Talk: WebVisions 2010: Alexa Andrzejewski: The UX Driven Startup: Crafting an experience-based vision for your startup

The UX Driven Startup: Crafting an experience-based vision for your startup
Alexa Andrzejewski
Formerly UX Designer, Adaptive Path
Now CEO and Founder: http://www.foodspotting.com

WebVisions 2010, Portland, OR

Twitter: @ladylexy, @foodspotting

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/ladylexy/the-ux-driven-startup

Alexa apparently also gave this talk at the Web 2.0 Conference, to glowing reviews. See this review at http://blog.gunnjerkens.com/tag/foodspotting/

This was an absolutely terrific talk -- perhaps one of the best I've sat in on in many years. Trust me. I wish I understood the need for designing around user experiences when I started Tripwire 13 years ago. Things like this are ideally baked in earlier, not retrofitted into the product years after it's been shipping.

The full notes of the talk are below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Alexa was a designer at Adaptive Path, but not a coder, so she was stuck in design-land for six months. It was frustrating for her, but in hindsight, it forced her to concentrate on designing the user experience.
• Like in development (and likely every major undertaking), concentrating on validating assumptions and crystallizing what the ideal end-state looks like drastically increases the likelihood of achieving the desired outcome.
• Alexa extends the typical interaction design model to encompass pitching, explaining, etc.
• She addressed very effectively the problem and allure of implementing features one at a time (e.g., badging, rating, gaming, etc.). She made the analogy of baking a cupcake, a cake, and a wedding cake: "how do ensure that we have at least a little frosting each step of the way?"
• Lots of great takeaways in her talk!

Great job, Alexa, and good luck in your new venture!

Full notes:

• Recently left Adaptive Path 
  • Vision: If you have an amazing food experience, make it easy to recommend it; makes it easy to discover foods around you
  • Foodspotting now has a website and iPhone app
  • now 100K iPhone app downloads, launched in March 2010 at #sxsw, 45K foods lsited
• Woke up one morning: why isn’t there a Yelp for dishes, instead of restaurants?
  • Inspired by trip to Japan and Korea: why didn’t I ever hear about them, and tried to find it in San Francisco?
  • At Adaptive Path, we help companies specify what to build before they build it
    • Build product strategy and competition
    • Interaction design: figure out flow, create detailed specs
• The only problem is: "I can’t actually build things; I can’t actually code"
  • Ended up spending 6 long months looking for acofounder: all my friends are designer
  • Tip #1: get out of your circle: you need designers, coders, business people
  • Very frustrating: because couldn’t write code and get something written
• Frustration was good
  • Used time to refine, communicate and validate my vision
  • I ate out a lot, asked people “what did you eat, how would you rate it, how would you keep a food journal”
• "I found my co-founder by showing them my big poster"
  • Rails developer: from GetSatisfaction (was front end developer)
  • Didn’t have iPhone skills, so hired that out: and by then, idea was tested and validated
  • found likely source of members: the 55K members part of “food porn” group on Flickr
• What is the experience you want to create: don’t want to recommend that you spend 6 months being frustrated
  • Concepts are not a replacement for Lean Startup or Agile Startup
  • Focus on the experience you want to creat and let everything else support that
• Top Mistakes that Startups make (top google search)
  • Mistake 1: build something people don’t really want or need
    • Segway
  • Mistake 2: Thinking too small
    • Investors want to see big idea: tell me about world domination
    • He wants to hear about ultimate solution: ideal, not what you’d build tomorrow
  • Mistake 3: Moving too slowly
  • A UX Vision can help
  • Vision: a concrete representation of where your product is headed
• Tools
  • 1. Come up with a vision
  • 2. Communicate your vision
  • 3. Validate your vision (slides are available on Slideshare)
• Vision
  • Intial: it’s a field guild for food
    • “Tell me about some of the highs/lows for your restaurant”
• TOOL: Contextual Interviews:
  • What do you think when you see the menu?
  • Do you order the same thing?
  • Hear about reviews and articles?
  • Yields:
    • Undersanding of pain
    • Opportunities you haven’t considered
  • Ingredients
    • 10 people, 10 questions
    • Notebook, pen, paper, sharpies
  • Instructions
    • Meet people in context
    • Ask open-ended questions
    • Use cues in environment
    • Use discussion aids if you can
  • Other tools
    • Show me timeline of highs and lows of food experience (read magazine article) - wavy line on sheet of paper
• TOOL: Make believe
  • Pretend the tool exists: like PalmPilot holding block of wood
  • Yields
    • An outpouring of fresh ideas
    • New ways to frame a problem (“what would the ideal magic wand be?”
    • A chance to taste whether an interaction feels natural in real life
  • Ingredients
    • Props, a friend, the Real World
  • Instructions
    • Get out and enjoy everday activities
    • Act out some ways you’d use your product, using props to inspire and test ideas
    • Got them to consider lots of exciting and tantalizing idea
• TOOL: Metaphor Brainstorming
  • A concrete representation of the proposed activities
  • Examples: Collecting, competing, finding
  • Collecting
    • Word association: Stamps, coins
    • Explore the metaphor: everyone is unique: passport photos: tells story; coins are kept in a special box
• TOOL: Artifact from the future
  • What would TechCrunch say about it? What is the review of software say?
  • Yields:
    • A concrete representation of where your product is headed
    • Something your team can rally around
  • Ingredients:
  • Just ideas and imagincation
    • (Missing some…)
• Communicating your vision
  • Principles
    • 1. It’s just about the food
    • 2. Not every food, just the good food
    • 3. Good food can be found anywhere
    • 4. Meaningful experiences
    • …
• TOOL: Experience principles
  • Yields
    • Concise, memorable guidelines that…
  • Inspire ideas
    • Give you a basis for decision making
• TOOL: Create an Experience Poster
  • Yields
    • A pocket sized visual summary of what using your product could be like
    • Something you can use to sell your vision and vett your ideas
  • Ingredients 
    • An elevator pitch
  • Description of benefits 
    • Principles, characgeristics, metaphors
  • Instructions 
    • Describe benefits of your product
    • Illustrate those benefits – capture the experience, not the interface
• TOOL: Pitch kit: name, pitch, vision 
  • Yields: 
    • A meaningful name
    • A one-sentence cocktail party pitch
  • Vision or mission statement
    • An “ah-ha” reaction
  • Ingredients 
    • A few social events to practice at
    • A few well-known companies you can relate your to
  • Instructions 
    • Practice your answers to those questions you can get people to say “ah-ha!” in a minute
    • Used Venture Hacks (http://venturehacks.com/, @venturehacks)
  • Reframing problem statement and goals: "Facebook is about making the world more open and connected; Foodspotting is about being able to discover great things around your world."
  • Look for the bigger idea
• Validating your vision 
  • By time she had cofounder, was on version 15 of wireframing
  • InDesign is favorite tool
  • Showed portable deck of cards
  • Prototyping in Flash was easy
  • Crank out prototype in days; 4-5 months to get iPhone app built
• Design the Future Homepage 
  • Use the renderings months before iPhone app available to get email addresses (use Facebook Like)
  • Holy cow: amazing sounding tool. Kiss Insights: ask question on any webpage (to ask questions like "which links on a navigation would you remove?")
  • Fill in the blank: I love this product because…
  • Not: “it uses augmented reality and it uses open standards”
• Build half a product, not a half-assed product: --Jason Fried 
  • Cupcake
  • Cake
  • Wedding Cake
  • All of the above are tasty: you don't ship any of them without frosting.
  • It could have been tempting to do core functionality: badges, rating, search, social, gaming
  • We worked backwards: what kind of gaming feature could we do, even given limited time, budget, etc...
  • Make sure there’s a little bit of frosting at each phase
  • At each step, ask “what is cupcake version?”
• What is experience you want to create? 
  • Experience
  • Business
  • Product
  • Technology
• For six long months, all I had was a vision 
  • We’re raising funding
  • 100K app users
  • Looking for mobile, bizdev rockstar, mobile/rails developer
• Q: What was your biggest surprise? 
  • People take lots of pictures
  • People tweet everything: almost like spam
  • People have lots of regional pride (we have great sushi in Ohio; Ashville, representing on foodspotting) 
    • Can we up the competitiveness on regional pride?
  • Biggest challenge? 
    • Explaining that opportunity is more than just a lifestyle: it's more than just a being food blogger
  • Believing it helps
  • So many great ideas (Four Square, Gowalla) didn’t start as a making money venture