Office Hours At TC Disr...

One of the most memorable moments of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year was office hours with Paul Graham, who is the heart and co-founder of Y Combinator . We are doing it again this year. But because Graham is back in Silicon Valley with a newborn baby, we’re doing it in a slightly different way. Over the past few years, we’ve heard that it’s not only hard to find engineers. It’s hard to find great design talent. And if Apple’s still unbelievable and mind-boggling rise over the last 15 years shows anything, it’s that design matters. Design and simplicity made the difference between Instagram and every other photo-sharing app. It revived Path. It made Square stand out among all of the other credit card readers. So we’re changing Office Hours to focus on design. Design Office Hours will be held on-stage at Disrupt NYC on Wednesday, May 22nd, from 11:55am to 12:30pm. Just like we did last year at New York during Disrupt, six companies will be chosen from the completed applications below to spend time on-stage with some talented design experts. Startups will get to go up on stage, show our experts their designs, and receive advice and feedback. Our on-stage design experts include Leland Rechis , who is a director of mobile product at Etsy and was a lead mobile product manager at Twitter. He was also a user experience designer on the launch team for Android OS. We also have Jamie Divine , who was director of user experience at Boxee, a senior visual designer at Google and a head of user experience at AVOS Systems, the company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Jason Morrow  is a lead product designer at betaworks and has led design teams at Google on products like News, Finance and Search. Finally, we have Mimi Chun , who is the design director for General Assembly, a co-working space and startup education institute near Union Square. She was the communication design lead at Ideo before that for several years. If you’re interested, apply below! Loading...

User Experience And The...

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple , the company behind Base CRM . I used Path twice. None of the people that I know are using Path. I even checked with an early adopter of social media recently and one of Path’s earliest users. She told me that she doesn’t see a lot of people using it. Generally, this is not a good indication. Maybe there are millions of secret Path users (or users in another geography that I don’t know about) but it seems that Path just doesn’t pick up. Sure, Path 2.0 design is amazing. However, amazing design is not enough. It is like fashion. Everybody is excited about it at the beginning, but then people are getting used to it and eventually it wears out. After it does, the user is left with the essence of the user experience and what Path misses most is a compelling and unique user experience that will make using it worthwhile. “Amazing” design won’t get you anywhere What is considered web design today is not really design. It is styling, pixel coloring or whatever you’d like to call it. Real design is about solving problems. It is way more holistic and deep than the actual work we do in Photoshop. Real design is about creating a thoughtful, engaging user experience. Aesthetic styling can be then applied to enhance the experience as long as it doesn’t get in its way. There’s a reason why the most successful internet companies have fairly utilitarian design — take Facebook, Google or Amazon as an example. The focus is on creating a fantastic experience that delights users and adds value. Instagram’s design is utilitarian and is way less “sexier” that Path’s. However, Instagram made taking and sharing photos so easy and delightful and that was enough. Why Wesabe lost to Mint? Marc Hudlund was the CEO of Wesabe. Wesabe was an early competitor of Mint, but you might have heard of it. The service actually launched 10 months before Mint did. Hudlund wrote a humble post on why Wesabe eventually lost. I encourage you to read it but the key sentence is: “I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all.” In other words, from all the things that Mint did, there was one thing that mattered the most and made a huge impact. Mint just brought in all your data and organized it for you automatically. That was the poison on the tip of the arrow. Finding this poison is the real job of the real designer. How Dropbox killed it in a competitive landscape When I showed a designer friend Dropbox in the early days, she was appalled. Dropbox used a set of generic icons called FamFamFam that is almost as old as the web. That was terrible design. Well, actually, it was terrible styling. The design of Dropbox was genius although they didn’t have any designer on board at the time. They put a folder on your computer. Done. Behind the scenes, there was so much technology and so many features. All that didn’t matter. There was one thing that mattered most. That was the folder on your computer. That was Dropbox’s poison. Thinking about design It is time that we as designers shift our conversations from the new cool color palette, the gradient and the drop shadow effects and the latest shots on dribbble to creating compelling killer user experiences. This is how great products are built. Find your poison. Image credit: Juan Dao/juandao

Microsoft Needs Your He...

With Windows 8 getting ever closer to its release date, Microsoft today announced that it is looking for volunteers to join its invite-only feedback program for active Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview users in the U.S. In return for providing feedback to Microsoft – both by sending the company data or by filling out surveys – participants who stay in the program for more than four months will be eligible for “free software and Xbox games such as Microsoft Office 20120, Kinect Disneyland, and Forza Motorsport 4.” In the announcement today, Microsoft communications manager Brandon LeBlanc stresses that this is not meant to be a way to submit bug reports. Instead, the idea here is to help Microsoft “build better software by getting a broader understanding of your perceptions and experiences with our products.” It’s somewhat odd that Microsoft would choose this time to highlight this program. The Windows Feedback Program, after all, has been running for years already. Indeed, the sign-up for the Feedback Program is from 2009. While the sign-up form specifically mentions that volunteers will also be asked to provide feedback about Windows Live, including Hotmail and Messenger, today’s announcement puts the emphasis on Windows 7 and 8. Chances are that the company is mostly making this appeal today because it is looking for more data about the Windows 8 user experience (a user experience that could definitely still use some work). It feels like it is rather late in the Windows 8 development cycle to ask for this kind of data now, though.

Foursquare Adds Bios To...

Foursquare today rolled out the ability for users to add short personal “bios” to their profile pages on the site. These bios are limited to 160 characters or less, and can be imported directly from a user’s Twitter account or written from scratch. It’s another small step in Foursquare’s progression from a fun app that plugs into sites such as Facebook and Twitter to a more self-contained, standalone social network in its own right. Since the company secured $50 million in funding at a $600 valuation last summer, Foursquare has been steadily adding new features such as restaurant recommendations and passive location detection aimed at fleshing out the app’s user experience and increasing its stickiness. The addition of bios is in that same vein, as it could get people to start following other Foursquare users that they don’t necessarily know in real life based on their interests. Just like people often use Twitter to follow strangers who say interesting things, people could start to use Foursquare to follow strangers who go to interesting places. This already happens, of course, but the addition of bios encourages it more. Foursquare's new profile pages, with the new "bio feature Overall, these moves seem to be working: Its user count is growing worldwide , and investors seem pretty happy with Foursquare’s evolution as well. As our own Eric Eldon reported earlier this month, Spark Capital is said to have bought up as much as $50 million more of the company’s stock from its employees. But this is no time for the three-year-old Foursquare to relax. Apps in the social location mobile space (also known gratingly as SoLoMo) are hotter than ever, and new entrants on the scene such as Highlight and Glancee are getting lots of buzz . Small, iterative feature additions like today’s show that Foursquare is keeping up its own hustle as the competition continues to grow.

Blackboard Acquires Moo...

Blackboard , the maker of learning and education software for enterprises and schools, has acquired Moodlerooms and NetSpot, two providers of open source online learning technology. Financial terms were not disclosed. Both companies provide learning management hosting, support, and consulting services and products to clients using open source systems. NetSpot is also a reseller and service provider for Blackboard Collaborate. Moodlerooms primarily serves clients in North America, while NetSpot serves a client base in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region. Blackboard says each team will also become part of Blackboard’s new Education Open Source Services group, which will focus on the development of open source learning technologies globally. Last year, Blackboard was acquired by Providence Equity Partners for $1.6 billion. As we’ve written in the past, Blackboard has not always had the best reputation among students , especially in terms of user experience, but the company has thousands of colleges and universities using its platform. The company faces competition from CourseKit , Instructure , Nixty , and others.