Products
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Good Design Can Make the Elevator Pitch Futile
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2 min read
I had a five-minute conversation with an angel investor last week and described the product I’m working on. His response: “Similar things are being done by bigger companies with giant marketing budgets, so you’ll need a very clever marketing idea to succeed. What is it?” There was an uncomfortable pause. On one hand, I haven’t…
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What We Know About Failure So Far
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1 min read
I’m in the research phase of my book on customer experience product failures and I’m pleased to find several books on failure that will inform my work. I’m collecting them in a list on UX Zeitgeist: Oh Noes! Books About Failure. I’ll be adding reviews of each book I read. So far, Being Wrong is…
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My Product as an Equation
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1 min read
One of the most important things I learned when becoming a product manager was being able to see my product as an equation. In the startup phase it’s easy, there’s just costs and they’re often tangible: people, hardware, software. Then you add marketing in various forms each with a different cost/revenue profile, then revenue streams…
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Another Readability Business Model
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3 min read
I’m a huge fan of the ‘old’ Readability — I hit a button which sucks out the content of a web page into a nicely formatted view, then I usually hit the Evernote button to save it for reading on my Macs or iPhone. The Readability folks recently amp’d the feature into a business. They…
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Why I Think Posture Makes the iPad Different
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2 min read
Of all the images to come out of the iPad announcement, the one struck me the most was less about the device and more about the experience of it: Lying back on the sofa — isn’t that a nice way to be? And sitting or lying on the sofa with a 9.7 inch screen means…
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Democratized Design at BMW
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1 min read
At the end of the concept design phase you’ll need to select among the concepts you’ve developed, and there are various methods for doing so: customer feedback (e.g. desirability testing), a decision market, an executive decision, a vote, and so on. The last option, voting, becomes more interesting when you keep the designers anonymous to…
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A Quantified Value of the iPod Design
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2 min read
This study — Who Captures Value in a Global Innovation System? The case of Apple’s iPod — is one of the best I’ve heard of in a long time. The researchers traced the parts and assembly of the iPod and attributed the value generated by each step by part and by country. A few key…
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Dream Cars Meet Harsh Reality
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3 min read
That’s what Phil Patton at the New York Times thought about the concept cars at the Detroit Auto Show. In the article I found some insight as well as some assumptions we can toss out… But this year, dark economic clouds seem to have cast a shadow even over the designers displaying their ideas at…
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Designing Better Proposal Price Tags
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2 min read
Not long I was talking to a project manager who was writing her first request for proposal, explaining the common wisdom on budget disclosure: “You’ll want to give them a ballpark idea of what your budget is without telling them your actual budget; agencies will sometimes configure the work to take all the money on…
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Interview With Me Discussing Tangible Futures
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1 min read
Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and research fellow of The Long Now Foundation, asked me a few questions about tangible futures and published the interview on his blog. While I’m more focused on near-term concept design these days, it was helpful for me to reflect on why and how…
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Finally, The Iraq War Ends
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1 min read
…not really, unfortunately. But that was the headline on a “special edition” of the “New York Times” today. The credibility was in question from the start, as the paper was handed out free at the subway which is never the case with the Times. The production is quite accurate, but a quick glance at the…
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Creative Commons: Good for Nature
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1 min read
At Overlap 08 this past weekend we talked a lot about sustainability in all its forms, including sustaining nature. This was on my mind this morning as I cycled over the Brooklyn Bridge and saw a small video crew capturing some footage of the bridge. Surely, I thought, there’s so much footage of this bridge…
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Google Labs Embedded in Gmail
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1 min read
I think a lot about how organizations and their products evolve quickly rather than remain static, and Google Labs are a prime example of that. By developing many alpha products, releasing several public betas, and getting live feedback they use the market to tell them what works. For many companies the notion of releasing your…
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Disruption From the Bottom Up: Flip
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1 min read
I think it’s fair to say the $100 Flip video camera is a disruptive play. I’m not too surprised it didn’t come from Canon or Sony, but instead from a company who established their capabilities by building even cheaper cameras… Pure Digital started out, in 2002, making a digital version of the single-use “disposable†camera,…
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The Familiar Product That’s Always Surprising
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1 min read
When one of my students started designing a product extension for Orbit gum, I didn’t get the appeal of Orbit (it’s huge among college students, but as I don’t own a TV I’m immune to the marketing). But lately my project manager at work keeps bringing it in, and each pack is a new flavor.…