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

After calling the app “Secret”, letting everyone who uses it think it’s secret, the founder of Secret now acknowledges that the information you submit is not, in fact, secret: “The thing we try to help people acknowledge is that anonymous doesn’t mean untraceable,” David Byttow, chief executive and co-founder of the Secret, told Wired in […]

Continue Reading: Secret, you keep using that word…

In his insightful article, Why Behavior Change Apps Don’t Work, Nir Eyal brings up a crucial point about the habits we form (or fail to form) around the products we use. “Unfortunately, too many well-intentioned products fail because they feel like “haftas,” things people are obligated to do, as opposed to things they “wanna” do. […]

Continue Reading: Is your product a Hafta or Wanna?

Jack London, the author of The Call of the Wild, was talking about writing when he said “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” The product design equivalent is: You can’t wait for feedback. You have to go after it with a club. If you’re waiting for feedback, […]

Continue Reading: Go after feedback with a club

An interesting article by Vinicius Vacanti, founder/CEO of Yipit: The Secrets Behind Many Successful Startups. In 2010 Yipit knew a secret about what was happening in the daily deals marketplace (that daily deals were exploding) and they were able to take advantage of it by creating a daily deals aggregator. What struck me about the […]

Continue Reading: Customer research = secrets?

Found this great quote by Steve Jobs: “Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people […]

Continue Reading: Looking for a word

In order to align a company around delivering great experiences, Peter Merholz says, “there are (at least) six components that need to be aligned throughout the organization”: The Why and The How of Organizations that Deliver Great Experiences They are: value, vision, goals, incentives, processes and capabilities. My experience agrees with this…you need both vision […]

Continue Reading: The Why and How of UX

A great little list by Cindy Alvarez: » 10 Things I’ve Learned About Customer Development (2014). The overriding lesson in this list (and in customer research in general) is that you can’t simply trust what people say during an interview…because people being interviewed are biased to please you (or not look stupid). Instead, you must […]

Continue Reading: Customer development notes

When building something is expensive, like a physical object, prototyping early and often becomes the obvious way to improve the product cheaply. If you’re designing a new chair, for example, it makes sense to prototype, test, and prototype again before sending the final design off to the manufacturer. The workflow of physical products is naturally […]

Continue Reading: There is no later for your customers