There are two established New York tech companies who do a great job of getting close and staying close to their customers: Meetup and The Ladders. Andres Glusman (VP of Strategy, Meetup) and Jeff Gothelf (Dir of UX, The Ladders) established regular, lightweight usability sessions at their respective companies (that’s them above giving Lean Ignite talks — see bottom for …
Entertainment or Utility? (more on gamification)
Several years back, over beers one evening at GDC (Game Developers Conference), I debated design principles with Bernie Yee, my colleague at Electric Sheep who had previously worked at Sony (Everquest) and at Harmonix (Rock Band). He argued that any product had to choose between being an entertainment property or a utility. There are a lot of people challenging that …
Lean Wireframing
Will Evans, who does UX design at The Ladders with agile-UX champion Jeff Gothelf, recently wrote a tweet that caught my eye: The hi-fidelity vs. lo-fidelity wireframe debate is silly. You use the weapons you need based on the war you face. (link) A wireframe is meant to communicate and test. You want to do the least amount of work …
12 Tips for Customer Development Interviews (revised)
UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR A REVISED LIST OF 12 TIPS A year ago, I gave a talk at the very first Lean Startup Machine about giving customer development interviews. Tomorrow, I am doing the same with a new batch of LSM warriors and I have revised and updated my list (and accompanying text) as follows: 1. One person at …
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 …
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 …