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Who values your product and do you value them?
We have reached the most critical point on a project I'm working on. After a few months we think we know enough about the domain and application to build a product road map that will take us to the first public release. The proof of concept is complete. The design team has created a remarkable, genera changing product. Additionally, the system is designed around real users we have been able to talk to and get feedback from. We have put together an unbelievably good development team and built a backlog of stories with estimates. We have been here before. Putting together a design and backlog of stories is something we have done countless times...
The easy part is over. Now the hard part begins.
Our research and user feedback tells us we have multiple potentialcustomer groups we can build the system for. On one hand this is great news. We have a number of potential markets to choose from. On the other, we don't have an infinite amount of time and money to build it for all of these groups. We have to commit and go all in with one group. Right now, these are just some of the questions we are asking ourselves now:
- What customer group do we value the most?
- What features do they value the most?
- How expensive is it to build the ultimate product for each group?
- What is the minimum viable product we can build for each group?
- Which group is most likely to give feedback and partner with us to help refine our product?
- How much feedback is this group likely to give you?
- Are we missing some market window by passing on one group v.s. another?
This is a critical point in the product's design. Whichever user group we choose will be our customers. Or another way of saying it: They will be our ONLY customers. Other customer groups aren't likely to be interested because we aren't building any features for them yet.
When designing a product do you consider what customer groups you are including and excluding? Are you going to be happy with that choice for the foreseeable future?
Storytelling in Design
Instead of a "loading" animation that we may bail out on, why not tell a story? I was impressed with this technique used by BMW. They are running banner ads on NBC's site which hypes the upcoming Olympic events. You see a car in the banner ad, you expect to click and see more car. But you don't. Instead, a blank white screen with just a few short words pops up. But the words tell a quick paced story. phrase by phrase, of what joy is. Joy is Timeless. Joy is Freedom. Joy is Innovation. And below those words is the "loading" indicator. 10%, 20%, 32%, and so on. A nice example of storytelling used in design - if you are going to make someone wait (or have to, because you are loading a high-end car video), consider getting them engaged with a story.
http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/joy/bmw_joy.html
Topics: Advertising, Design, storytelling, strategy
Where the iPad will take over: 15 examples
There's still a lot of internet chatter about why you'd want a tablet anyway. I think there's a big space between the laptop and the iphone, and that in particular, the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch will take over from a lot of purpose built devices that deliver specific high value functionality. Here are a few examples:
1. The daily commute. It's a simple matter of ergonomics here. I will use the iPad, sold with a cheap data plan when I'm sitting down on the El, rather than the iphone. Because it has a bigger screen, and it's already connected. I won't use my laptop, because it doesn't come with a data plan (or only an expensive one that I won't buy), and it's pretty uncomfortable to use in a cramped row of seats. I'll use it instead of a laptop because the form factor works much better, and because I will have bought the data plan bundled with the iPad.
2. The eBook reader. I'll use it instead of a Kindle because it will be good enough (or better), and I can do a lot more than read with it. My guess is there will be more people that read on the tablet than who buy a dedicated reader. (Just as there are more people who do photo sharing on facebook than on flickr.)
3. In the Kitchen. If I'm in a situation where a sealed, mess resistant device with a big screen is a big advantage (like a kitchen) then I will use the tablet. I will prefer it to the iPhone because it's bigger and I can look at it while I'm doing something else, and I will prefer it to a laptop because the keyboard will not get gunked up. There are already devices retailing around $300 to store and retrieve your recipes in the kitchen - an iPad with the right recipe app will run rings around that.
Continue reading »
Topics: apple tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, purpose, purpose built devices, tablet
How Would Steve Jobs Pitch YOUR Product?
It's no accident that Steve Jobs is arguably the ultimate technology pitch-man. He's worked with some of the best designers, ad agencies and creative people on the planet even since the early days of Apple. But how would he pitch your idea? It's a fun question to ask and I found a book that just might have the answer. While browsing in a discount brick-and-mortar bookstore I came across "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" by Carmine Gallo of Businessweek.com. There was one copy on the shelf and it immediately caught my attention. As I flipped through the pages, I was impressed with the many "how-to" pieces of wisdom. For example, you'll see how answering four simple questions can yield a powerful elevator speech. You'll see how to use high impact words, tight headlines and key numbers to get your point across in a way that seems effortless. While I think the book is a "must have on your desk" for product managers and marketers, I also think it's a great reference for designers to think about what makes a design more marketable and enticing to the customer.
Topics: apple, keynote, marketing, presentation, product manager, Steve Jobs
User Driven Product Development
This morning I sat through two pitches by two startups looking for funding. I won't get into the details, but they both had clever ideas at their root. But while one company was attractive and poised for success, the other was mediocre and not getting much traction. Why was that? They both had clever ideas, no?
Over the years I've looked at a lot of business plans for Venture Funds. The first lesson that I learned was that cool ideas didn't equal successful companies. While I would get all hot and bothered by a particularly elegant software solution, the VC's I was consulting to preferred the plans that understood the market and the customers in it (and had a kick ass management team, natch).
Continue reading »
Topics: User Modeling, Venture Capital
Why would you use a tablet instead of a laptop? (In Pictures)
As an answer to those asking why we need a tablet anyway, there's a very funny set of pictures and comments at WTF Is Wrong with Laptop Users in the Media. The author went through the first 400 images (out of 28,886) he got on a search at Getty Images of "Using a laptop" and compiled the highlights. My favorites:
Now ask yourself, in which of those pictures would (a sealed, always on, always connected) tablet make more sense?
In all of them (although the beach one still seems like a bad idea.)
Topics: apple tablet, iPad, laptop, tablet
Trading Away Technical Complexities for Vastly Increased Simplicity and Ease of Use
... it's hard not to think about how much easier some people's lives would be (hi Mom and Dad) if they could trade technical complexities they don't care about for vastly increased simplicity and ease of use.
My parents were technically savvy enough (with a little help from their sons) to start using Skype video in their mid seventies, prompted by the arrival of grandkids halfway across the country. But for them, it was always a cumbersome affair:
1. Arrange a time to have the video call.
2. Move the laptop to the dining room.
3. Call on the telephone to tell me that they're using Skype on the computer.
4. Initiate the Skype phone call.
Needless to say, this did not happen all that often.
This past Christmas my brother got them a Skype Video Phone. They set it up with a little help from us, and when we told them to just treat it like the telephone, they got the idea. Now, they are making video calls much more frequently - not just to the grandkids, but to our cousins in Switzerland and South Africa.
They traded complexity for simplicity and ease of use, and though the skype video phone will not end up being a success on the level of the iPhone, it's already brought my parents a lot of joy, and is part of a trend towards more simplicity and ease of use. It's one major reason the iPhone is as successful as it is.
Now imagine that simplicity and ease of use in a multipurpose, always on device with a bigger screen. My parents wouldn't need the skype video phone, they'd just have that as an app on their tablet.
Prediction: The Teens will be the Decade of Mobile
I've made my fair share of predictions, and this may seem to be a layup, but I think it's a prediction worth making anyway: mobile devices and applications will transform business and every day life in the next decade.
Why does this seem like such a layup? Well, look at the iPhone and the ecosystem of applications and companies springing up around it. Android and Blackberry are trying to jump in on the business and everybody and their brother is cooking up a connected mobile device. And yes, that's obvious. Mobile devices are going to increase in importance in 2010 and if you don't already have an iPhone app cooking to complement your other online channels, you're behind the times.
But if you're just thinking that more iPhone applications are going to be the end of it, you're in for a rude awakening. Businesses have just started consolidating after the disruptive years of the 90's and aught's, with the transformative effects of the web largely digested by the marketplace (the newspaper industry is still thrashing but will soon succumb). A new disruptive decade is dawning that may see the passing or fundamental transformation of industries as varied as telecom, credit card and broadcast television/cable. Prepare to take your business through a roller coaster ride every bit as challenging as the web revolution. Continue reading »
Topics: iPhone, Mobile, Predictions
Your SDLC or Your Product – You Decide
…or the telephone game
Last weekend I was watching a movie with my kids. In the movie there was a chain of monkeys that needed to pass on the message from one character to one on the other side of the chain. The message went something like, “Don’t throw us over the wall. There must be another way. We will all be killed.” As it went through the chain and the receiver heard, “Throw us over the wall. It’s the only way. Banana.” The scenario seems ridiculous, but its roughly equivalent to how many companies approach software product design. Often times companies don’t realize they are creating a product at all. They think they are just running a project and focus only on delivery of that project as if it is the only artifact of their work.
The problem stems from the fact that when organizations reach a sufficiently large size they must focus on consistency of delivery and efficiently using people’s time. For large organizations this is part of the mix that makes up their competitive advantage. However, the sheer size and number of moving parts required to enable clocklike consistent delivery leads to the most knowledgeable people about the customer never directly speak to the people responsible for building the product. Or translated into a traditional SDLC, the definition/high level design team isn’t communicating with the build team. In my experience they are usually two different groups of people. I’ll give you an example:
A while back, I was leading a software development team creating a product to be used by all 170,000 of my customer’s employees on a daily basis. They happened to have a team of user experience designers and wanted to take on the “big picture” part of the design themselves. This company could afford the best and the brightest talent - and was able to attract them. Individually the folks on this team were talented and knew their craft well. I actually learned a lot just from my brief time with them. However, once we got the design in hand it was obvious that the usability team’s artifacts weren’t going to work for the project. They didn’t meet the end user’s needs nor were they implementable within the time we had available for the project. The client’s design team literately spent months of time showing users lo-fi prototypes, running focus groups, and understanding usage statistics from similar applications. But, the simplicity the end users craved didn’t match the complexity of the business rules required. Upon further investigation the customer’s design team never was given a business level view of the problem to be solved. We tried to merge the business requirements with good usability, but ultimately the franken-design didn’t work. We had to throw out the big picture design and use them as ”guidelines” instead. Clearly it was a waste of talent and a haphazard way to build a product.
In hindsight the design team should have been presented the complex business rules so that their design could incorporate them from the beginning. However, the customer’s SDLC only allowed the design team to be engaged in the definition/high design phase of the project. Once we got to the design phase they were hard to find. By the time we got into the build phase the development team was simply a distraction from other work for these designers. A better model would have kept the designers on the project as each piece is built. I’m not suggesting full dedication to the team – 40 hours a week. That would be nice, but that’s not likely possible in most organizations. I’m suggesting a small time commitment over a long period of time.
Most of the time projects are actually building products. If you are building a product, but focusing SDLC metrics and efficiency, keep in mind that your phases are likely making walls around teams and causing ineffective communication between them. As Matt from 37Signals points out, “Inefficiencies are what make you special.”
Art vs. Design, the Art of Design, or the Design of Art
A couple of days ago I happened upon an interesting article about the difference between art and design. The author makes a lot of interesting points, and whether you agree or not with the statements he makes, the article does make for a great conversation starter.
Art and design are two different words, and some say two different worlds as well. The use of each often comes with a distinct connotation. I could go on about how design's goal is to solve a problem, whereas art doesn't necessarily always have a problem to solve. I could talk about how art doesn't necessarily require a common user experience, whereas design more often than not does. I could expand upon that by discussing how art doesn't require that a thing be usable, whereas design is often judged in part or whole by its level of usability. I could even discuss how art can be effective whether done collaboratively or not, and contrast that with numerous examples of how here in our agile software development environment at Pathfinder we find collaboration inseparable from our design process.
But I could also talk about how much art and design overlap and blend, so much so that it becomes difficult to make concrete distinctions. And how, sure, software design is about solving a problem, but it's also about solving a problem beautifully. Continue reading »
Software Development: Importance Doesn’t Always Equal Effort
I've worked on more than a few software projects over the decades and one of my favorite little misunderstandings is the Importance versus Effort disconnect. That's where non-experts assume that because a particular part of a software system is more important than another, it must also take more effort to develop. That is rarely the case and, in fact, importance -- however that is defined -- is rarely a driving factor in determining effort or cost. This sort of misconception can result in some planning and budgeting mistakes, sometimes to comic or even tragic effect.
To illustrate, I can point to a trading system that I worked on (the names have been changed to protect the innocent). The average size of a transaction in this system was over $1 billion in 1990's money. The part of the system that resolved the transactions was really really "important," but the part of the system that allowed an application helpdesk to support users by seeing what their user's saw cost 60% more to develop. That's right, an "unimportant" helpdesk module was more expensive and took more effort and cost more than the "important" backend that handled billions of dollars a day.
User Centric Design – the Who, What, Why and How of a Feature
At Pathfinder, we do our best to help our clients experience the software through the eyes of the user. Defining a feature includes explaining who will be using it, what they need to accomplish, why they need to accomplish it and how they’ll actually do it.
We start with personas (who) — they define the user base and let us identify the primary users whose needs we should focus on, which in turn drives the feature list. Personas also bring the human element into software development. Rather than using a vague term such as actor or user, terms that can easily be dismissed, we now have Myrna from Accounting, a numbers guru who is the primary user of the new software. Myrna is not so easily dismissed, especially once her needs and goals are identified.
We move onto user stories, all of which are written from the point of view of the personas: Continue reading »
Topics: user centric design
Wireframing with incomplete requirements
The value of wireframing even with incomplete information
The task of wireframing in application development, as I've come to know it, should begin after user research has been performed, and a complete set of requirements gathered. But what happens when, for whatever reason, you just don't have access to user research, or a full set of requirements? What if all you have are some rather unspecific, vague notions of what the user should and should not be able to do? Is wireframing at this juncture useful? I say yes. With incomplete or even almost non existent information about target users and or requirements, wireframes can still be a valuable tool in the interface designers toolkit.
The key to a wireframe's usefulness is that it is a visual document. Presumably it will be presented to one or more product stakeholders, and they will have the opportunity to review it and comment. Having something visual to respond to is one of the easiest ways to generate ideas, and identify incomplete specifications. A good assumption is that if a product's requirements are incomplete, someone at the wireframe review will notice the gap by responding in the context of the visual presentation. "Where is the Cancel button? Oh...not in the requirements? Well it's obvious that on this screen the user will need to be able to cancel, so we have to add that as a requirement."
In this way, a wireframe can be an ever evolving document, which begins by starting the requirements conversation. Of course ultimately, just prior to feature development, the wireframe should have all of the necessary specifics so that the developers can use it as a guide (along with the relevant user stories).
Error Messages & Usability
I was starting up one of the Adobe apps the other day when this somewhat troublesome message was displayed:
Ack! On the one hand, good for them for alerting me that an error had occurred. On the other hand, what's up with that message? I had no idea what I could do beyond clicking ok (and after reading the message I wasn't sure all was ok). A bit unnerving, but it did get me thinking about how applications deal with error messages.
The idea that non-technical users will be viewing error messages is one of those things that tends to be overlooked. You’re so focused on getting all the features up and working that dealing with errors on the presentation layer are often left out of both design and implementation.
Even if time is crunched on a project, however, here are three scenarios you should always cover in a user-friendly fashion: Continue reading »
Bridging the Gap Between Rails Developers and HTML Designers
To make a cheap joke and paraphrase a common quote, web developers and web designers are two groups separated by common languages. In our case, the languages are HTML and CSS, which are the output of both the web design process and the web development process. Developers and designers produce their HTML/CSS in different ways and with different goals. Here are some ideas for bridging the gap so that the developers and designers on your team can work together smoothly.
Designers and developers obviously have different goals for their HTML -- developers have issues of reducing duplication, organization, and performance that are largely not the designer's concerns. The designer is primarily concerned with how the HTML looks and behaves to the user.
Topics: Ruby on Rails, uxd
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Blogroll
Recent
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- Pathfinder sponsors the midVentures25
- Pathfinder sponsoring Day of Mobile in Chicago
- Refactoring versus Rewriting
- Storytelling in Design
- Remembered: Claude Shannon
- mort_calc gem: Rails Mortgage Calculation Gem
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