IBIZIOUS ENERGY DRINK. Amnesia is a nightclub on Ibiza, Spain, an island famed for its colossal seasonal techno clubs. Amnesia will open for the season on June 15 and is promoting that fact with this bizarre — and hilarious — launch video that employs every 1980s advertising cliche ever seen. It’s all knowingly done, of course — there’s a reveal at the end. But still, kudos to ad agency Limon Estudios. Perfectly executed. Source

Massive Lightbox Acts Like It’s Alive. At the 2011 Creators Project New York event, United Visual Artists’ massive LED sculpture Origin attracted spectators like insects to bright light. Set in the foreground of the Brooklyn Bridge, the artwork was continuously engaged with its environment through the buzzing dialogue between the visual light and sound. Source

Light Painting The Sydney Harbour Bridge. Colour The Bridge transforms the Sydney Harbour Bridge into a massive interactive light sculpture. Using 2,000 LED linear tubes, one kilometer of fiber optics, and 10,000 individual programmable LEDs, 32 Hundred Lighting, in partnership with Intel, created an interactive installation for the VIVID Sydney festival that lets you create and watch your own light painting come to life on the Sydney Harbour Bridge via touchscreen computer. Source

Testing for your startup

Perfecting your product’s user experience (UX) means creating something that people truly enjoy using, be it an app, gadget or multifaceted service.

Look no further than below and you’ll find a list of 13 excellent UX tips from startups like Square, Path, Uber and more.

1) Embrace guerilla usability testing

“Many startups don’t test their product at all or only after release because they fear it would be too expensive and would take too long. The truth is that with guerilla usability testing, it can be done quickly and with minimal costs.

Once you’ve defined which user tasks should be tested, start developing low fidelity paper prototypes. It’s a fantastic way to validate your ideas by using just pen and paper. When you have your paper prototype, step out of your office, find people who are at least similar to your target users and begin testing! Don’t wait too long until your first session; start as soon as you have your first design idea!”

- Nadav Poraz, Founder, WhoSampled

2) Add Google Analytics events everywhere

“One thing that every startup should implement is tracking how customers are using their interface.

By firing events on every action, you can get metrics that track Call-to-Action buttons and compare their performance to find out which one can be optimized.

You can also generate funnels to see customer retention and discover where they exit the website.

I used A/B testing with event tracking with RefurbMe in the beginning. The idea is to set up two different landing pages, show them randomly and find out which one performs better from the analytics.”

- Mohammed Elalj, CEO, Refurb.me

3) Define your product goals first

“One of the most important practices in UX design is actually done before the UX design process even starts. Defining the goals and values of the product that you would like to build is the key driver for a results-driven process.

Naturally, there are different kinds of product goals, e.g.: fulfilling a certain business model, forming a habit, creating a behavioral change or owning an experience.

Writing down goals before the UX process starts will help you set the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), keep your team focused and save lot’s of debate, time and energy.

At Tawkon we’ve developed a culture of precisely articulating our goals for every new product and feature we intend to develop, and apply Lean UX as a working process to get a tangible product and test with the market as quickly as possible.”

- Ori Goshen, Co-Founder & VP R&D, Tawkon

4) Get feedback early on

“Even before determining product market fit, it’s important to get early validation and feedback. Show the website or app to any and everyone.

Craigslist can be a great source of independent, unbiased users. Even approaching people in a bar can give you good perspective. For just the price of a pint, most people will be happy to give your app a whirl. If someone doesn’t grok it after a beer or two, chances are it’s too complicated.

Once an app starts to scale, user research should grow more formal. As usage increases, let user analytics demonstrate problem areas where effort should be focused. Ultimately, while big changes need to come from intuition, optimization of an interface or flow should include a structured experimentation framework.”

- Jamie Davidson, VP of Product, HotelTonight

5) Use tools to monitor user interaction

“UX has been driving purchasing decisions since trades in ancient civilizations all the way through to that café just around the corner. UX is how your customers interact with you, it’s how they perceive you, and it’s what motivates them to refer and return.

At Needle, we use 5 different tools to keep a constant eye on how users interact with our platform. We watch them use it through screen capturing (Inspectlet), we investigate heat maps to identify points of interests (Crazy Egg), we dig deep into individual actions on a per-user level to process usage patterns (Mixpanel), we step back to analyze behaviors on a macro scale (Google Analytics), and A/B test everything we implement (Optimizely).”

- Michael Cheng, Cofounder, Needle

6) Use a 3-step approach for your qualitative user interview

1. Recruit: Find a low-barrier way of recruiting users so that you can habitually conduct interviews and usability tests. At Coursera, we ask students to sign up if they want to be contacted for feedback — and the response has been great.
2. Connect and Document: Choose a method to conduct interviews that is most comfortable for the user. For remote interviews, use Skype or Google Hangouts, or set them up with software like Quicktime or Camtasia if they’d rather give feedback on their own time. Make sure to capture not only their screen, but also their voice and face. All of this will be helpful for drawing insights later.
3. Synthesize: Be open to surprises! Proactively interpret the user’s behavior and comments, rather than mechanically react to every suggestion. After all, you are the one that holds the vision for your product.

- Minjeong Kim, Product Designer, Coursera

7) Simplify

“When it comes to UX testing, we learned to start with the idea of a user in your worst case scenario — someone who knows nothing about your product, is distracted when they onboard, has bad cell reception, etc. By watching that person use and fumble through your product (or even just imagining them using it), you can quickly identify areas where the app is not simple, clear or fast enough.

With Rithm, we made a commitment to make simplicity our top priority from day 1, and filtered every wireframe and piece of copy through these questions: Is it simple enough? and Is there anything we could do to make it simpler?”

- Jesse Dallal, Cofounder, Rithm

8) Get your app into a usable state

“The most important thing for any of our apps is to get them into a usable state as quickly as possible. With Clear, we had a basic prototype built and in use by the Realmac team in the space of a few weeks. This wasn’t just a prototype that we used in the office — we used it every day with live data around supermarkets, etc., to see how things actually worked. E.g.: was the swipe threshold too strict or loose, how did the app work when used single-handedly?

The same process applied for our newest app on the Mac: Ember. You only start finding gripes with user-flows and interactions by using an app all-day, everyday.

Getting to the point at which you can start using it all-day obviously takes a little more work that a basic idea-validation-prototype, but once you find that point with each product, that’s when you can really get to work refining things.”

- Nik Fletcher, Product Manager, Realmac Software

9) Test early, test often

“Do it early and often. When we are building products at Uber, usability and visual design helps shape the product’s story. Testing at different stages helps us refine the story by uncovering user motivations, behaviors, as well as validating the assumptions we make during the creation process.

User testing doesn’t have to be lengthy, complicated or formal. The important thing to remember is to stop, validate and refine. When we were re-imagining the Uber app, we performed a lot of informal testing by asking family, friends, colleagues to perform specific tasks for key scenarios. From signing up and requesting a car to adding/removing a credit card, we were able to surface user motivations and behaviors by asking them to talk through what they saw and expected as they navigated through the experience.”

- Shalin Amin, Head of Experience Design, Uber

10) Don’t make your designs static

“Iterate. The beauty of the web is that it changes; it’s not static. So our designs shouldn’t be static. The best testing is when you solve a problem to the best of your ability, ship it, gather feedback and watch how it’s used, and then iterate accordingly.”

- Jason VanLue, Lead Designer of Codeschool, Envy Labs

11) Stay focused and trust your intuition

“Having a tight feedback loop while building your product is key to iterating and moving quickly. For most startups, including Path, one of the most efficient and practical ways to get feedback is by testing rapidly amongst close friends, family and employees.

We treat user testing as one of many signals for making decisions. When building, it’s important to remember what specific problem you’re setting out to solve. Trust your intuition: early on, it’s especially important when larger decisions are so fragile and easily swayed. Remember that you can’t build something that pleases everyone: trying to do so normally results in a weaker, confusing release. Stay focused on the use-case you want to nail and be merciless on getting it right. The smallest details can be the difference between a product that delights and one that confuses.”

- Danny Trinh, Product Designer, Path

12) Use lean UX principles

“Here at Hailo we’re lucky enough to have the expertise (and desire) to utilize truly ‘lean’ product principles. That means connecting with your users early with features and ideas to learn — quickly — if you’re likely to add true customer and business value, before you’ve invested dramatic amounts of time and money in development. Implicit in that is an acceptance that you often launch with a minimum viable product that isn’t feature-rich. It takes time (and some guts) to adopt this process, but the rewards are immediate. I’m consistently amazed how few companies truly practice this process.

Hailo is undergoing pretty dramatic growth right now (we’ve launched in three new cities in almost as many weeks), with many more to come in the coming months, and some truly ambitious goals for 2014. That obviously brings complexity as we need to understand the needs of a growing number of customers globally. The only way we can do this is to ensure we’re consistently interacting with our users, testing and learning so we’re laser focused on an approach that combines a rapid speed to market with testing and learning. Success really is about understanding what works, and what doesn’t, as quickly as possible.

What does that mean practically? It means iterating designs via a series of prototypes, numerous times a week in numerous locations, before moving the result of those tests into a series of MVPs via an AB testing framework. We ‘kill or continue’ on the basis of those results. It’s a process of continuous improvement and we’ll iterate the process as necessary. But it works for us and we’re pretty happy with the results.”

- Jonathan Moore, Head of Product, Hailo

13) Test every possible scenario on a new build

“When releasing a new product or update, every detail matters. You must have rigorous, detail-oriented testing processes across teams to test every possible scenario on a new build. At Square, we recreate the merchant and consumer experience internally by using Square Register and accepting Square Wallet at the Square Coffee Bar and Square Kitchen. Almost daily, these locations are receiving a new beta build.”

- The Square Team

Have more advice to share? Please let us know in the comments! 

Source

57 startup lessons

There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.

People

1. If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market).
2. Split the stock between the founding team evenly.
3. Always have a vesting schedule.
4. Make most decisions by consensus, but have a single CEO whose decisions are final. Make it clear from day one.
5. Your authority as CEO is earned. You start with a non-zero baseline. It grows if you have victories and dwindles if you don’t. Don’t try to use authority you didn’t earn.
6. Morale is very real and self-perpetuating. If you work too long without victories, your investors, employees, family, and you yourself will lose faith. Work like hell not to get yourself into this position.
7. Pick the initial team very carefully. Everyone should be pleasant to work with, have at least one skill relevant to the business they’re spectacular at, be extremely effective and pragmatic. Everyone should have product sense and a shared vision for the product and the company.
8. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Pick a small set of non-negotiable rules that matter to you most and enforce them ruthlessly.
9. Fire people that are difficult, unproductive, unreliable, have no product sense, or aren’t pragmatic. Do it quickly.
10. Some friction is good. Too much friction is deadly. Fire people that cause too much friction. Good job + bad behavior == you’re fired.

Fundraising

1. If you have to give away more than 15% of the company at any given fundraising round, your company didn’t germinate correctly. It’s salvageable but not ideal.
2. If you haven’t earned people’s respect yet, fundraising on traction is an order of magnitude easier than fundraising on a story. If you have to raise on a story but don’t have the reputation, something’s wrong.
3. Treat your fundraising pitch as a minimum viable product. Get it out, then iterate after every meeting.
4. Most investor advice is very good for optimizing and scaling a working business. Listen to it.
5. Most investor advice isn’t very good for building a magical product. Nobody can help you build a magical product — that’s your job.
6. Don’t fall in love with the fundraising process. Get it done and move on.

Markets

1. The best products don’t get built in a vacuum. They win because they reach the top of a field over all other products designed to fill the same niche. Find your field and be the best. If there is no field, something’s wrong.
2. Work on a problem that has an immediately useful solution, but has enormous potential for growth. If it doesn’t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it’s not worth doing. For example, Google touches billions of lives by filling a very concrete space in people’s daily routine. It changes the way people behave and perceive their immediate physical surroundings. Shoot for building a product of this magnitude.
3. Starting with the right idea matters. Empirically, you can only pivot so far.
4. Assume the market is efficient and valuable ideas will be discovered by multiple teams nearly instantaneously.
5. Pick new ideas because they’ve been made possible by other social or technological change. Get on the train as early as possible, but make sure the technology is there to make the product be enough better that it matters.
6. If there is an old idea that didn’t work before and there is no social or technological change that can plausibly make it work now, assume it will fail. (That’s the efficient market hypothesis again. If an idea could have been brought to fruition, it would have been. It’s only worth trying again if something changed.)
7. Educating a market that doesn’t want your product is a losing battle. Stick to your ideals and vision, but respect trends. If you believe the world needs iambic pentameter poetry, sell hip hop, not sonnets.

Products

1. Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can. Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management.
2. Don’t build something that already exists. Customers won’t buy it just because it’s yours.
3. Make sure you know why users will have no choice but to switch to your product, and why they won’t be able to switch back. Don’t trust yourself — test your assumptions as much as possible.
4. Ask two questions for every product feature. Will people buy because of this feature? Will people not buy because of lack of this feature? No amount of the latter will make up for lack of the former. Don’t build features if the answer to both questions is “no”.
5. Build a product people want to buy in spite of rough edges, not because there are no rough edges. The former is pleasant and highly paid, the latter is unpleasant and takes forever.
6. Beware of chicken and egg products. Make sure your product provides immediate utility.
7. Learn the difference between people who might buy your product and people who are just commenting. Pay obsessive attention to the former. Ignore the latter.

Marketing

1. Product comes first. If people love your product, the tiniest announcements will get attention. If people don’t love your product, no amount of marketing effort will help.
2. Try to have marketing built into the product. If possible, have the YouTube effect (your users can frequently send people a link to something interesting on your platform), and Facebook effect (if your users are on the product, their friends will need to get on the product too).
3. Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then do marketing that way. Pick a small set of tasks, do them consistently, and get better every day.
4. Reevaluate effectiveness on a regular basis. Cut things that don’t work, double down on things that do.
5. Don’t guess. Measure.
6. Market to your users. Getting attention from people who won’t buy your product is a waste of time and money.
7. Don’t say things if your competitors can’t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can’t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors can say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can’t.
8. Don’t use supercilious tone towards your users or competitors. It won’t help sell the product and will destroy good will.
9. Don’t be dismissive of criticism. Instead, use it to improve your product. Your most vocal critics will often turn into your biggest champions if you take their criticism seriously.

Sales

1. Sales fix everything. You can screw up everything else and get through it if your product sells well.
2. Product comes first. Selling a product everyone wants is easy and rewarding. Selling a product no one wants is an unpleasant game of numbers.
3. Be relentless about working the game of numbers while the product is between the two extremes above. Even if you don’t sell anything, you’ll learn invaluable lessons.
4. Qualify ruthlessly. Spending time with a user who’s unlikely to buy is equivalent to doing no work at all.
5. Inbound is easier than outbound. If possible, build the product in a way where customers reach out to you and ask to pay.

Development

1. Development speed is everything.
2. Minimize complexity. The simpler the product, the more likely you are to actually ship it, and the more likely you are to fix problems quickly.
3. Pick implementations that give 80% of the benefit with 20% of the work.
4. Use off the shelf components whenever possible.
5. Use development sprints. Make sure your sprints aren’t longer than one or two weeks.
6. Beware of long projects. If you can’t fit it into a sprint, don’t build it.
7. Beware of long rewrites. If you can’t fit it into a sprint, don’t do it.
8. If you must do something that doesn’t fit into a sprint, put as much structure and peer review around it as possible.
9. Working on the wrong thing for a month is equivalent to not showing up to work for a month at all.

Company administration

1. Don’t waste time picking office buildings, accountants, bookkeepers, janitors, furniture, hosted tools, payroll companies, etc. Make sure it’s good enough and move on.
2. Take the time to find a good, inexpensive lawyer. It will make a difference.

Personal well-being

1. Do everything you can not to attach your self esteem to your startup (you’ll fail, but try anyway). Do the best you can every day, then step back. Work in such a way that when the dust settles you can be proud of the choices you’ve made, regardless of the outcome.
2. Every once in a while, get away. Go hiking, visit family in another city, go dancing, play chess, tennis, anything. It will make you more effective and make the people around you happier.

Source

Riley Sunrise Installation for Riley Hospital for Children is complete, after over a year in the making. The facility is still under construction and is scheduled to open June 1, 2012. Please enjoy the videos above highlighting all of the fabrication and installation. Source

Digital Experiment is a series of physical prototypes that utilize the capabilities of computational design tools, CNC machining technology, and an array of synthetic materials. Prior to the development of this technology, complex parametric geometries could not be easily calculated. Through the use and misuse of design and fabrication software we are able to bring back an intricate level of ornament previously achieved only by hand through skilled craftsmen and laborers. The aim is to build upon and develop original contemporary forms of ornament and graphics creating visual complexity and texture. Source

How the Tesla Model S is Made — Behind The Scenes. Source