As a general rule, I believe that you want to get users to the “goods” quickly and easily, reducing friction wherever possible. However, sometimes this can go too far, and sacrifice the needs of the business. I thought I would share an example from Aprizi where we did exactly that. First, for context: Aprizi was a personalized discovery engine for …
When UI Innovation Isn’t Progress
As a visual person, I have always fantasized about being part, even a small part, of the creation of a major UI innovation on par with what Apple/PARC did for the modern desktop. I have learned some lessons the hard way about how skeptical one must be with UI “innovations”. I fell for 3D twice in my career – once …
Waiting for Perfection
My former colleague Jerry Paffendorf, who is off re-inventing Detroit, shared a great clip of Pixar’s Ed Catmull talking at Stanford, via Protoshare’s blog. At around the 6 min mark, Catmull is discussing Pixar’s constant “peer sharing” process: “In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. …
The Enterprise and Lean Startup: outsourcing app development
(aside: I’ve made a promise to myself to try to blog more often. It was tough to find the time over the winter, but I’m going to start with something I meant to write months ago) Big corporations aspire to innovate with web and mobile products, but their end results are too often bloated or uninspiring. The list of common …
TBPP
What on earth does that title “TBPP” mean, you ask? I received a nice surprise last week when Jeremy Horn, organizer of the 700-person strong “Product Group” meetup, said that I had been awarded “The Best Product Person of 2010” (after being nominated by Ty Ahmad-Taylor, so TY Ty). As much as I am proud of what Liz and I …
Design is always context-specific
I’ve had an interesting couple of days here at Altimeter’s “Rise of Social Commerce” conference. It was great being in the startup showcase with some cool companies like Swipely, Quorus, Open Sky, and 8 others. There have also been lots of case studies from bigger companies trying to make sense of “social commerce”. The diversity of what I have been …