Rob Go of NextView Ventures makes a great point: saying “It’s been tried before” is a bad excuse to dismiss a product or startup. Rob says: “I’ve said those words before as well, both directly to entrepreneurs as well as in our internal conversations about companies. But I’m convinced that “it’s been tried before” is […]

Continue Reading: Great idea, poorly designed

Great list by Braden Kowitz on why you should listen to your customers: Several important points: 1) People love to say they talk to customers but rarely do. And some people talk to a couple customers, feel good about it, and assume their job is done. But the fact is that you have to go […]

Continue Reading: Three important points about listening to your customers

A nice set of notes here: The Right Way to Do Lean Research, curated from a discussion panel of several folks who really know their stuff: Christina Wodtke, Laura Klein, Todd Zaki-Warfel, and Mike Long. Right questions: Ask the right questions and save a tremendous amount of time by knowing what you want to learn […]

Continue Reading: Tips for doing Lean Research

It is said that all designers wished they were architects…or something like that. Over at the Percolate blog former architect Melissa Mandelbaum has written Applying Architecture to Product Design: Lesson 1 in which she points out the architectural principle of circulation is pretty much the same thing as navigation in UI design. Mandelbaum writes: “The […]

Continue Reading: How architecture can inform UI design

The Biggest Lesson I Learned as an Apple Designer is a thoughtful piece that pushes back on the standard advice given out today of creating an MVP (minimum viable product) and learning as you go. It comes from a former Apple designer, Mark Kawano (who also wrote about Apple’s design culture), and suggests that MVPs […]

Continue Reading: Why Apple doesn’t do MVPs