Principles of Product Design

Fred Wilsons golden rules about creating successful web applications, with examples and comments.

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/03/10-golden-principles-of-successful-web-apps.html

http://twitter.com/karrisaarinen
http://twitter.com/jorilallo

Transcript

1. Principles of Product Design Karri Saarinen (@karrisaarinen) Jori Lallo (@jorilallo)
2. Karri Saarinen Co-founded startup media ArcticStartup and Rails Girls Product Designer Flowdock, Shadow Cities Jori Lallo Co-founded Aalto Entrepreneuership Society Developer Convore (YC) & Grove.io Team
3. Professionals and companies need to collect and collaborate on new information. It’s a very essential part of the way we work.
4. Web and mobile web app Extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Opera Search from page content Collect, collaborate, get email summaries
5. 1. Speed 2. Instant Utility 3. Software is media 4. Less is more 5. Make it programmable 6. Make it personal 7. RESTful 8. Discoverability 9. Clean 10. Playful 10 Golden Principles for Building Successful Web Applications by Fred Wilson
6. 1. Speed. Real speed Perceived speed
7. 1. Speed. Real speed Perceived speed + = WIN
9. Instagram: Move bits when no-one’s watching
10. “All other things being equal, more usage, as measured by number of searches, reflects more satisfied users. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That's 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second! While these numbers may seem small, a daily impact of 0.5% is of real consequence at the scale of Google web search.” Google Search:
11. 2. Instant utility
12. Creating instant utility Solve a part of the user’s problem in seconds Youtube: Instant video upload, encoding & sharing Google Video: “Come back in a week”
13. Populate with sample data
14. 3. Software is media Have a personality, tell a story
15. PERSONALITY = INTERESTING. INTERESTING = CARE. CARE = TALK. - FAKEGRIMLOCK
17. Startup Personality Test 1. How do you change the customer’s life? 2. What do you stand for? 3. Who or what do you hate?
18. 4. Less is more One thing well
19. Do less. Launch now. Small but powerful. Half product, not half-assed
20. 5. Make it programmable Let people hack
21. Read/write API
25. 6. Make it personal
28. Use your own name, don’t fake it
29. 7. RESTful
30. http://github.com/jorde/kippt
31. http://github.com/jorde/kippt/issues
32. http://github.com/jorde/kippt/issues/51
33. 8. Discoverability
34. Google / SEO App Stores Viral loops ...this is the hard part - no magic bullet
35. 9. Clean
40. 10. Playful
42. KipptTips™ The Four Steps to Awesomeness
43. 1. Simple landing page Describe the service with one sentence. What for who. Have a screenshot AND/OR video A/B test / Track Conversion: optimizely.com, mixpanel.com, kissmetrics.com, google analytics
44. 2. Launch NOW and talk with your users Add the feedback button on the app! Answer every email/tweet/message personally. Use it to learn about your users / customers
45. 3. Have a personality Be cool and be yourself. Scrappy, happy and hacky. Do interesting things. Have fun. Sometimes take a stand. Be prepared to defend it. Give something back / teach people.
46. 4. Release something every week Even small things. Do a blog post / tweet about it. People are happy/impressed when things improve.
47. Thanks. @karrisaarinen @jorilallo Follow us on twitter: @kippt / kippt.com