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Single man flying suites: The future is here

We are now a few stages before single man flying suites become commercially available for the masses. In this stage of the technology life cycle, it is common to see multiple companies coming up with their own working prototype.

In the next stage, some number of companies will figure out the business model and marketing channels while a lot more will fail. Many of the viable ideas and employees from these failed companies will get absorbed into the surviving companies.

The final stage would be when the manufacturing gets outsourced to China. During this stage, cost of production will drop by 10X. That is when adoption gains traction amongst the early majority .

The stage after would be when government steps in to define regulations for proper use in public.

https://www.facebook.com/100056716005101/videos/236171661616699/

#business #manufacturing #innovation #supplychain

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Balancing features on between power users and general masses

Observations for the day: After studying the behavior of more than 3000 users over the past four months, I conclude the level of abstract thinking required to understand how this one single button works is too complicated for 99% of users to grasp.


Only nerds/power users who are already familiar with the notion of the schematic web would get excited when they see this button.


Building a UX that caters for the general masses as well as the few power users is challenging. Too much stuff for the power users and the general masses will feel overwhelmed thus shy away from the tool. Too little stuff for the power users and they will feel frustrated for not being able to realize their vision of what they intend their tool for.


At this point I am opting to hold off implementing some of the functionalities that I (the ultimate power user) personally need from this tool. Or if I did, more as an Easter Egg like feature that you would only find if you go hunting for it within the tool. This is to avoid forcing the general masses to think too much. People do not like being forced to think.

When the tool is too “powered up”, you see lowered percentage of newly registered users making it to the magic moment. To know this, you will need to maintain historical records of your activation rates.

When the tool is too “weak”, your power users all complain about the same missing stuff.

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Thoughts on advertising

Getting a deep level of empathy from another fellow human being is one of the most yearned desires of every person.

A message in recognition of a person’s  actualized self is more powerful than one centered around what you are trying to sell.

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Insights from Tim

  • Western design emphasizes minimalistism and simplicity
  • Chinese design emphasizes more is better, more is prosperous
  • aim towards form completion
  • users really care about their end goal
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Ideation process

  1. Gather qualitative data through user interviews
  2. Gather historical quantitative behavioral and segmentation data if any
  3. define problem statements
  4. define personas
  5. Prioritize personas base on segment size and organization strategy/mission fit
  6. Prioritize problem statements based on problem and product feature fit
  7. generate many design concept variants  as different approaches to tackling problem
  8. curate and prioritize them as agile stories
  9. implement base feature set
  10. roll out to user base
  11. validate outstanding hypothesis to gain visibility
  12. iterate on results
  13. head back to step 1

External references

  • User centric design high level – http://garyteh.com/2018/08/tim-on-user-centric-design/
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Tim on User centric design

Design thinking is a more elaborate waterfall like model as compared to User centric design

  • It was originally created by the dude from SAP which is the founder of IDEO

User Centric Design

Helps avoid thinking of solution purely in functional terms devoid of human values

Goals

  • Business Goals – numbers you want to hit as a business

Assumptions

  • List of hypothesis revolving around your business goals

User(s)

  • Who
    • the various personas about your user
    • it is centered around the kinds of physical behavior they exhibit
    • it is centered around the emotions and attitude
    • In a market place or social network the following distribution would hold true
      • 1% content creators – the protagonist
      • 9% synthesizers – they transmute the inputs from the creators
      • 90% silent majority – they observe and consume what was generated
  • Problems / Needs
    • centered around the day to day needs they have in their role
    • centered around the day to day problems they experience because of the need they have
    • qualitative and quantitative data to size of each segment of persona as well as the conversion rates in prior experiments
  • Themes
    • The commonly recurring themes identified based on qualitative feedbacks gathered from interviews with users.

 

 

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Insights from Vibhu

  • Orkuts’ growth was driving by recruiting influencers to their platform and paying them to generate content
    • Influential writers for news columns
  • Initial community that gets seeded drives the DNA of the community that crystallizes around it
  • It is possible to have two drastically different communities on the same platform
    • Brazil community on Orkut was focused on something else
    • India’s community on Orkut was focused on sharing code and resume
  • Google does not understand social networks. Seeing from the functional perspective, pieces of code that serves as social proofing will appear as inefficient, unnecessary and redundant thus removed
  • The nuances of UX is not often appreciated by the engineering community
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Takeaways from conversations observed for the week

  • Ved and Tim
    • Abstract terms like simplicity can get interpretated differently
    • Simplicity could mean minimal number of clicks
    • Simplicity could mean the look and feel is something I am most familiar with
  • Regina
    • To keep the tendency to do everything yourself in check
    • much better to learn from the mistake of others
    • find a group of people that are actively learning how to solve the pricing problem and learn their lessons. It’s cheaper
    • personal branding is important. Not being taken seriously results in lack of access to resources in times of need

Relevant resources

  • The design of everyday things
  • Dont make me think