There’s a great interview in ReadWriteWeb with the founder of Flipboard on the months leading up to the product launch and what informed what the product eventually became.
It’s a great read all the way through but two things in particular stood out for me:
For a product that has been universally lauded (even on this blog) for its novel approach to interaction, it’s interesting to hear what their starting point was for their design process:
When we got together, we decided to do a thought experiment: imagine if the Web was washed away in a hurricane and we needed to build a new one from scratch. What would it look like? How would it be different? What would the user interface be? Would there still be the notion of a browser? If you build a totally new Web, knowing everything we know today and where the technology is and where it’s likely to be heading, what would you do differently?
It’s incredibly difficult to successfully execute on this “blank slate” approach to design but it really feels like this team has pulled it off.
Something that clearly helped them be able to take that approach is that they were designing Flipboard before there was an actual piece of hardware to design it for (they were months into their process before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad).
Product designers often struggle to balance technology constraints with solving a genuine human need. Unfortunately the former often ends up shaping the the product more than they would want. This is a fascinating case study of seeing what can happen (and what you can accomplish) when you’re forced to come at a problem purely from the users’ point of view:
When I traveled, I would buy magazines before I got on an airplane. I love magazines, I read them all the time. As I was reading them, I’d ask myself: “Why is it that the Web isn’t as beautiful as these magazines? What could we do to make the web a more beautiful place?” And of course, along with that line of thinking, I was saying to myself: “If this [Apple] tablet that is rumored ever happens, it would be the perfect form factor for doing exactly that – for making websites as beautiful as magazines.”
The date that I started realizing we needed to go more towards the magazine approach, in terms of the aesthetics and design, was in the September-October time frame.
As we talked more about it, we decided that the best way to start would be on this theoretical product that Apple was rumored to be doing. And then when Apple actually announced it [in January 2010], it was obviously very exciting for us. We realized that it was as we had hoped – that it would be the platform that could allow us to re-visualize the web in a way that maps more to print. So it would be the perfect place for us to start. And then, as we came to that realization, we married that up with social media. And we realized what we’re really doing here is creating a social magazine. We first started calling it a social magazine in January.
I recommend checking out the whole piece and if you don’t have it, go grab the app (iTunes link)
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