Everyday UX: Make Uber Easier, Let Me Enter My Destination

Earlier this week I was in Los Angeles for some client meetings. We had a rental car which was awesome, but a few nights we left the car at the hotel so we could use Uber and not worry about having drinks.

Overall, I was really impressed with Uber in Los Angeles. One of the things that I loved most was the pricing. Compared to NYC it is much more affordable. A friend of mine said it was because of all the competition that exists in Los Angeles from other companies, including Lyft.

In New York when I get in an Uber, I never tell the driver the exact address. Instead, I tell them the intersection, such as Broadway & 29th. But, in Los Angeles, things got a bit more complicated.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, so I’m not that familiar with the street names and neighborhoods. And to be sure I didn’t get dropped off in the wrong place, I made sure to tell the driver the the exact address.Continue reading

What Is A Startup?

How would you define a start up?

I’m guessing that a lot of people would say it’s a small company, or a company just getting started, or even that it’s a young tech company. I think the term startup has been a bit popularized by the technology community. Along with that is a bit of a misconception about what a start up really is.

I recently stumbled upon a great article by Steve Blank called Why Companies Are Not Startups in which he discusses why large companies have trouble adopting and embracing innovation. The key reason he gives is that large companies are inherently different than a startup in terms of their goals and structure. As a result, the environment of a company is not necessarily conducive to innovation. Continue reading

Identifying Your Product Story: Try This MadLibs Style Activity

Creating a great user experience starts before you ever have a single brainstorm, whiteboard session, or sketch a wireframe. One of the most important parts to creating a great user experience for any product is establishing the story of why the product exists and what the product does.

We’ve all heard the term “value proposition” but, sometimes I question the value of our value propositions.

I work with a variety of clients and do some teaching so I’m exposed to a lot of product ideas. One of the main problems I encounter is that teams often have a great idea, but the idea lacks enough focus to be a great product. Why? Because so many times we get excited by our ideas and see the vision of where the product could be in 3 years, and we forget that we need to start small.

Some common mistakes I see people make are thinks like using generations and vague statements. For example, have you ever heard someone describe their product as being for “soccer moms” or “millennials” or some other stereotypical phrase? Or, here’s one I bet we’ve all heard … “it’s like Pinterest for _______”.

Another mistake I see is when people talk about a project in terms of it’s features and not why those features will matter to the intended user. Too many times we become mesmerized with how the product will work and not why it exists.

We need to stop talking like this! Why?

Well, because speaking about our products without specificity allows room for assumption and re-interpretation of the idea. When this happens, you end up with a disjointed product and experience.

Remember when you were a child and you played the “telephone game” where everyone sat in a circle and whispered a phrase in each others ears? Then, at the end of the game someone would say the word or phrase and it would be wildly different from what it started out as.Continue reading

Emotion In Product Design & Why I Love Instagram

The other day I logged into Facebook and literally nearly every single post was of someone’s Facebook Movie. If you don’t know what that means, in celebration of turning 10, Facebook created a movie for each of their members which highlights the member’s top posts, photos, and moments. It’s cute in theory, but when you see 20 of them in a row in your newsfeed, it’s not that exciting.

A walk down memory lane is fun when I watch my own memories, but not very fun when I watch other people’s memories.

If I didn’t have the career that I have I doubt that I’d actually use Facebook at all — I’m a fairly private person and I don’t share a lot. I am mainly on Facebook to research and observe.

I really don’t care to consume a lot of the content on Facebook, I find it to slants a little too negative for me — too much venting, too surface level, and a bit too polarizing.Continue reading

My Latest Dilemma: Technology Extinction

Last week, Business Insider reported that Barnes & Noble laid off a lot of people on its Nook hardware engineering team. If you’re not familiar, Nook is Barnes & Noble’s e-reader and intended to compete with Amazon’s Kindle. However, things didn’t turn out so well for Nook and in Q3 of 2013 it’s earnings were down 32% and made it the worst performing part of Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble has been figuring out what to do and one route would be to change their focus from the hardware to just doing its own applications and digital distribution. Too bad for all those people who got Nook’s as gifts over the last few years.

This brings up an interesting problem though that eventually we all will face. How do we decide what devices to purchase? How do we know that the device or hardware we purchase today will still be around in three years? I think the reality is that we don’t. The world of technology hardware changes so fast that there’s no way to ensure that some amazing new device will see a long lifespan.Continue reading

Customer Experience & Why I Decided To Sign Up For Oscar Health Insurance

I grew up in Canada and trying to figure out the American health insurance system is something that’s been a huge challenge for me.

I remember getting my first “real” job at a big Fortune 500 software company and being emailed a ton of forms to fill out for health insurance. I had no idea what any of it meant. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really anyone who could guide me through the process.

No one in the human resources department wanted to be advise me because of that delicate line between “advising” and “choosing”. It was so very frustrating for me as I felt totally blind. If someone had asked me what my plan deductible was or what my yearly out of pocket maximum was, I would have been clueless.

It wasn’t because I didn’t have the brains to figure it out. It was because the process was so broken and the information was so inaccessible that I just gave up out of impatience and total frustration. Each plan had it’s own brochure or PDF with tiny fonts and crazy charts and tables filled with insurance and legal jargon.Continue reading

Dear Twitter: Please Don’t Change Your Design, I Like You Just The Way You Are

Dear Twitter, I started using you in 2007 after a friend introduced me to you. You were my connection to my industry and colleagues. You helped me stay up to day with my profession and made it easier to learn about the NYC start up community after I moved here over 7 years ago.

What attracted me to you was your simplicity and the ease by which I could consume information. Twitter, you replaced me visiting multiple other sites because I knew that the community of people I had followed would curate the best content that I was interested in.

Over the years, you’ve done some things that I’m not a fan of (for example, the new white header just makes the site toooo white for me) but overall, my core experience, my feed of tweets, has remained intact. But today, I learned from articles on TechCrunch and The Verge that you want to give the feed a facelift and make it more visual and possibly for Facebook and Pinterest like.Continue reading

Why The Pre-Product Phase Matters To Product Development

Recently Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post called “The Pre-Product Phase” in which he outlined a key weakness he says he has, mainly the inability to fully understand a product and it’s potential when that product is presented through wireframes, sketches, fully designed screens, etc.

As a result, he says that he prefers to invest in products that are created in code — products that actually function so he can try them out and have them come to life for him as a user. He goes on to say that he has “pretty much given up investing in products that aren’t ready for public use.”

For the record, Fred is not saying that wireframes, sketches, and designs don’t have value. He’s just saying that for him, he has a hard time grasping a product and understanding it’s viability without experiencing the product in real time —  fully coded and fully functioning.Continue reading

Everyday UX: How to “Star” A Song in the Spotify UX

I’m a big fan of Spotify. But from a user experience perspective there are a few things that I find a bit confusing. I thought it would be great to outline a few of these little issues as a part of my Everyday UX series so you can see the things that a user experience designer thinks about. Consistency and familiarity is key to a great user experience. The experience of “starring” a song on Spotify provides a great example to outline this as a mini case study.

I’m always discovering new music on Spotify and when song comes on that I’m really into, I immediately want to star it. However, there’s one key place in Spotify where I cannot star a song from. Check out this screenshot of Spotify below.Continue reading

What Acupuncture Taught Me About User Experience Design

A year ago I was experiencing a lot of shoulder pain and I knew I needed to do something about it. I didn’t have a big injury, but I just had constant dull pain in my right shoulder. The pain was presumably due to poor ergonomics at my desk, constant use of my mouse, stress, and sleeping on my right side.

I also get migraines and have vertigo but I’ve figured out how to manage those problems and they weren’t the instigator for checking out acupuncture. But the shoulder pain was really affecting me because my right hand is my mousing hand and I noticed the shoulder pain all the time!

At my first appointment, I expected to go in and have them put a bunch of needles in my shoulder and tell me to come back once or twice a week for a few weeks. Well, that’s not exactly what happened.Continue reading