Nik Laufer-Edel

"The only metric that matters […] should be a signal that they are using [your] product in the way..."

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 15:03:00 -0800

“The only metric that matters […] should be a signal that they are using [your] product in the way you expected and that they use it enough so that you believe they will come back to use it more and more.”

- The only metric that matters by Josh Elman

"Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at..."

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 09:04:00 -0800

“Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.”

- Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation | Talk Video | TED

Winning at Product: Four Roles

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:47:51 -0800

Winning at Product: Four Roles:

It’s no secret lots of work goes into launching products. But there is a secret: you need four hats.

"Tool time is a great place to look for deep frustration. In an experience, tool time is the..."

Wed, 25 Dec 2013 10:43:30 -0800

“Tool time is a great place to look for deep frustration. In an experience, tool time is the cumulative moments where the user is dealing with a system requirement that doesn’t advance their goal.”

- http://www.uie.com/articles/innovative_experience/

"Clearly communicating the things you want seems to be a good way to get them."

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 16:55:00 -0800

““Clearly communicating the things you want seems to be a good way to get them.””

- via Jakob Lodwick (via kazlist, ahref)

"I’m looking for somebody who has a positive attitude and is confident enough to express their..."

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 07:25:00 -0800

“I’m looking for somebody who has a positive attitude and is confident enough to express their ideas. They’re confident enough to disagree with me, confident enough to say what they think and paint a picture of the future as they see it. But at the same time, they’re questioning whether there is some better solution and whether they’re right or not. It’s this balance between confidence and questioning. This represents a kind of curiosity, an open, child-like mind of being enthusiastic enough to talk about their ideas–and questioning them enough to build on that idea rather than think it’s all done.”

- David Kelley on Designing Curious Employees

What would the Granddaddy of Information Architecture say?

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:13:46 -0800

What would the Granddaddy of Information Architecture say?:

As product designers we often work with lots of data. How can we organize information to maximize the impact of our design?

"Certain pursuits and activities lend themselves to reaching a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi..."

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:19:00 -0800

“Certain pursuits and activities lend themselves to reaching a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes the common characters of these activities as including ‘a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.’”

- The 100 Best Business Books of All Time

Build Successful Products

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Build Successful Products:

The four variables you need to get PM Fit
When looking to build a new product there are an infinite number of things to think about. Luckily, in the early stages most don’t matter…

Can Your Users Win?

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 15:12:00 -0700

Can Your Users Win?:

Designing a product that keeps people engaged requires thinking about how users win and lose.

"“Hard” marketing, on the other hand, are activities that authentically engage customers: finding..."

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 14:25:15 -0700

““Hard” marketing, on the other hand, are activities that authentically engage customers: finding them, grokking their needs, crafting a solution with shoe cobbler-like attention, patiently educating them about your approach, making it easy to buy from you, and being a likable vendor. This “hard” marketing is the essence of what I refer to as product management.”

- Why Product Management is Everything | Inc.com

What Great Presenters Do Differently

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 12:40:00 -0700

What Great Presenters Do Differently:

When I go to conferences I generally find a few presentations stand out while the majority are forgotten.

Looking to make an impact on stage? Read my first post on Medium covering nine items which I’ve found great presenters have in common.

"The core features had to be simple and straightforward. The power user features needed to be in..."

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 10:41:00 -0700

“The core features had to be simple and straightforward. The power user features needed to be in places power users expected them to be.”

- Tomasz Tunguz’s conclusion on how to design a single product for three inevitable customer types: New Users, Occasional Users, and Power Users. Via The trinity of product design.

Pre-Validated Pain Points I had a great chat with Teresa Torres...

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:21:00 -0700

Pre-Validated Pain Points

I had a great chat with Teresa Torres about “high-level” pain. If you start with a top-down approach to finding pain it means you’re starting with the business’s purpose and key metrics. This approach typically involves “following the money” which has the bonus that you can easily pitch the ROI of your solution.

Let’s pretend your Customer Segment is B2B SaaS businesses. Starting top-down you can safely assume their purpose, other than changing the world, is to make money. The way SaaS businesses make money is by generating quality leads, converting those leads into active users, fostering relationships and usage such that users become paying customers, and keeping those customers happy to avoid churn. These are high-level pain points and you know what? They are amazing. Why? Because you don’t need to validate them. What business wouldn’t want more qualified leads?

Use a pre-validated pain point and skip the pain validation step. Tweet this

Instead your focus can shift to: 1) proving you can impact one of those metrics, and 2) positioning your solution as being less painful and less risky than the current solution.

Is your product painful? You want people to adopt your product...

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 21:01:00 -0700

Is your product painful?

You want people to adopt your product because you know you can help them solve their pain point. So why aren’t they using it?

Today was delicious. I had just finished my third bowl of ice cream. I definitely wasn’t hungry, nor did I have any sort of craving, but I had two pints just sitting in the freezer, so I figured why not…

Then came a problem. As I tried to get at the ice cream, the scoop hit what felt like concrete. The ice cream was frozen solid; so I weighed my options. It was either going to take a bit of work to chip at it, or it was going to take a while waiting for it to thaw on the counter, so I put it back in the freezer.

Customer Development tells us to search for pain, then to find a solution to solve that pain for which people will pay. We look for pain because people will generally pay to get rid of it, or to avoid it in the first place. That is why we buy Advil when we have a headache, or AppleCare when we buy a new laptop.

But how do we measure pain? The answer is motivation. The more something hurts, the more effort or resources you’ll dedicate to make the hurt go away. Steve Blank talks about identifying early customers based on a pyramid of pain and Ryan Hoover has a good list of ways to test pain.

In the case of me getting another bowl of ice cream, the pain of getting it out of the container and into my bowl was greater than my motivation to eat it. This raises an important point. Pain, or motivation, exists not only within your customer, but also with using a product, or in our example, getting the ice cream into my bowl. Even if you’ve found a massive pain point, if the pain of actively adopting your product is too great, your customers will not use it. Just imagine if you needed a can opener to get into a pint of ice cream.

The moral of the story is, that the pain of adopting your product has to be perceived as less than the pain of the the problem you are solving. This means taking into account your customer’s current solution and switching costs. The greater that gap, the more likely it is that your product will be adopted.

Starting a business? Start with pain.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:57:00 -0700

You’ve got a really cool idea you want to turn into a business, but how can you be sure people will buy it?

If you want to make money you need to sell something people want to buy. And people are most likely to buy things that get rid of pain. Kareem, a mentor of mine, has a good analogy. Stop for a second and picture this: if someone’s hair is on fire, and you happen to be walking by with a bucket of water, do you think they’ll pay for it?

The fun part for many of us is coming up with solutions. It’s easy to dream up features. But without understanding the problem how can you build a solution? Start by understanding the pain, then instead of just having an idea, you’ll have a business.

How do you find the pain? Learn about the process your product fits into or replaces. How are things being done today? What happens before and after using your product? Who’s involved at each step? Who has the budget? And what fire are they trying to put out?

How to sort ranked items in your software

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:24:00 -0700

Hint: it’s not by average

So what would be a better ranking? Well, we’d probably like to see an item with 50 5-star votes before we see an item with a single 5-star vote. Intuitively speaking, the more votes, the more certain we are of an item’s usefulness, so we should be focusing our attention on high-score, high-vote-count items.

-William Morgan

5 Presentation Design questions answered

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 14:35:00 -0700

I run a workshop based on my 5 Steps to Great Presentations. During the last session we didn’t have time to answer all the questions so I’ve answered some of them below. Enjoy!

Good resources for PowerPoint or Keynote templates

Most templates do more harm than good, they add visual distractions and clutter to your slides. The best templates I’ve seen come by default with Keynote and I personally suggest building your own simple template. Remember, any visuals on the screen should be reinforcing your message, everything else is clutter.

Tips for building your own simple presentation templates:

Make use an existing colour pallet (checkout Kuler for pre-designed colour pallets rated by the design community)
Keep the focus on your content (imagery or typography)
Use a single colour, try a light or a dark background

White has the advantage of making it easy to add many images found online into your presentation without worrying about those images having white boxes around them
If you’re going to be photographed or are presenting via webinar I’ve heard dark backgrounds are best

If you need to add a corporate logo make it small and put it in the bottom right hand corner, usually a logo is just clutter, so if possible try putting it on the first and last slide

A simple template leaves most of the space to show off the important elements of your slide: your content and visuals. Over the years I’ve developed numerous templates, get in touch if you’d to discuss a professionally designed template for your corporation or presentation. I may also make my template available for download in the future which I use myself for workshops and client work. Signup for my presentation design newsletter to be notified.

How much information to include in your presentation

Start by focusing on the goals of your presentation, make sure you can achieve your goals within the allotted time. If you don’t have a lot of time you might need to break your goal into multiple steps and start by raising interest in your topic with your audience and giving them an avenue to learn more. This is better than overwhelming them during your talk. If this is the case, try starting with a story but don’t give the ending, or leave them with a thought provoking question.

Most people are tempted to cram too much information into a given time slot. You need to know your audience and their level of understanding of a topic. If they are experienced in the field, you can cover more ground and move faster. If they are new to the topic, you’ll have to cut how much you cover, explain concepts as you introduce them, and use more repetition.

Improving the delivery of your presentation

The way you hold yourself, your pace, your tone, and intonation are all aspects of delivery. Mastering these elements takes practice. When I work with clients I will record their talks, listen to them, and provide feedback. You can try this yourself. You will be amazed at how much you will learn and improve by watching or listening to yourself.

Software to make professional presentations: Keynote, PowerPoint, or Prezi?

At the end of the day you should use what you’re most comfortable with.

Keynote is my personal favourite and what we use for all the speakers at TEDxVancouver. It has great built in tools for making small adjustments to images, has clean animations, and an interface consistent with the rest of the iLife suite. It’s only available for Mac and not suitable if the presentations need to be run on a PC (unless you want to fiddle endlessly with a PowerPoint export or present a PDF or a movie file).
PowerPoint has more features and can accomplish everything Keynote can and more (although that’s not necessarily a good thing).
Prezi is great for specific types of presentations, specifically when you providing a high level overview or concept map and then drilling down into specific details of that overview. The zooming in and out provides context to the audience as you move from the high level to the detail level. For presentations where you don’t follow this format, the animation can cause a disorienting effect.

Career opportunities in presentation design

Presentations are used everywhere within the corporate world be it for internal purposes or public product announcements. That being said I’m not aware of many roles dedicated to presentation design. There are communication firms that specialize in presentation design, you might want to checkout careers at Duarte.

Want more?

Be sure to follow me @nikDOTca on twitter, signup for my newsletter, or subscribe to this blog via RSS. I’ll be posting more Q&A on presentation design.

Don't break your (implicit) brand promise

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:00:00 -0700

Your brand is a promise to your customer. As a conscientious marketer you are aware of this, you know that consistently communicating and upholding this promise is paramount, but you also realize that each customer is unique and may be buy for myriad of reasons. Understanding why people buy gives you the opportunity to understand what implicit promise lie at the heart of your relationship with that customer.

Example: You promise customers you’re the low cost provider of a service. Your marketing and positioning paints this picture, your communications, your actions, everything you do, reinforces this promise. But there may be other reasons that people buy. Maybe they are fed up with their existing provider nickel and dimming them or making accounting “errors”. They are switching not just for a better rate but because they want a more forthcoming provider. Making the switch to you, as the low cost provider, carriers with it this additional implicit promise. So what happens when you need to increase prices? Even if you’re still the low cost provider, if you don’t handle the communications around your price change properly, you’ll be breaking that implicit promise. However, if you understand that customers have this implicit promise you can craft your communications on the price change to not only reinforce your promise of being the low cost provider, but do it an an open and honest way, to preserve that implicit promise,

Take away: Understand why people are buying and understand what promise your brand or product is making to your customer. Then consider those promises in your communications and your actions. Brand loyalty is about building trust, and you build trust by keeping your promises.

Branding should come after Customer Discovery

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:40:00 -0700

There are four steps in Customer Development. The first is Customer Discovery where you identify who your customer is and what pain point you’re going to solve.

A good brand is a promise to customers and positions you relative to alternatives and competitors. But what kind of promise are you going to make if you don’t know who your customer is or how you will truly solve their problems? And how can you position yourself against the status quo or competitors if you don’t know who they are? I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about your brand early on, just don’t obsess over it, yet.

The next step, Customer Validation, is when you start putting money towards marketing, making it a natural time to revisit your brand. This insight resulted after a great conversation with my colleague Paul over rebranding. It especially makes sense if it’s something you’ve been putting off because you were too busy doing what you’re supposed to be doing in an early stage startup, finding product market fit.