There is an approach called “working backwards” that is widely used at Amazon. We try to work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it. While working backwards can be applied to any specific product decision, using this approach is especially important when developing new products or features

Love this Quora entry on Amazon’s Product Development process. Relatively simple tool that can go a long way toward saving you from yourself.

Multiple times a day I find myself with an idea, note or task I want to remember in the future. I’ve tried a variety ways of dealing with these fleeting thoughts – email, to-do in my GTP app du jour (OmniFocus 4EVA!), evernote, Apple’s crappy Notes app and even voice memos (back in the day!) – and each has its strengths and its flaws, either on input or on the processing side (turning that note/idea into *something*).

Enter Capt.io, an iPhone app that is designed for exactly this use case – the quick note to self. Here’s how it works:

You open the app and land right on the input screen. Tap out a note and hit “Send” and you’re done.

Or you can choose to add a photo (camera or library) to your note with a top of the paper clip in the top-left.

This simple and pure experience is largely made possible by the smart way that the developers have offloaded some crucial info to the Settings screen. You just give the app an email address you want all these notes to go to and you can also add a prefix to all your notes which makes them really easy to filter in whatever mail client you’re using.

In a world when even the “simpler” apps we use have too many features, it’s really refreshing to see an app that isolates a very common use case and designs a pure interface around it that is as useful as it is simple. Well done.

For 99 cents Capt.io is an absolute no brainer for anyone who has ideas (and it makes a pretty great design case study to boot)

I came across this excellent interview with Buster Benson in MediaStyle where he talks about the motivational mechanics behind some of the apps he’s built, specifically 750 Words and Health Month.

The whole interview is a great window into the spirit that drives his work but I found this particular section interesting as it reminded me a lot of how we look at badges here at foursquare:

I think that “dangling carrot” is a good term for it, even though there has been a lot of research lately that the carrot, in general, is a bad motivator. We don’t want to chase carrots, it turns out, when it comes to the most important things in our lives. But if you think about the visual metaphor a bit more, I think it is actually a really good trick of psychology. You dangle a carrot in front of someone when you want them to go in a certain direction. Now, what happens when you’re dangling carrots in front of yourself, and you get to choose the direction? That’s the truly magical component. If you can align your “carrot” with your values, aspirations, and goals, then what you end up doing is providing a little kickstart towards a goal that will eventually become intrinsically motivating.

People love getting foursquare badges and there’s a new startup launching every day ready to give you a badge for doing just about anything but I feel strongly that badges for the sake of badges is a fleeting reward and ultimately not something that’s going to create any sort of strong relationship between you and your users and more importantly between your users and themselves.

For us at foursquare, the reward has always been in getting people to do something they might not already be doing, or necessarily feel comfortable doing. It’s that potential for discovery and profound behavior change that’s so core to everything we weave into the foursquare experience and it’s great to see Buster articulate that so well.

I definitely recommend reading the entire interview if you’re at all interested in leveraging technology and game mechanics for self-enhancement.

Also:
- Check out Buster’s excellent blog, Enjoymentland
- Give Health Month and 750 Words a go.

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)

Atlanta photographer Jason Travis has done an exquisite job capturing and presenting 60 different people and the things they carry with them in a series called Persona. I love the voyeuristic spirit behind it and I find the detailed yet incomplete picture these pieces tell about their subjects fascinating. Many of the flickr photos have notes tagged to the objects, which them which makes them even more interesting.

Needless to say, I’m a huge sucker for projects like this and took part in a similar one myself (quaintly named There’s a lot of crap in my bag).

Check out the whole set on Flickr.
Check out Jason’s photography.

See how a man turns his 1 bedroom apartment into 24 different rooms/experiences. Think about this the next time you feel like you’ve exhausted all the creative options in front of you. Amazing.

This home video really shows the impact the iPad is only starting to have on the way all kinds of people will interact with information. This particular video focuses on a child but you can imagine it (disclaimer: I know there will be other tablets but until I see them executed in the same way, I’m sticking with the iPad as the category-defining device) will have a similar, profound effect on a variety of other kinds of users.

ps: anyone know what apps “bunny alphabet” and “rainbow keyboard” are?

(via TechCrunch)

I have a firm belief that the way you do things, in life in general but specifically on the social web, is through the practice of actually doing it. Inside of Betaworks we don’t accept any powerpoints and we don’t take business plans. I want to see betas, I want to see products.

Amen.

Read more in this great profile on ReadWriteWeb.

The moment I saw screenshots of Roundarch’s work on the real-time stats dashboard for the New York Jets’ new stadium I was smitten and not just because I’m a huge fan of the Jets (as well as Rex Ryan’s leadership model). I love how they’ve taken really complex information that spans different categories (food, parking, merchandise) and made it clear, accessible and actionable (and very much on brand, btw).

The Jets’ executive team gets:

What exactly is the system capable of? Let’s start with concessions and merchandise. While a game is underway, NY Jets’ owner Woody Johnson will see a four-panel layout that shows a variety of metrics, from gross spending to total transactions to average amount spent per transaction. The stadium is virtually divided up by each level, and Johnson can zoom in on individual stores and concession stands to see which jerseys are selling, or which beer isn’t. The stadium is heat-mapped too, so if lines are getting to long, mobile vendors can be directed to help ease the burden.

While the fans benefit as well:

The Command Center won’t just help managers and executives, but will soon aim to improve the fan experience as well. Cisco has invested $100 million into the stadium, and one rep estimates the company’s technology could provide fans with estimated wait times in the near future. The dashboard will also warn of choke points at stadium gates and concession stands, so fans can be informed of how to avoid the longest line for a burger, or the best way to exit after the game.

Companies have always had data at their disposal to use to help them make decisions but I think we’re going to start seeing companies seeing the value in thoughtful interface design as a window to that data and that makes me really excited.

Read more about it over at Fast Company

There are a lot of reasons Flipboard is special and they absolutely deserve all the attention (and melted servers) they’re getting.

I suspect that many folks don’t even realize the potential they have to really have a profound effect on how people consume content going forward, particularly as we continue to find ourselves with more and more channels of content to make sense of.

Frankly, I think they’ll find themselves in that product design sweet spot where there are so many things they can do with their product and they’re going to have to be very smart in choosing which ones to pursue.

Rather than focus on their innovative interface, as many others already have, I wanted to write up a quick note on a feature I saw them tweet about recently: Sharing your Flipboard covers. It allows you to grab a snapshot of your dynamically-generated cover and share it via email and Twitter:

Did a friend of yours show up on your Flipboard cover and you want to let them know? Did a beautiful picture show up that you want to share? Tap the “share” icon in the top right corner of your screen to retweet the image on twitter or email it to friends and family.

It’s your magazine, share your covers.

For me, this feature loosely touches on the one thing I really miss as I’ve made the move to e-books – the loss of the book/magazine cover as both design artifact as well as social communication tool.

While I don’t think this is a feature a lot of people are going to use, it makes me confident that the people on the Flipboard team are aware of the subtle nuances that are part of the content consumption experience and that makes me even more excited to see where they take their product over the next year.

Read about the new feature here and check out their cameo in Apple’s most recent (and by far the best/most informative) ad for the iPad: