User Experience Vision ...

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple , the company behind Base —a simple CRM for small businesses . Welcome to 1889. The field of photography was just changed forever. Up until recently, the process of taking and developing photos was expensive and cumbersome. As a result photography was available only to professional photographers or rich people. Then, a guy named George Eastman comes up with a new way to take photos. He develops a special flexible, unbreakable, rolled film that allows people to take photos and then send the film to a factory where the photos can be developed and sent back to the customer’s house. Suddenly, photography becomes available to everyone. Kodak is born. However, Mr. Eastman had one other innovation. In 1892 he came up with an advertising slogan for Kodak: “You press the button, we do the rest” . More than an advertising slogan, it was really the first time in history that a company captured the user experience of its product in a single clear and crisp sentence. Eastman understood that the key pain for the amateur photographer was the long and complicated process of taking photos. As a result, he came up with the idea that photographers should just focus on taking a great photo and that Kodak can handle the printing. He captured that in this single pithy sentence that described the unique compelling vision of the company. Let’s call this the User Experience Vision (UXV if you will) of the product. From Paul Graham’s “Do one thing and do it well” to Steve Jobs’ “Focusing is about saying no” , the idea of focus is one that is often mentioned, and frequently ignored. After working with many startups, I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing more important for a startup than the ability to clearly understand what it builds and then relentlessly focus on it. How can you achieve such focus though? Let’s look at two examples that will help explain the concept of a User Experience Vision. Evernote is a note-taking tool. Every computer ships today with at least two or three free, pre installed, note-taking applications. How come Evernote is so successful? One reason for that is Phil Libin’s grand vision for the product. He wants it to replace your brain. Seriously . This is beautifully captured by Evernote’s perfectly crafted tagline — “Remember Everything”. So simple. So powerful. The beauty of this tagline is that it touches a real pain (you forget stuff), offers a compelling vision (you will now remember everything), and even more importantly – gives the Evernote team a beautiful User Experience Vision to optimize for. When Dropbox was founded, there were probably more than 100 companies that were offering some sort of cloud storage or backup. How did Dropbox grow so fast? Phenomenal virality aside , the key to Dropbox’s success was a fantastic product. But what did Dropbox build? When they started their message was: “Your files everywhere”. Simple. Powerful. Clear. Now, as they move beyond that, it changed to “Simplify your life”. It relates to the Dropbox’s plan for the future . The Ingredients of a Great User Experience Vision It’s very hard to capture the UX of your product in such a meaningful and concise manner. To make it easier, consider the four critical elements that make a great User Experience Vision: It addresses a real need – If you don’t know what is the need you are solving for, I suggest that you take time and think through it. Now. It will also give you a good starting point for defining the UXV and help you focus on what is meaningful for the user. It is simple — keeping the UXV simple is critical so you can communicate it effectively to your customers, team, partners or any other stakeholder. If it is not simple, you probably didn’t figure out the right UXV yet. It serves as a guiding light — a successful UXV provides guidance to your team as for what to build next. It can help you think through your roadmap and identify whether the next feature you are building will be useful or not. It is unique — it does not apply to every other startup on earth. Don’t have as your UXV something like “Great User Experience”. The more unique it is, the more meaningful it will be. It is not easy to come up with a UXV. It takes time. You have to intimately understand the needs of your users. It might take weeks to come up with a good one and either way you will keep developing and refining it. The time to start is now. Excerpt image from Smashing Magazine

Archos Teases G10 XS Ta...

Veteran tablet maker Archos has released a teaser video of a new tablet they’re going to be releasing (we presume) later this year. It’s called the G10 XS (the latest in a series of G tablets ) and it has a few differentiating features that may call your name. As others have noted, the only way for Android tablets to set themselves apart from one another is in design and specs. Archos has found one more that seems to have been mostly neglected: material. Ubergizmo reports that the shell of the G10 series will be made of “paper-thin” steel. Perhaps that’s how they managed to get the thing down to a very svelte 7.6mm deep. Check out the teaser video below. A little artistic license may have been taken; this isn’t, obviously, a video of a device in real life. The claim to thinnest tablet out there, of course, is short-lived and doesn’t have much of an effect on user experience past a certain point (do you really need that extra half a millimeter in your bag?) — but Archos isn’t divulging any specs yet. It will, however, ship with Ice Cream Sandwich. And it also will have a close relationship with a keyboard, with which it will dock or possibly just sync. That puts it on a collision course with another major Android player, Asus, whose Transformer series has had a keyboard as a major feature for some time now. No availability estimate was given, but the price is said to be between €200 and €400, or around $250-500. Other models were mentioned as well, including some budget and mid-range items. Liliputing snapped a few pictures of promotional materials, if you’re curious.

RAM And CPU Clock Speed...

Good news, everyone! It’s confirmed that the new iPad is indeed slightly “faster” than the iPad 2. Early benchmarks of the new iPad show that the actual clock speed of the A5X SoC is still set at 1GHz, the same speed as the iPad2. But the new model also rocks 1GB of RAM, which should make for a smoother and faster experience. Plus, as Apple stated in the announcement keynote, the A5X rocks a quad-core graphics chip for better graphic performance. Apple rarely talks nerd-level specs. The company would much rather talk about marketable improvements based on user experience — you know, general arbitrary nonsense. That’s why Tim Cook & Co. just glazed over the technical improvements during the new iPad’s launch and instead focused on new features. It was mentioned that the new tablet has an updated A5X SoC but the actual clock speed and amount of RAM was never mentioned. In many ways Apple’s method is right. The spec is dead — but just for Apple. Listing specs is only important when comparing competing products. There is no direct competitor to the iPad. Android tablets are locked in a sort of spec race. Slightly different hardware is the only differentiating factor between Android tablets since they all run the same OS and have the same form factor. But there is only one iOS tablet out there: the iPad. Comparing the specs between an iOS and Android device is a fool’s affair. It only matters in fanboy flame wars. Specs like clock speed and RAM for iOS hardware should only really matter to developers planning product road maps — not that they should be coding just for the new hardware. Smart developers will use this information to plan future products but continue to optimize their apps to work on a broad number of devices instead of limiting themselves to the newest model. You’ll never see a post-PC era Apple video ad running through a list of specs or acronyms . The company doesn’t need to get into a pissing match. Apple would rather sell you on fun new features than boring new hardware. Saturday Night Live got it right .

Co-Founder Of Manterest...

We’ve found Pinterest clones galore since the social pinboard site first launched, but it would seem that the fad is going in a new direction. Recently I stumbled upon Manteresting.com , a Pinterest for men, and couldn’t help but seek out the founders for a quick little interview. In it, co-founder Brandon and I discuss what it means to be a clone, how Manteresting plans on differentiating itself, and whether or not the user experience is heightened by drawling a line between the two genders. (Unfortunately, co-founder Jesse Michelsen wasn’t able to speak with us.) If you’ll remember, comScore recently revealed that 80 percent of Pinterest activity is by women, though you really don’t need comScore’s input to know that’s the case. A quick visit to Pinterest.com should help clear it up: ladies love Pinterest. But honestly, even as a girl I don’t really enjoy Pinterest as much as I know I could if I was following more male friends who actively interact with the site. At the same time, I can’t see myself getting the best possible experience out of Manteresting.com either. A nice combo would be best, and that’s what Pinterest is going for. But it might get a bit more difficult with Manteresting, and other sites like it , trying to snatch up the male demographic.

Leveraging Zong, PayPal...

Back in July, PayPal shelled out over $200 million for payments platform Zong, as a way to boost mobile payments technology. As you may know, Zong lets you pay for things, particularly virtual goods online, via direct billing to your mobile phone. According to an announcement made by eBay today, PayPal is looking to make these mobile carrier payments more available for online merchants. According to a blog post from Zong founder and PayPal Mobile VP David Marcus, PayPal is launching an initiative to help increase the usage of carrier payments. One of the main barriers to carrier payments are lofty carrier rates. Wireless carriers have charged roughly 30% to 40% to process transactions made via mobile phone accounts, making it very difficult for mobile payment companies like Zong and competitor Boku to scale beyond virtual goods. These transaction costs are passed down to developers and merchants using the mobile billing technology, which are then passed to the consumer. Carriers also sometimes have a dollar amount limit on payments that can be processed over a specific period of time, which inhibit merchants for using this payments option for larger transactions. In order to avoid these costs, mobile payments companies need to negotiate direct relationships with carriers. PayPal says that the initiative will require that carriers to “revise standards to help optimize user experience, increase flexibility of carrier payments as a payment method, and increase payout rates for merchants.” PayPal adds it will be working directly with carriers to help make lower transaction costs a reality. In turn for lowering fees, carriers will be able to leverage some of PayPal’s own mobile payments expertise and network of users. It’s hard to tell whether PayPal is making real headway in cutting transaction costs without actual evidence of deals where carriers have actually lowered their cut. Hopefully, we’ll see more deals being struck in the future. Until then, this is still just an ‘initiative.’