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.

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.

When we recently redesigned the website, we focused a lot on the discovery part of the equation, making it very simple for people to get value out of Twitter without necessarily participating.

Love seeing these little insights into strategy shift and the connection to user experience.

Incredible.

If you are building a startup, you need to own it.

You have to care about the product, so it needs to align with your skills and interests. Trying to build a startup in an area you don’t care about means you will fail to address problems and to seize opportunities that your more caring competitors will exploit.

Interesting. Seldom do I see a tactical explanation for why it's important to build a startup in an area one cares about. Although I sometimes wonder if all the successful founders really care about their startup area.

instead of dividing your customers into segments and asking which features each segment would like, you should think about what “job” the customers are “hiring” you product to perform.

This is from Clay Christensen and I learned it at Intuit. It's a great tool I've used to further develop an instinct as another way to validate what designers always want to know which is "why" as in "Why would someone want this" or "Why would anyone care about or love this?"

I'm often asking teammates what difference in someone's life are we going to make by releasing what we are talking about. This goes for little features and new product lines. Sometimes I find that we can get more focused and that helps us to streamline the design to really deliver the benefit. Sometimes I find that we're not so sure about how some work will make a difference and we get to rethink it.