Product Breakdown

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This is a virtuous cycle: Entrepreneurs manifest their ideas by inspiring others’ imagination, including those who join the effort, fund the venture, and purchase the products. This model is relevant to startups and established firms, as well as innovators of all types where the realization of a new idea — whether a product, service, or work of art — results in a collective increase in imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

This framework allows us to parse the pathway, describing the actions and attitudes required at each step along the way.

Imagination requires engagement and the ability to envision alternatives

Creativity requires motivation and experimentation to address challenges

Innovation requires focusing and reframing to generate unique solutions

Entrepreneurship requires persistence and the ability to inspire others

Via Steve Blank

[mercius]

it’s all about

[productbreakdown]

Choosing the right UX metrics for your product can be a tough challenge. The HEART framework by Google can help you proceed with confidence.

Great post. Cool UI for it as well. In summary, here are the ones you can use:

Heart

Engagement

Adoption

Retention

Task Success

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How to Engage Your Users to Build the Product They Actually Want

“Make it clear that you will listen to users who are thoughtful about their ideas.”

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Do Customer Interviews Even If You Don't Think You Need To

The customer development process showed me that it’s never too early to start customer interviews. However, it can be too late. Although I had wanted to finish the product first and jump straight to user testing, going out and talking to potential customers helped focus and clarify my ideas before building something that I would have had to redesign in the end.

[courtenaybird]

KPIs for Social Media According to Executives Worldwide - eMarketer:

"Advanced” metrics had generally seen the most growth. For example, engagement—the top KPI—had jumped 32% in the past two years, while sentiment tracking showed year-over-year growth of 38%. …

Still, web traffic as well as followers, fans and group size—simple and relatively useless figures—ranked second and third, which… was “slightly disconcerting.”

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"People have an intuitive bias about push. They only want to receive push notifications that are relevant, time-sensitive, and valuable. Our data shows that consumers have innate assumptions about what an app will offer based on the app’s industry. As a result, an app’s ability to bridge the trust gap greatly impacts push enablement rates."

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What customers say vs what they *could* mean

[ebunomoni]

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

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What's it for? and How will we know if it worked?

Answer these two questions first, please. If it's worth doing, it's worth knowing before you do it.

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"Viral Loops" vs "Viral Oops" via @nireyal

[productbreakdown]

Naming Your Idea (no hair pulling required)

Learn how to find the perfect name for your startup, project or idea, without pulling your hair out.

[designeh]

[theverge]

When a design finally comes together, Yves says, “the pain is forgotten. What lasts is the quality of the work.”

The Maker’s Mark: Yves Behar is the man behind Silicon Valley’s most beautiful gadgets (via thisistheverge)

[publishertheme-blog]

[stoweboyd]

Good design:

Is innovative - The possibilities for progression are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for original designs. But imaginative design always develops in tandem with improving technology, and can never be an end in itself.

…

[firsttimeux]

NPR One iPhone app first time user experience

The good bits:

The app begins with an interactive intro tour. A Guy Raz voice clip explains key features (“Let us use the mic on your phone so you can talk to us”) and these explanations are reinforced by visual highlights that progressively appear during playback. 

The introductory clip plays within the normal controls of the app, which helps the user get comfortable with how real clips will appear in the future.

The user is prompted to press play to begin the clip, instead of the clip auto-playing. This allows the user to make sure that he is in a good place to listen.

The user can use the skip button to go straight to the sign-up screen.

All prompts for location or microphone access are deferred until after the introduction and user sign-up. 

The user’s NPR channel is automatically selected based on his location.

To be improved:

While the voice clip is short, there are several instructions covered in its duration and these fly by quickly. This may cause the user to forget things or feel overwhelmed.

Unfortunately, it seems the user cannot move the playhead backwards to hear an instruction again. Even if a real radio broadcast won’t allow scrubbing, it may be a good idea for NPR to make an exception in this case.  

There are some cases where the visual highlights make it seem like the user should interact with the cue being shown (for example, the microphone highlight). This is an expectation when samples are placed in the context of normal interaction, so it can be frustrating to only be able to interact with two of the controls (the play and skip buttons) but not with any others. To both help users retain information and lessen this confusion, NPR may want to explore pausing between instructions and asking the user to interact with the element in question. Just increasing the pause between clips could be helpful.

It seems prudent to let users proceed without signing in. NPR One explains that signing in ensures it never plays the same story twice, but the app can use local storage to keep track of previous stories so this argument quickly breaks down. A sign-in prompt may be more relevant after the user plays his first few clips and might be better focused on cross-device purposes (for example, “Want to listen to these clips on other devices? Create an account.”).

After the clip plays through, and even after the user signs in and starts exploring the app, the welcome clip is no longer accessible.