Making better products

As most of you know, I have finally taken the plunge and decided to join a startup. I will be starting from Monday, 21st July 08 as a Product manager with a stealth mode startup based out of Bangalore.

I am really looking forward to this new gig and am sure that the startup experience is going to be one roller coaster ride with many twists and turns. Above all, I think that it will be a great learning experience for me and can add a lot of value to my career.This somehow seemed to be the perfect time to juggle things up in life and I got a great opportunity.

We have a small team of around 10 people and I am really looking forward to interacting with each of them and for some great times ahead. I will of course miss all the folks from ADITI and the fun we’ve had together.

So here’s to new beginnings, Cheers!

Found this very interesting picture which I think explains user experience and the various elements involved in it in a powerful way.

Image courtesy

What do yout think ? Do all these apply to shaping web user experiences too ? Are there other factors ?

Design Camp 2.0 bangalore is all set to happen on the 26th July, 2008. This time it is being hosted at ADITI along with the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). To participate in the event you can register on the wiki from here.

Date : 26th July, 2008. 10 AM onwards.

Location : Aditi Technologies
224/16, Ramana Maharishi Road, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore – 80

DCamp is an unconference focused broadly on design and user experience community. It is open to everyone interested in the topic: designers, usability practitioners, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and other audiences.

We already have close to 50 registrations with very interesting speaker slots. If you wish to speak at the event, sign up for a speaker slot on the wiki.

If you have any interesting ideas for the event or wish to have discussions / BOF sessions around specific topics, leave me a comment or call me on 98866 38995.

See you there!

Vodafone very recently opened pre-registrations for the new 3G iPhone in India.

You can pre-register from here. No details on the tariff plan though, any insider info, anyone ?

I’m sure most of you know what Social Media is, for others -

Social Media is a dynamic and growing area that includes a collection of blogs, wikis, forums, photos and videos sharing sites. According to Wikipedia-

Social media describes the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

The fact that social media is changing the way people collaborate and interact with each other is now a given. Below is research data from a Forrester’s report on usage of various social media avenues.

Social media can become a powerful voice for your brand and add credibility by allowing users to share opinions and experiences about your brand. Below are some of my thoughts on how you can leverage social media to build your brand image - especially useful for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Blogging - This should be the starting point of your social media marketing strategy. It needs to work both ways - Read blogs using Google Reader, Bloglines and comment on blogs to get link love and imporve your credibility. You could use WordPress, TypePad, Blogger for easily setting up your blog.

RSS - Use RSS feeds to enable your consumers to take data away from your portal / blog and enable them to take it to places where conversations are happening. This will enable interesting conversations to evolve around your content. Some tools - Feedburner, Google News and mysyndicaat

Social Search - By social search, I am primarily referring to local content search providers. Being active in user engaged communities like Yelp, Yahoo Local, Local.com can give you a platform to advertise your brand and engage with potential users.

Social networking - Consumers these days are spending quite a lot of time on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut etc. Being on these networks enable you to understand what your customers are talking about and provide services targeted at them.

Consider building widgets/ applications which can integrate into these networks. This makes it easier for your consumers to share information about your product / service with their friends and peers. As a result,brand endorsements are visible and shared amongst members. Chains of endorsements might evolve from this sharing, making social networking incredibly powerful and influential. Facebook has an entire category of business applications with over 1000 different applications.

Social bookmarking - This is a great way to tag content and enable traffic to your site. Allowing users to share information from your site using social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx will enable your brand to get more coverage.

Social conversation tools - I like to bunch tools like Twitter, Thwirl, Plurk and FriendFeed into what I like to call “social conversation” tools. These are very powerful tools to start conversations with other people and virally spread information. Several corporations have already starting using Twitter as a part of their main stream marketing model - Jetblue for instance has a twitter feed enabling their customers to get real time updates on flight timings and weather conditions.

So what’s your social media strategy ? How are leveraging and influencing the crowd to use your brand ?

With more and more web products hitting the market everyday, the importance of delivering value to end users through your product has become paramount.

If you are building a product from scratch, prioritization of features becomes the most critical task and this can determine success or failure for your product. Most of us product managers love to add features - customizable user interfaces, changing password, RSS feeds etc. Faced with such a situation, here are questions that I usually like to ask myself

• Is your feature solving a particular problem of your user segment ?
• Is the feature adding value to the way your end users solve their problem ?
• Is feature increasing usability or improving the user experience in the product?
• Is the feature cracking a technology problem which others have failed to solve ?

Prioritizing features can be quite a daunting task for your entire product team - from product managers to technical architects keeping in mind that you still need to build a great v1.0 and hit the market within time and budget.

Many product companies, especially startups have failed because of this critical reason. 37signals’ Getting real is a great read to understand the dynamics involved in building web products.

So is there any best way to solve the prioritization problem ? Well, there’s a technique that I have been using, some parts inspired from here.

It’s a simple four quandrant technique with two axeses

• Difficulty of implementation on the X axis - This indicates the time, effort, cost and technology complexity of implementation a particular feature. This ranges from low to high
• Business Value on the Y axis - This indicates the business value of the feature in terms of revenue, greater user adopting, cost savings etc.

Get your entire product team involved in this exercise, first starting out with a list of all possible features which you can build into the product. Then get the product management/business team to evaluate all the proposed features on their business value. Get the technical team to evaluate the difficulty of implementing each of the features.

Then map the features into the four quadrants as shown above.

• High business value, Low difficulty level- These are what I call the “Cash cows”. These are features that you would definitely include in your product as they bring maximum value with least effort. No brainer!
• High business value, High difficulty level - This is the tricky part. These might be your niche features, or features which separate your product from the rest in the segment. These features are strategic investments that you might need to make for the success of your product. Rethink about each of these features and how they can potentially be simplified to move them to the left. Also evaluate features from this category which you want in V1 and push some for V2.
• Low business value, low difficulty level - These features are straightforward abilities which are present in most of your competing products. Make sure that you don’t add all these features into your product to avoid feature bloat. Think about how you can potentially make simple changes and move them up the value chain. Think about whether these can be monetized in any way and check if you can change the way these features have been implemented by your competitors.
• Low business value, high difficulty level - These are features that you want to stay away from as they provide very less value.

So, what do you think about the effectiveness of this method ? Let me know the techniques that you have for prioritizing features.

Update: A great read from the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) blog on the similar topic and tips for product mangers : Great Products by Design

NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last couple of years they have been releasing a bad usability calendar which is meant to show examples of bad UX and usability.

This year’s calendar has great examples of exaggerated use of web 2.0 design,social bookmarking proliferation, drop down menus, message feeds etc.

You can download this year’s calender here.

Interesting way to portray UX and design bloppers!

It’s now almost an year since I started blogging seriously - blogging about work, about trends in technology, product management, user experience and usability.

It’s one year down and this is my 50th post on this blog. Not bad after all, an verage of four posts a month, a post a week!

The other I was just going through my blog stats and wanted to check out the most popular posts etc.

Here’s an excerpt

Top 5 posts and pages of all time along with the number of views

Here’s the traffic snapshot over the last year. I think that this is fairly consistent, but would like to hear from experienced bloggers about this trend line.

Any finally search engine terms which brought me in traffic, here are the top terms along with the number of clicks

Thanks for all your support, keep the comments and feedback flowing!

I was at the Bangalore startup lunch last Saturday at the NSCREL, IIM Bangalore. It was a good event overall, with participation from about 8 startups. The agenda of startup lunch was to provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.

Kudos to the organizing team for putting up a great show!Great job guys - Sridhar, Ashish and Pradeep !

If you are interested in working for a startup - here’s a list of startups in Bangalore along with positions that they are looking for.

If you were at the event, these are pics from Pradeep.

Do you think simplicity is the be all and end all of design ? Is it the panacea that we are all looking for ?

Quite a profound pic that has been floating around on the web.

Steve Job’s take on “What is design ? “

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.

PS: Emphasis mine