BIG FUTURES

Protip for baby owners

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:13:52 -0800

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disruptive innovation - YouTube

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:01:00 -0800

via youtube.com

Some of Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation ideas in a 4 minute summary.

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Android Design - Writing Style

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:08:00 -0800

When choosing words for your app:

Keep it brief. Be concise, simple and precise. Start with a 30 character limit (including spaces), and don't use more unless absolutely necessary.

Keep it simple. Pretend you're speaking to someone who's smart and competent, but doesn't know technical jargon and may not speak English very well. Use short words, active verbs, and common nouns.

Be friendly. Use contractions. Talk directly to the reader using second person ("you"). If your text doesn't read the way you'd say it in casual conversation, it's probably not the way you should write it. Don't be abrupt or annoying and make the user feel safe, happy and energized.

Put the most important thing first. The first two words (around 11 characters, including spaces) should include at least a taste of the most important information in the string. If they don't, start over.

Describe only what's necessary, and no more. Don't try to explain subtle differences. They will be lost on most users.

Avoid repetition. If a significant term gets repeated within a screen or block of text, find a way to use it just once.

via developer.android.com

The examples in the link really bring the rules to life.

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Elad Blog: How To Choose A Board Member

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:07:00 -0800

The independent board member should be someone you feel comfortable calling up to ask a dumb, newbie question about your business. They should be someone that if circumstances were different, you would be excited to start a company with them.

via blog.eladgil.com

Fascinating. Always wondered how new entrepreneurs/CEOs learn to run things.

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5 Ways That Android Is Trying To Break The Mobile UI Paradigm | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:21:00 -0800

Android team discovered that many users felt dumb using the system because they couldn’t figure out how to access all its features. "We went through and eliminated all the hidden affordances [controls], places in the system where it wasn’t clear what you had to do, or where somebody would have to teach you, or where you’d have to just try it [to figure out what it did]," Duarte says. To reduce the learning curve, all essential actions in each application are right up on the surface screen. "That makes everything much more discoverable and much faster.

via fastcodesign.com

I wonder if they had to remove some of the items in the menus. Hard to believe all the stuff tucked into all the menus could then be easily fit onto all UIs. This is an example of where it's key to get product and design thinking and working as one.

Sometimes each feature and aspect of the UI is already optimized and there just isn't enough prioritization or elimination of non-essential features.

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Angel Investor Proves Doing Good and Profit Co-Exist Nicely - Forbes

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:13:00 -0800

Gil has noticed that CEOs of the most successful start-ups are intellectually curious. They ask questions of many different people who are working on a problem that interests them. And they synthesize all these opinions using their instincts to focus what they’ve learned.

In Gil’s view, to succeed entrepreneurs must challenge the status quo. And to do that successfully, they must be curious about how things work and why.

via forbes.com

Intellectually curious, ask questions of many different people, synthesize opinions, curious about how things work and why. Sounds ridiculously fun.

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Clear for iPhone (Coming Soon!) on Vimeo

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:46:00 -0800

via vimeo.com

Some really fun interaction design here. Great video. Been a while since a UI has made me actually want to find an excuse to use it instead of just enjoy using it.

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Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:51:00 -0800

via ted.com

Over Christmas, I was having coffee with my father and mentioned that it has been really good to be living overseas again for some time and that it's good for people to move around in the world.

He asked me to explain why. So I thought about it and said something like "Being in different cultures with different beliefs and ways of doing things reminds you that what you took to be fact or obvious might not be so much of a fact. More importantly is that you realize that if this is the case, then, in a certain sense, nothing in the world has to be the way it currently is and nothing in the world has to be any certain particular way."

I think this is good for creativity and good for problem solving and thus good for humankind.

UPDATE: Embed code seems unavailable. Link to the video.

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An entrepreneur is the artist of the business world

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:31:00 -0800

an entrepreneur is the artist of the business world. Yeah, there are some rules defined by the legal system and techniques to learn and apply, but pretty much everything else is free game and left up to the artist’s eye.

There is creativity required to make an idea a reality.

via gocubby.com

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9th Founder Showcase - Ina Fried of All Things D Interviews Mike Maples Jr. of FLOODGATE on Vimeo

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:52:00 -0800

via vimeo.com

His advice to entrepreneurs starting at 18:30:

1. Find something the rest of the world doesn't know about that's going to be big and crush it. A lot of you think you are but you're not. You're just doing a startup.

2. Forget about whether your investors are celebrities. Find investors who believe what you believe and help you do real stuff. (Hiring a hot engineering team, actively define your culture, etc.)

3. Your success will largely be a function of who you choose to trust whether it's investors, employees, customers. So many people are not long-term greedy enough when it comes to these choices.

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DLD 2012 – @Jack Dorsey: “Twitter Has A Business Model That Works” | TechCrunch

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:43:00 -0800

When we recently redesigned the website, we focused a lot on the discovery part of the equation, making it very simple for people to get value out of Twitter without necessarily participating.

via techcrunch.com

Love seeing these little insights into strategy shift and the connection to user experience.

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How iPhone explains why I design

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:23:00 -0800

Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made these features a lot more usable. "But that's important. When our tools don't work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers… When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole."

This is why I'm a designer. I feel that I am able to fix broken things in the world and I sense that, bit by bit, it makes the world and the people who live in it more whole. I accept this responsiblity and challenge and I find deep meaning in this.

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John Dimatos: Design For Unicef on Vimeo

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:19:00 -0800

via vimeo.com

Incredible.

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You have to care about the product | Why I Will Miss Steve Jobs

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:59:00 -0800

If you are building a startup, you need to own it.

You have to care about the product, so it needs to align with your skills and interests. Trying to build a startup in an area you don’t care about means you will fail to address problems and to seize opportunities that your more caring competitors will exploit.

via abtinforouzandeh.com

Interesting. Seldom do I see a tactical explanation for why it's important to build a startup in an area one cares about. Although I sometimes wonder if all the successful founders really care about their startup area.

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What jobs are users hiring your product to perform? - Chris Dixon

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:57:00 -0800

instead of dividing your customers into segments and asking which features each segment would like, you should think about what “job” the customers are “hiring” you product to perform.

via cdixon.org

This is from Clay Christensen and I learned it at Intuit. It's a great tool I've used to further develop an instinct as another way to validate what designers always want to know which is "why" as in "Why would someone want this" or "Why would anyone care about or love this?"

I'm often asking teammates what difference in someone's life are we going to make by releasing what we are talking about. This goes for little features and new product lines. Sometimes I find that we can get more focused and that helps us to streamline the design to really deliver the benefit. Sometimes I find that we're not so sure about how some work will make a difference and we get to rethink it.

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Beepl: A Smart, Social Q&A Platform

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:58:00 -0800

Meet the team

As we’ve noted already, Steve O’Hear is the CEO and co-founder of Beepl, but then there’s also Jan Paricka (CTO) who bootstrapped the company up until its investment (see below), Pete Harris (UX), and Rosie Svaskova (Community Manager).

via thenextweb.com

UX guy Pete Harris as co-founder and in the first 4 members of the company. Also, he appears to be a programmer:

"Pete is a UX/UI designer specialising in front-end web application development and design. He’s currently co-founder and a Director of Beepl Ltd."

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How To Build a Modern Website in 2011 - Tom Milway - Blog

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:49:00 -0800

we have to start designing with razor-sharp focus, basing our decisions off rich empirical data rather than personal preference or unsupported opinion. Furthermore, no longer should designers just create ‘buckets for which content gets chucked into’

via blog.tommilway.com

Great overview of some best practices in design and code of how to build a modern website today.

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Praia do Leme

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:17:19 -0800

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Freebie: Download New Twitter Profile GUI PSD - Smashing Magazine | Smashing Magazine

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:45:00 -0800

via smashingmagazine.com

Smashing Magazine editorial team released this PSD of Twitter's new UI. What do I have to do to get them to do this for me and my projects?

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Secret Science Club, Nerd Nite and Other Barroom Education - NYTimes.com

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:18:00 -0800

It got started in 2006, which was the height of national stupidity,” Mr. Garbarino said at a recent event. “This was pushback. People were sick of being dumb."

via nytimes.com

Funny. Would like to attend these bar backroom lectures held by local experts.

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