Some of Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation ideas in a 4 minute summary.

When choosing words for your app:

1. Keep it brief. Be concise, simple and precise. Start with a 30 character limit (including spaces), and don't use more unless absolutely necessary.

2. Keep it simple. Pretend you're speaking to someone who's smart and competent, but doesn't know technical jargon and may not speak English very well. Use short words, active verbs, and common nouns.

3. Be friendly. Use contractions. Talk directly to the reader using second person ("you"). If your text doesn't read the way you'd say it in casual conversation, it's probably not the way you should write it. Don't be abrupt or annoying and make the user feel safe, happy and energized.

4. Put the most important thing first. The first two words (around 11 characters, including spaces) should include at least a taste of the most important information in the string. If they don't, start over.

5. Describe only what's necessary, and no more. Don't try to explain subtle differences. They will be lost on most users.

6. Avoid repetition. If a significant term gets repeated within a screen or block of text, find a way to use it just once.

The examples in the link really bring the rules to life.

The independent board member should be someone you feel comfortable calling up to ask a dumb, newbie question about your business.  They should be someone that if circumstances were different, you would be excited to start a company with them.

Fascinating. Always wondered how new entrepreneurs/CEOs learn to run things.

Android team discovered that many users felt dumb using the system because they couldn’t figure out how to access all its features. "We went through and eliminated all the hidden affordances [controls], places in the system where it wasn’t clear what you had to do, or where somebody would have to teach you, or where you’d have to just try it [to figure out what it did]," Duarte says. To reduce the learning curve, all essential actions in each application are right up on the surface screen. "That makes everything much more discoverable and much faster.

I wonder if they had to remove some of the items in the menus. Hard to believe all the stuff tucked into all the menus could then be easily fit onto all UIs. This is an example of where it's key to get product and design thinking and working as one.

Sometimes each feature and aspect of the UI is already optimized and there just isn't enough prioritization or elimination of non-essential features.

Gil has noticed that CEOs of the most successful start-ups are intellectually curious. They ask questions of many different people who are working on a problem that interests them. And they synthesize all these opinions using their instincts to focus what they’ve learned.

In Gil’s view, to succeed entrepreneurs must challenge the status quo. And to do that successfully, they must be curious about how things work and why. 

Intellectually curious, ask questions of many different people, synthesize opinions, curious about how things work and why. Sounds ridiculously fun.

Some really fun interaction design here. Great video. Been a while since a UI has made me actually want to find an excuse to use it instead of just enjoy using it.

Over Christmas, I was having coffee with my father and mentioned that it has been really good to be living overseas again for some time and that it's good for people to move around in the world.

He asked me to explain why. So I thought about it and said something like "Being in different cultures with different beliefs and ways of doing things reminds you that what you took to be fact or obvious might not be so much of a fact. More importantly is that you realize that if this is the case, then, in a certain sense, nothing in the world has to be the way it currently is and nothing in the world has to be any certain particular way."

I think this is good for creativity and good for problem solving and thus good for humankind.

UPDATE: Embed code seems unavailable. Link to the video.

an entrepreneur is the artist of the business world. Yeah, there are some rules defined by the legal system and techniques to learn and apply, but pretty much everything else is free game and left up to the artist’s eye.

There is creativity required to make an idea a reality.

His advice to entrepreneurs starting at 18:30:

1. Find something the rest of the world doesn't know about that's going to be big and crush it. A lot of you think you are but you're not. You're just doing a startup.

2. Forget about whether your investors are celebrities. Find investors who believe what you believe and help you do real stuff. (Hiring a hot engineering team, actively define your culture, etc.)

3. Your success will largely be a function of who you choose to trust whether it's investors, employees, customers. So many people are not long-term greedy enough when it comes to these choices.