Lessons learned about user experience and product development in the last decade

Working with superb developers and designers in all kinds and shapes taught me a lot. I would like to share a few key mindset changes great developers go through in order to design better products. This article is written from different aspects of the product dev cycle: design, plan, prototype, develop, user testing and QA.

1- YOU DON'T NEED ALL OPTIONS ON SCREEN AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT.

Even when you make a complicated system dashboard, the user has different tasks or questions they wish to find out at any given moment. Make sure you place only the information the user really needs at that specific situation or state.

" Place only the information the user really needs at a specific situation

Think of the product as you think about code: each section should be simplified to do one functionality as simple as possible. When you have parts of the product that can stand for themselves, consider dividing them apart.

Lets take for example an online mobile shopping app that offers taking a picture of a product's bar-code and gives back more details. That functionality is not something to be embedded inside the dashboard, rather it is a separate part of the product, presented in a separate screen.

An overly complicated screen and sayings like "my users must have this" or "we must have this with easy access" is the easiest identifier that you have a problem in your product's UX.

How to get better?

You would need to know who your users are, what they wish to do, what is their problem and how they solve it nowadays with other solutions. And that's where our second principle comes into place.

2- LET YOUR USER FEEL AWESOME ABOUT THEMSELVES.

We humans want our pains to go away. We want to enjoy our time here. And we don't need extra trouble, because we already have enough...  Now, app developers and entrepreneurs might think that what they are building is the best thing humanity has seen. But let me break some news to us all - people don't really care...

The only thing the user will care about is solving their problem efficiently and as fast as possible. If you can do this they would be thankful. If you could do this and let them enjoy from the way, that would be much appreciated. But this is the only way you can make the user care about you. 

"Do everything you can to solve the user's problem as fast and efficiently as you can

A happy and satisfied user is a talking user. Word-of-mouth is the best marketing strategy you can wish for, and that should be the only explanation why you should strive to satisfy your audience. 

But marketing agents usually take this idea one step too far. Because satisfying your user doesn't mean that you have to do what the user asks you to, rather do what they need you to. That is where user research comes into place.

Alan Cooper, the inventor of the Personas, once said that if you can do all that while letting your user believe that they worked that magic themselves- you will become even greater. In Instagram for example, the user believes that they are the ones working all the magic. No one cares or thinks about the effort that was placed into designing such a wonderful technology. But the most important thing happen, it went viral very fast.

How to get better?
Get to know your users by interviewing them on a coffee. Find out their real issues and struggles with existing solutions or shortcuts they found to overcome. Design the interaction flow that would solve their problems better.  

3- DESIGN FOR THE USER FLOWS AND TASKS.

Once you know the tasks the user wishes to perform with your tech, design the steps.

Design one task at a time. Separate the tasks. Make sure steps are well defined.

Offer checklists, breadcrumbs, or other measures to educate the user about the process of execution they are required for.

4- great products don't have a tutorial

if you need a tutorial (or a manual, or documentation) to start using the product, it is a sign of complexity. If you feel your product doesn't work with explanations, and believe that tutorials or step by step instructions will solve this issue, you are addressing this the wrong way.

Even though you might be right, and some sort of instructions will help the user achieve their goal, this will slow them down, and they will not be happy about the fact that they needed help.

Often the need for tutorials identifies a flaw in the product itself. Maybe the process or flow is now defined in the rightful order; perhaps the language used in the UI is not understandable by the user.

Remove the need for explanations will simplify the use and fasten the results.

The way to do that is get to know your user's vocabulary and right track of doing things.

5- watch user testing sessions

You can let others do the user testing for you, but don't give up on watching the tapes. If you can keep quiet, go watch it live. You can give the facilitator notes during the session (if it's really important) or feedback them between each sessions.

Doing this will equip you with the powerful feedback of how users approach the product. In the first time, you would think "this user is stupid", or "they are not the right audience". But after 5 or 10 people you would realize that the truth is that something is not working properly , and we did something that caused that.

6- don't waterfall your agile methodology

The purpose of agile method is to allow easier and faster change. If you know something must change and you will get to it in only 4 or 5 sprints ahead, "just one more release , and then we could handle this issue"- that's not good.

7- talking to designers

8- when do you need more testing?

רעיון מנחה שיכול לעזור להחליט מתי כדאי להפסיק לחשוב על רעיון לפיצ'ר חדש ומתי אפשר להמשיך לפתח את המוצר.
אם הבנת שיש בעיה במוצר או בתהליך או בהבנה של המשתמש את התהליך, (קודם כל תרשום אותה ביחד עם שאר הבעיות).
אבל עכשיו עלה לך רעיון איך לפתור את זה. ואז אתה בא להתחיל לכתוב את הקוד ופתאום יש לך עוד רעיון לדרך נוספת. ברגע שיש לך יותר מרעיון אחד כיצד לפתור משהו (ואתה צריך להתאמץ כדי לנסות למצוא כאלה לפני שאתה כותב), תחשוב מה יותר טוב בראי המשתמש. אם אתה לא מצליח להחליט לבד בצורה ברורה ומשכנעת, זה אומר שחייבים לעשות בדיקה על הסוגיה הזו.

Design recommendations

. When people see your product and start consulting or suggesting features, the product probably works. 

If they stay silent, or don't respond - it is probably because they don't understand something, and therefore the design did t work well.

. Design at least 2 solutions for the same problem. That would help you better evaluate both solutions without being attached to one in particular

7th IMAGinE UnConference 2018 summary

We met at Haifa, during a rainy day, so it was an experience already.

Here are the interesting things we talked about today.

Augmented Decade 

I have talked about my last decade with augmented reality technology and what can be done with it. I have showed the ToyZ game, the HomeDecoration app, legendary AR step by step Instructions, and also last year’s VRoom Shooter using project Alloy.

These projects show how the technology evolved from a marker based tracking, into a scene reconstruction, and eventually into scene understanding. In the last project, we were able to understand specific objects and replace them with other virtual elements in a similar size. This way, the player was able to get a physical feedback from the object when they lean on a virtual one in the game.

In our conversation we went through ideas like the WorkLink, that combines the worker with help from an expert, and also how robots could guard our neighborhoods, by better understanding the world around us. 

I have also shared how 3D cameras are different from the 2D ones in the way they work, and how this would influence the newer generation of technology, coming to us by Intel, Magic Leap, Microsoft, Meta and others in that space. This is an article I wrote that might help people understand more about these differences, if you are interested. And here are all the slides from my talk.

Reddit PLACE

Didi Nishlis shared the story of the empty canvas opened last April fool’s day (of 2017). His takeaway was optimistic. When many people are needed to convey a message, the good shall prevail the evil. 

if you don’t know the PLACE project, then basically its a Collaborative empty canvas, opened for creative work for an unknown period (it closed after 3 days). Each user places a dot (a pixel of color) on the canvas. 

Uncanny Valley and Hyper Reality

Michael Shalyt reminded the uncanny valley and Matsuda’s hyper reality video, but also the Player One Ready movie trailer, which sums up why I don’t really like virtual reality that much... 

Anyway, was nice to see the AR Haifa community again, and hope to catch up next time! 

Light Speed Roadtrip Through Augmented Reality: a Decade of Design and Prototype

My story with augmented reality started back in 2007 with the BMW visionary movie about a car technician. Then I started to prototype and code projects and products. This blog shows some of these results. A few years later I got to work for Omek Interactive, a motion tracking startup with 3D sensor technology. We were later acquired by intel and continued our work as part of the RealSense product line. There I worked on scene understanding, object recognition, gesture recognition and many features that AR must have, in order to fulfill the dreams of the designers.

The Apple AR-Kit, Goggle AR-Core and also Facebook, Snap, PTC and other hardware-software companies enabling this technology in the past year, has given AR a huge boost (which probably started with the release of Pokemon GO).

Yesterday, I gave a talk about my relationship with AR technology over the years. I showed many prototypes and product videos there, references to the work of myself and others from 2000 and on. It is a great idea bank for startups, or a background story for those who consider starting to working with AR.

I hope that by sharing this with you, we would be able to reach a better future and faster.
There is a lot more to talk about, from hardware improvement to software requirements, and I will be happy to bring up these subjects in other occasions again.

Live video of the talk thanks to the event organizers.

Bonding Buffet by KLM : ארוחת צהריים בנמל התעופה בחינם, אם רק תתיישבו יחד

Hello Bench by Nestle

Jimmy Kimmel עם שיעור בראיונות משתמשים: מה לא עושים ואיך להטעות לקוחות

לקחו אנשים ברחוב, לקחו את הiphone שלהם, ניקו להם את המסך, אמרו להם שהחליפו להם את הטלפון והעבירו את כל המידע אל iphone החדש. שאלו אותם האם הם רוצים ללכת עכשיו איתו ולשם 50 דולר במקום 600 (המחיר האמיתי בחנויות). 

נחשו מה הם אמרו.