Product Design

Irene Au, operating partner at Khosla Ventures, led the user experience team at Google for six years and the user experience and design team at Yahoo! for eight years. In this talk she looks at how the different views of design at Google and Yahoo affected the companies. What was it about Yahoo’s organisational structure Read more »

Nir Eyal, the author and entrepreneur behind the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, talks about the secrets behind the success of companies like Facebook and Twitter. What is it that makes a product habit-forming and even addictive? Nir argues that it’s a hook that consists of a chain of events: a trigger, an Read more »

Kathy Sierra, who created one of the largest (and friendliest) developer communities, javaranch.com and the bestselling Head First tech book series for O’Reilly, talks about the sociological side of the product development – how to build badass users, not just badass products. She focuses on how to attract users, but also on how to keep Read more »

Why is it that some products take off while others fall flat? There are many tactical reasons we can point to such as timing, competition, or product-market fit. Fundamentally though, there is one consistent truth regardless of the reason we may determine: some products create value for the market they’re serving, and some simply do Read more »

If you’re interested in becoming an entrepreneur or an inventor and making money from something you thought of and designed then there is one thing you need above everything else before you can begin: an idea that you can work from. If you hope to make money from a product then of course you need Read more »

Startups have always obsessed over VC investment, but now the savviest of them are paying as much attention to user investment. User investment is an umbrella term that refers to any activities in which users spend time or effort interacting with a product in a way that ultimately makes that product more valuable to them. Read more »

Cheap sensors are readily available, data is easy to gather, analyse and visualise, and there are people and companies interested, and cash available for experimentation. However, in this age of Internet of Things, the combinations of sensors, hardware, software and data being created are still relatively simplistic. At ProductTank April, Patrick Bergel, Founder and CEO Read more »

The world, we are told, will become a vast ‘eco-system’ of conversant devices, buildings and virtual environments. But somewhere behind all these ‘machines’ are people, and it’s the people that, ultimately, make interactions ‘smart’. At ProductTank April, Usman Haque, founding partner of Umbrellium, founder of Haque Design + Research  and founder of Pachube, a real-time data Read more »

I built the same product three times. It wasn’t an act of insanity. It was my way to get my product ready in three weeks. Before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. It was the 1st of March 2013 and I’d just left my job as CIO at one of the UK’s Read more »

Imagine you’re building a new product – say a Death Star. And it’s solving a particularly pesky problem – getting rid of Rebel Scum. You don’t really care what it looks like or if it’s particularly efficiently designed – so it tends to be seen as an engineering problem. But in the rush to market Read more »