED and WANT will give you a competitive edge: Not only you’ll be delivering what they need, you’ll be delivering it in a way they would want it. You’ll be selling to their conscious and subconscious minds!

If most businesses fail anyway, this should be a liberating fact! If it might fail, why not fail with a style and have fun doing it. Or as James Cameron put it:

You might also like reading...

• If you love something, give it away
• Don’t violate fundamental design laws – even when you are Apple
• D3 – Designing with Clients

What’s unique about Docverse’s user experience is that it never tried to change the way people did something. Instead, it tapped into people’s existing habits and workflows to provide them with easier, faster, and more secure way to share and collaborate on their documents. We carefully observed how people already used email attachments, how they changed and saved documents, and how they previewed and merged each other’s changes. Andwe brainstormed for days at a time about how to make every part of that workflow better, without forcing users to do anything different, and sometimes without asking them to do anything at all. The best user experience was to have no user experience: the more transparent the product became, the more users were focused on the main task: editing a document together. It was the document, not the product, that’s always been the center of the universe.

Docverse just works.

I am grateful for having the opportunity to work with this amazing team, and being part of that great journey that started less than 18 months ago with a spreadsheet of ideas, to sketches and designs hanging all over the green walls of their Howard street office, to a functional product, and finally, to a successful acquisition. It’s been a true rollercoaster ride through a unique and inspiring Silicon Valley success story.

I blame Docverse for raising the standards of what I will be expecting from technology teams to make a user experience, no matter how challenging, come to life.

You might also like reading...

• The monkey trap
• The secret life of ideas
• Design thinking for startups

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?

Start with the tribe leader, because his voice is worth 10,000 voices. This person might be a bestselling author, a blogger, or one of the top consultant in the field. What’s important is that this person is seen as a leader and expert by your target audience; they listen to him, they trust his opinion, and they share their thoughts and feedback with him.

For instance, if you’re working on a new presentation tool, Garr Reynolds would be a great example. If you’re creating the next agile project management tool, Mike Cohn might be your guy.

Keep in mind that this expert is not just a tool expert, but a community expert as well. He uses best practices, works with the tools, and knows other people who use them.

Why is his voice worth 10,000 voices?

• He reads dozens of books on the topic, so he might save you the time to read them by sharing his insights and conclusions, or by recommending the most useful ones to read.
• He interacts with your potential audience on a daily basis; he writes for them, he reads their comments, and he speaks to them in conferences and seminars.
• His blog analytics provides him with great insights about the audience’s demographics, which he might be willing to share if you ask nicely
• He knows other experts in the field that he can introduce you to
• He knows his active readers, and can suggest some people for you to interview
• He is a power user of other products in your market, and already knows what people like and dislike about them
• He probably knows your potential competitors, and some of their current and previous employees

Once you’ve identified the tribe leader, get in touch with him and ask for an interview. Keep in mind that his time is valuable, so you will need to find a good incentive to get his attention: If the person is offering consulting services, hire him. If he’s a second degree connection on LinkedIn, ask for an introduction from a common connection. If you’ve already started a blog on the topic – which is a great way to find early customers – then ask the expert if he’d like to be featured in an interview on your blog.

When you interview the customer expert, make sure you ask him questions about him and his audience. Keep your interview questions open-ended to give him a chance to share wisdom and insights that you didn’t ask about. Find out what his readers like and dislike, what they read, where they hang out, and what they buy. Ask him for introductions to other experts and active community members that you can interview later.

By working earlier with this community expert, you will find that he may be able to provide you with insights that would otherwise take you a long time ,and a large number of users, to get on your own.

And if you continue to work closely with the community expert, and you’re creating something that he (and his followers) care about, it’s likely that he’ll give you a good mention on his blog once you’re product is out. That’s probably worth 10,000 more voices.

Interviewing the leader is not a substitute for interviewing other tribe members, but it’s probably one of the best ways to get started.

This blog post was partly inspired by an insight from Tyler Perry’s biography (recommended), where he talks about the turning point in his career. After he’d exhausted all his financial resources seven years in a row, and couldn’t find audience for his plays, he finally went about it a bit differently: he visited the city’s churches and persuaded their most powerful musicians and choir members to take roles in the production of his plays. The opening night was one of the coldest nights in Atlanta, yet there was a line around the corner trying to get in the theater. His show sold out that night, and almost every night since then. Perry hired community leaders, and made them into cast members. That made all the difference.

You might also like reading...

• Malcolm Gladwell outliers – A very personal review
• Listening
• How to make the right decision every time (3 minute story)

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.

I started by browsing through existing tools, and I read previously published papers. That led me to plan B: If I failed to come up with something original in the first couple of weeks, I could improve on an existing project.

I also brainstormed several ideas with my team, but I couldn’t decide on any of them. I spent the first weekend in the office, trying to come up with my “cool and exciting” idea in the stereotypical lone scientist way: a whiteboard full of ideas and papers scattered all over my new desk. But that didn’t seem to go anywhere, since I had no criteria to judge on which idea is better than the other. That was when my first realization hit me: I’ve been too focused on ideas and I forgot about the most valuable resource: people. My research was about programmers productivity, and I had access to tens of thousands of programmers at Microsoft.

I erased the whiteboard. And with all the ideas gone, I was free to focus on finding out, instead of guessing, the real pain points that developers go through every day.

Lessons learned: Great ideas are seldom found behind office walls.

Step 1: Listen

The following Monday, I prepared a list of interview questions, bought a voice recorder, and prepared a list of developers to interview. That week, I spent close to six hours each day asking them about about their projects, their environment, and their teams. I didn’t know what I was looking for, so I listened to everything they had to say. And they talked as long as I was willing to listen. Every day, I would refine my interview questions based on interesting patterns or triggers I was getting from the day before. Having voice recording helped me go back and confirm a point that someone made earlier.

At the end of the week, I met with my mentor to analyze the results. It became clear to us that there was a common pattern among all interviewees: The most painful and time consuming part of the development process wasn’t writing new code, but understanding existing one. In a large organization like Microsoft, source code moves across several developers, and sometimes they need to go back to what someone wrote few years ago to comprehend it and add a new feature. Without access to the person who originally wrote that code, it was a pain task.

Lesson learned: Be willing to listen without judgment.

Step 2: Validate

I’d found a good pain point, and I needed to know what people did to solve it. I thought about writing another set of questions and go interview more developers. But I wanted to get deeper insights; I wanted to know what they did when faced with the pain point. So I instrumented Visual Studio, the development tool of choice at Microsoft, to record all navigation and editing activities. Then I designed an experiment where users were given an existing project (A Tetris game written in C#) , and they were asked to fix a bug and add a feature. To accomplish these tasks, a developer needs to navigate a couple of the 25 classes in the project, and learn the role of few existing functions and variables.

I had two assumptions I wanted to validate: First, experts were faster than novices in program comprehension (easy one). Second, there is something in common about how expert went about understanding code, that’s less experienced developers don’t do. So, I invited 5 senior and 5 junior developers to help with the experiment. I recorded time, success rate, and frequently asked them to think aloud about what they were trying to accomplish and what they would imagine the solution to be. While they were working their way through the code, their activities were being saved to log files.

Later that week, I wrote some Excel macros that aggregated all the “activity streams” inside visual studio and created charts that summarized the various code areas that developers navigated, and the various paths they took.

To my delight, both assumptions were true: experts were faster than novices in understanding source code, and they took common paths to understand it.

Lesson learned: Don’t just listen to what users say, watch what they do.

Step 3: Collaborate

At that point, I knew I had a problem that was worth solving, and I had some ideas about how to solve it. But I wanted to do more than just get in a meeting room with my team and brainstorm more ideas; I wanted users to be involved. So I scheduled more interviews with developers, told them about what I am trying to accomplish, and brainstormed solutions with them. And because these users were suffering the pain point I was trying to solve, they came up with some of the most creative ideas! That was new to me, as I’ve always thought that good ideas will come from the team creating them, not people who’d be using them. Once again, I was realizing how abundant this resource was, and how little it was being used.

At the end of the week, I had gathered enough ideas to keep the whole team busy for the following couple of years. We met to discuss those ideas, we agreed that some of them had good potential and were worth prototyping and testing.

Lesson learned: Customers may have problems, but they also have solutions.

Step 4: Prototype and test

During one of the brainstorming sessions, a user asked an intriguing question: “What would it be like for me to browse source code like I browse books on Amazon? you know? with all the social recommendation goodies!” That question inspired us to create the first prototype: the FAN (Frequently Accessed Next) – a social recommendation panel that provided users with a list of places to which previous users navigated after leaving the current location. It carried the same spirit of Amazon’s recommendation language: “People who debugged this variable also looked at the following functions”.

Another prototype was inspired by the recorded log files: users typically worked with a small subset of classes for each task, which required them to repeatedly find it through a long list of all classes. To address this, we created a customizable working set of classes that is automatically filtered to provide users with the classes they need for a specific task. Finally, we wanted to provide users with a gestalt view of their source code, so we created a heat-map UML diagram that provided users with the “hottest” areas in the in the project.

We were curious to know if these prototypes delivered on their premise, so we ran a series of experiments with seven programmers, and measured their performance with and without the prototypes. The results were significantly better.

Lesson learned: Small changes can lead to big improvements.

The prototype has since evolved into a much larger project, with several full time researchers working on it. It has also been internally deployed to help multiple product teams at Microsoft.

I feel that I can take very little credit for what’s been created: users told me about their problems, they helped me with the solution, and they showed me how well the solution performed. They deserved most of the credit!

If you are interested in reading more about the experiment and prototype, you can read the paper published at InfoVis’05 .

If you find this post useful, I highly recommend Steve Blank’s book on customer development, and Eric Ries’ blog on Lean startups.

Updates:

• I am thrilled that this post made it to the homepage of Hacker News, and stirred many conversations with great people. It’s even been translated to Japanese!
• I no longer work at Microsoft, so I can’t confirm the current state of development on this project. Feel free to contact any of the three co-authors of the paper if you’d like to schedule a demo, or learn more.
• I still consult with startups to help with user experience and product design. If you’d like to work with me, drop me a line.

Related Posts

• How to build interactive iPad applications in 30 minutes using Apple Keynote
• How to prototype desktop and web applications in 30 minutes using Apple Keynote
• Finding the G-Spot: What startups can learn from Lady Gaga

You might also like reading...

• The catch
• How I Launched A Profitable Product in 3 Hours – Part 2: The Nuts And Bolts
• Adobe Flash Catalyst – First impressions

“… 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.

Unfortunately, many products come out so bloated with features that it’s hard for them to own any specific moment. They are trying to offer too many features and several benefits that users are left wondering “When will I need this?”.

I believe that products should focus as much on WHEN as they focus on what and how. If your product is the first name that comes to mind at a specific moment, then you’ve owned that moment. And when you own a moment, you don’t just have a user; you have everyone involved in that moment.

So how do you identify that moment?

You can guess it, of course. But that’s not the best way to go about it.

One of my favorite activities is to ask users to think aloud while they are trying to accomplish certain task. I constantly encourage them to tell me what’s going on in their mind while they are looking at an interface or clicking through dialogs. After the task is done, I ask them more questions about that moment. Why were they struggling with that screen? What were they looking for? Why didn’t they try to accomplish it another way? What would have been the best way to accomplish that?

When I identify a recurrence of that moment, I make sure it goes into the user stories and is highlighted as a potential moment that the product can own. When marketing and sales are consistent with these stories, they can provide a clear message that will trigger the product’s name when someone finds themselves in that moment.

You might also like reading...

• The monkey trap
• My four steps to the epiphany: Lessons learned from creating a minimally viable research product
• What We’re Really Afraid Of

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:

Our journey starts with Danielle doing some search on Google for a solution she needed for her small business. She’s already visited various websites and looked through many alternatives, and she finally clicked that link that’s taking her to your landing page. She reached that page feeling a bit bored, somehow curious, and a bit more skeptical. She took a quick glance at the page, knowing that it usually takes her about 5 seconds to realize whether or not she’s found what she’s been looking for. At first glance, she saw a tag-line that grabs her attention. She read through the story below the tag-line, and she found herself relating to it. The story didn’t talk about the product. Instead, it talked about her! Next to the story, she found a screenshot that showed how the product will help her through her challenges. She became more curious to learn about what the product was offering her, so she started reading further. She liked how the information was presented: No marketing jargon, no mention of “innovative” or “revolutionary”, and no one trying to sell anything to her. It was as if someone had already anticipated the questions she had in mind about the product and answered them directly and simply. She felt as if she was having an engaging conversation with the person who designed that page. And she liked that person, and the conversation she was having with him.

She finds a “Try It Now!” button and clicked it. Based on her experience with previous products, she expected herself to land on a page that compares plan options, or at best, a sign up form that she needed to fill out to try the product for free. She was happily surprised to find herself face to face with the actual product, and with real data that put her immediately in the driver’s seat. She loved how the product had the exact features she needed: No more, and no less. She also discovered that the features she’s been using the most are carefully laid out to be easily reachable and quickly executed. As she tried each feature, she started experiencing fast results that she’d been looking for. At that moment, she realized that the product would save her a lot of time and she was ready to take out her credit card and happily pay for it.

In contrast, here is what it feels to have a disappointing user experience:

While reading through a product review blog, Mark stumbled upon a product that seemed to offer a solution for a challenge he’s been struggling with. He clicked the link and landed on a page with plenty of text and pretty looking graphics. The page had a bold tag-line, a product pitch, screenshots, video tour, a list of unique selling points, client testimonials, and even quotes from the press. He felt overwhelmed by the amount of information on the page, and confused about what’s in it for him. The page was all about the product, not about him. Among other graphics, a bright “Try It Now” button jumped at him, so he clicked it. To his disappointment, he found himself facing a grid of plans, options and prices. He was surprised that someone expected him to take out his credit card without giving him a good idea about what he would be paying for. He scrolled through the plans and found a tiny link at the bottom of the page that granted him limited free access to the product. He clicked it and realized that he had to fill out a long form to access the product, and he did so patiently. He felt that he already gave this product too much of his time, and received nothing in return. His disappointment turned into frustration as he stared at the message asking him to check his email to activate his account, and his cursor found its way quickly to the x icon on his browser’s tab.

Here are some notes about how to design for ecstasy:

• Understand where your users are coming from, and what they need to know.
• Design pages that anticipate and answer their question in a simple and direct manner. Avoid marketing jargon.
• If you’re saying more than one thing, then you’re saying nothing.
• Give them instant gratification, before you ask them to sign up or pay. Make the “Try It Now” button a “Try It NOW” button.
• Enable them to experience the product with real data. Don’t give them a blank canvas and let them figure out how to use it.
• Make it easy for them to accomplish something you already know they need to.
• Understand that it’s about them, not about you.
• Don’t give them a product that just enables them to accomplish a task, but also enable them to feel good while doing it.

You might also like reading...

• What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 4 Years Ago
• Why A Launched Product Beats A Perfect Idea
• So You Wanna Be an Entrepreneur?

One day he was with his fellow chicken picking seeds off the ground when a shadow covered the sky above him. He lifted his gaze and was mesmerized by the sight of a beautiful eagle cruising the sky. Unlike other chicken that he saw trying to fly, this eagle didn’t seem to be making much effort. With his wings spread wide, he was flying smoothly and changing his direction with the slightest gesture. “Wow. Look at that!”, yelled the young eagle to his friends. “Who is that?”, he asked. “That’s an eagle”, replied a chicken. “He’s the king of the sky. But we belong here on earth. We are chicken.”, she continued. And the eagle staring at the bird disappearing in the horizon as if it was gliding on an invisible path that only he could see.

Days later, the old eagle was flying again over the barnyard and was stunned by the sight of an eagle running around with the chicken. He surged down to the ground. As the other birds saw him they ran back to hide in the house. He descended in front of the other eagle before he reached the door.

“What are you doing?”, asked the old eagle.

“What do you mean?”, answered the young one.

“What are you doing running around with chicken?”.

“I am a chicken. These are my brothers and sisters. I grew up with them.”

“No you’re not. You’re an eagle. You belong in the sky, not on the ground.”

“No I am not. I am one of them. All I know is to do as they do, and to eat what they eat. I can’t even fly.”

“You can’t because you never tried. But you’re an eagle, just like me”.

“Even if what you say is true, I’ve lived all my life as a chicken. I am not an eagle anymore”.”

“It’s the heart of an eagle that matters, not the way he lived or ate… Come with me”

The eagle took another look at his friends hiding in the comfort of home. “Don’t listen to him!”, yelled one of the chicken. “He is tricking you”,” said another. “ If you go with him, you will die!”. “ Come back and be with us”…

But deep inside the eagle’s heart, a faint voice told him what he needed to do. He took one more gaze at the barnyard where he spend all his life playing with his friends, then turned around and followed the older eagle.

A moment later, the arrived at the cliff he used to visit sometimes with his friends. They stood next to each other on the edge looking at the mountains in the distance. Without a second of hesitation, the old eagle jumped off the edge, spread his wings and soared upward.

The young eagle looked down the cliff and trembled. He’d never flown before. May be he would die. May be he should go back.

“Don’t look down.”, the old eagle said “Look up at the sky. Aim toward the sun. Give it a bit of faith.”

The young eagle lifted his sight up, spread his wings and leaped…

Back at the barnyard, the chicken heard a triumphant cry that ascended to heaven. Their feather trembled and they looked at each other without exchanging a word. They know they will miss their brother a lot. They know he might visit some day and tell them how it felt to fly. And they will gather around to hear his stories about the lands he visited. But for the time being, they would keep doing what they did best: living as chicken.

You might also like reading...

• The monkey trap
• Purpose
• The secret life of ideas

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.

“Are you kidding me?”, he groaned. He’s been waiting for this weekend, like every other weekend, with great anticipation. It’s been a long week. Long days with endless meetings where no decisions were made, frequent visits from his manager to inform him about what the next hours of his life should be spent on, and long emails written mostly to people who were sitting at the end of the same hallway.

But today is different. He feels burnt out. He remembers the feeling when he stepped out of that building letting go a long exhale, as if he’s been holding his breath for the past 5 days. He felt like doing what he did back in school when the bell rang after a period of several boring classes in a row. He ran out of the classroom with everyone else and screamed their lungs out. He didn’t know back then why they were all doing this. But it felt good. Now he knows the nature of  what he was releasing with those screams. He knows that it was the only way of expressing how they all felt. But he cannot do it anymore. He’s a grown up now. And unlike children, grown ups know how to deal with reality.

A series of honks brings him back to the scene he’s playing a role in. He notices that the car ahead of him moved forward few meters and the ones behind him were urging him to follow. It was as if everyone was trying to get as far as possible from where they are coming from. “Follow the follower”, he thought. He puts his car in gear and starts moving, but a glance at the fast moving exit lane on his right makes him realize that it’s best to take the inroads. He sneaks into the faster moving traffic, takes the exit, misses the yellow light flipping red and stops by the white line. He is often amazed at the amount of lines on the road. Lines separating one direction from another. Lines separating cars going the same direction. And lines dictating when he can turn and when he should just keep going. He;s always felt that as long as he followed the lines, he will reach his destination safely. And he rarely wondered who drew these lines in the first place. Someone who knows what they’re doing, probably… Hopefully.

Light is still red, and the ticking sound of his left turn blinker relaxes him a bit. It reminds him of the sound of that old clock hung on the wall in his grandfather’s house. As a kid, he used to spend long moments mesmerized by the fast moving needle. He once asked his grandfather “why is that red needle moving much faster than the other ones?”. His grandfather chuckled and replied: “because it’s got much more important things to do!”. And he replied back: “I can’t wait till I grow up! I have very important things to do”. The ticking sound of the blinker is different than that of the clock. It ticks twice, instead of once. Two quick ticks, a second of silence, and then two more quick ticks, and so on. One tick in farewell of the second that passed, and another welcoming the one to come. And before one knows it, the next click signals the end of that last second, followed by another for the future one. And between one tick and the other, now happens. His attention shifts from the ticks to the silence between the ticks. And the more he becomes aware of that silence, the longer that silence feels. It was the same silence between the ticks of his old grandfather’s clock. The same silence that mesmerized him as a kid. That eternal moment between the past and the future.

He’s brought back to reality with another series of honks. He sees that his light is now green and he’s holding back a line of cars behind him. He puts his car in gear, presses the gas pedal, and the car starts moving forward. Then the car suddenly stops, urging his body to jolt forward and stop under the pressure of his seatbelt. “What the…?”. The car is still on, no gas or battery lights, it’s in the right gear, and his foot is on…. His foot is now on the brake! He stares for a second at his foot that just made its own mind to release the gas pedal and hit the one next to it. Then with the corner of his eye he feels a slight motion to his left. He lifts his head and sees it coming. The old rugged Honda was cruising at 40 mph, crossing the red light, and approaching in a straight line that ends on his side of the car. He sees the car crossing the white intersection line without slowing down. The license plates reads H7A30.

He read  before that during moments of danger, time stretches almost indefinitely. He also read that when one is coming to his final moment, he will see all his life playing back in front of his own eyes.Like a movie. And now, he is experiencing both. The volume of everything around him decreased to a mute. The speed of all things slowed down to a pause. Even his blinkers gasped one more tick and stopped. There were no two ticks this time around. Just one last tick. The past. Then he saw it all. He saw every moment in his life flashing. Everything he said. Everyone he met. Every place he’s been to. They weren’t flashing quickly. Feeling that something was quick requires time. At that moment, there was no time. These moments were just there. He saw his childhood moments. His first day at school. His first kiss. His graduation. His first day on a plane. His new job. He saw how some small things he did made big impact on others, and some big things he did made no impact whatsoever. He saw how simple moments stretched to fill more of his life, and how years of doing the same things he despised were not even there, as if they didn’t count. And he sees a man in the middle of all these moments. He was standing in front of a closed door with his back toward him. As the man slowly turned around to face him, he was still staring at his back. In that place where time didn’t exist, his fear had no face. He’s been the one placing masks on that face all his life. He’s been giving him his voice. The voices of many others. And when he didn’t find a voice to cast, he created new voices for him. This time, he didn’t have a voice at all. He was just standing there. And he knew the things that were behind that closed door. All the things he’s dreamt about doing. All the things he’s always enjoyed doing and ended up gathering dust in his life basement. All the things that he thought he would have time to do later, when he gets more time. Everything he’s imagined himself to be and do when he was a kid. And all the things he’s been always itching to do and has been rationalizing why he should be doing other things instead. He always thought he’d have more time…

He moves forward to open the door. His fear doesn’t stop him this time around. He passes through his fear as if it were a ghost, and as he does, he merges with him. In this moment, as he became fear, he sees it all. He feels how weak and powerful he is, how small and huge he became, and how hated and loved he felt. He grabs the door knob and turns it around. The door is suddenly sucked into the void behind it, and a flood of light came through it.

Light. Lots of light…  He closes his eyes to shield them from the bright scene in front of him. And as he does, his ears are suddenly deafened by the sounds around him. It was as if he was coming out of the womb, and everything around him was so bright and loud. Loud screams. Not human screams. They sounded like alien screams. more like loud squeaking. And the feeling of a cold breeze touching his ear.

All at once his senses come back to him. He is sitting in his car looking at the tires of the red Honda as they just crossed the white line and started screeching over the dry asphalt. He glances up at the driver and their eyes met for a second. Then the Honda driver tries to steer his car away from the collision course. The red car is now gliding over the road, still approaching at a deadly speed, but slowly curving away from its previous destination. All this is happening in slow motion, and he is watching it the same way he watches a movie: he is a detached observer. With his hands still on the steering wheel and his foot on the brake, he watches the other car drifting past his front bumper and missing it by an inch. His car shakes for an instant when the air between both cars is strongly disturbed, then the other car spins and stops in the middle of the road.

The next moment feels as if someone just hit the pause button on the playing scene: total stillness and complete silence. None of the cars stopped at the intersection is honking. Everyone seems to be here now. No one is thinking about what happened at work, or what will happen at home. They are all experiencing a moment out of time. And everyone is waiting for someone else to move. As his foot decided to hit the brake few seconds earlier, it now leaves it to gently press the gas pedal. The car starts moving, and he finally takes that left turn and hears the blinker latching off. He glances in his rear view mirror at the scene behind him: no one is moving yet. The red Honda was now stopped in the middle of the intersection, facing the opposite direction it came from after spinning 180 degrees. He glances at the licenses plates in his rear view mirror and smiles. Few drops of rain show up on his windshield. He looks up at the clouds and smiles even wider. Rain never felt so good.

You might also like reading...

• Corporate Designer vs. Startup Designer
• How to prototype like a pro using tools you already know
• UX advice from XKCD