As Chief Product Officer, I lead our product team to create simple, intuitive user experiences.
Ultimately, you have to provide value to the user.
The typical user of a food bank is not someone that’s languishing in poverty: it’s someone who has a cash flow problem.
Economic theory dictates that the value of a company is basically the present value of its future profits. To estimate Facebook’s value through its future profits, we need to have a view on its user growth and how this will evolve in the next 10 to 50 years.
One of the cool things we’re seeing at TaskRabbit is local tech and gaming startups hiring TaskRabbits to test their products and deliver immediate user feedback. As the founder of a tech startup, I can tell you that this type of focus group testing is paramount – and usually really pricey and difficult to coordinate.
Pinterest is offering consumers a way to discover things on the web, in a serendipitous way, with a beautiful user interface. So it’s offering a whole new paradigm called ‘discover’ and allowing users to be creative.
Run focus groups. Do whatever you need to do to get 8 to 10 people together in a room and put your product in front of them. Ask them how much they would pay for it and whether they would pay for it. It’s really important to get user validation early and often.
The whole concept of data science is that the software becomes the expert, and you, as the average user, are able to understand what’s going on.
You can see that tight integration, as Facebook and Twitter now have with iOS, makes the overall user experience better for both the partner and for Apple.
What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!
Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free.
The iPhone was the first phone that brought what we used to think of as ‘desktop quality’ software to a handheld platform: software where you just say, ‘Wow, that’s a great user experience,’ not merely, ‘Wow, that’s a great user experience for a handheld.’
I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions.
We are pushing ahead as fast as we can for all audiences, whether for the business user, the child, or the digital music enthusiast.
Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can’t change it since they don’t have the source code. They can’t study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.
As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it’s going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.
I feel that it’s lovely when, as a user, you’re not aware of the complexity.
As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain.
We use content-addressing so content can be decoupled from origin servers and, instead, can be stored permanently. This means content can be stored and served very close to the user, perhaps even from a computer in the same room.
If you’re a Firefox user, you get accustomed to your history and the URL bar and finding things. That should be available on your mobile phone as well.
There is no better source of real-time news than Twitter. With the constant sharing of news and information, if you’re an active Twitter user, there’s nothing happening, big or small, that you won’t know right away.
Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it’s designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out.
My initial desire to blog came from something that’s always been my approach to investing – I’m a nerd, and I love to play with the technology, and part of my approach has really been to understand things both at a user level and at a reasonably deep tentacle level.
All through the 1980s, Apple kept its prices high. There were many reasons Microsoft’s much bigger user base managed to resist moving to the GUI – but price was high among them.
Location-based services are here to stay, as it focuses on high relevance and contextual offering to the end user. This means a user sees what he needs with immediate sense and meaning to him.
Making the AI better in a video game is not like making the AI better in, say, a chess game. Making it better in terms of acting ability – we’re basically improving its acting so that the user can have more fun.
Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria – unfortunately.
Historically, software for business was seen as unsexy because the products were seen as so poor – they provided such a poor user experience.
In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.
At KaBOOM! we are crowd-sourcing a nationwide Map of Play that uses GIS data and user rankings to identify where the engaging playgrounds are located, but more importantly, where they are not.
The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it’s the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.
A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.
I have never seen a game’s graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.
Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user’s needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.
Things that are ultimately complex must have a simple end user experience if they are to be successful.
I am extremely passionate about digital media and as a longtime user and fan of Yahoo!
The combined entity Youku Tudou Inc. represents a dominant leader in online video sector in China with the largest user base, most comprehensive content library, most advanced bandwidth infrastructure, and most effective monetization capability.
We’ve never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.
It’s really important to note that Bumble VIBee isn’t about weeding anyone out of the equation. Everyone is still allowed to use Bumble. If you’re an active, engaging user, we reward you with VIBee status, and you can stand out in the app.
If you’re looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users? I’m increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web.
We try hard to provide the best user experience possible, and that means the best ads possible, so we work with the brands to come up with the best images.
When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.
Although TikTok is a Chinese app, it had a humungous Indian user base.
Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them.
I not only work online through my various projects, but I am an avid user of online technologies to connect and engage with friends as well.
Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.
