Jason Cohen’s recent post got me thinking about the difference between UX and UI and the order in which I think about design when coming up with something new. Here is my rough order (and tomorrow I will post a concrete example): 1. The Problem Understand the customer’s problem and ask yourself if you are solving the right problem Example …
Getting in the Way in a Good Way
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 …
Prototyping for the iPhone with Briefs
I’ve been playing around with the open source prototyping tool Briefs, and while it took a little hair-pulling to get through the quirks, it really is a great tool. Briefs lets you script up an interactive mock-application, and then test it out on iOS devices. The best part is you can create a prototype with your own images, rather than …
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 …
Post-mortem on a UI “input” screen
Today I am working on some UI/UX changes to our product, and thought I would quickly talk through a UI example (soon to die under my axe) from our beta. Some context: in the spirit of getting a beta up as quickly as possible, our first user experience (FUE) was pretty crude. After registration (also soon to disappear), the first …