Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. “Beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”? No one has figured out how to describe their product effectively. For example, Write, a note-taking app, describes itself as “a beautiful home for all your notes,” which doesn’t say much about why one might want it. Macworld describes it as “Easy Markdown Writing for Dropbox Users.” That’s both concise and specific: If you like Markdown and use Dropbox, you’ll read more. It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, when Dave Feldman became a designer, he had the opposite problem.
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Technology companies are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. While the concepts they focus on are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
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This article concludes the series on how to sell and profit from digital products. In this piece, Nathan Barry will be discussing more of the tactics required for a successful digital product business, and he hopes you’ll learn some valuable techniques to make selling digital products more profitable! Let’s jump in.
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Instead of having a 10 to 20% profit margin like many businesses, Nathan Barry had an 85% profit margin in 2012. That actually could have been much higher, except that he spent some money on equipment and hiring freelancers. After creating each product, he has only 5% in hard costs for each sale. And the product can be sold an unlimited number of times. In this article, Nathan Barry will show how to profit from selling digital products.
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Anyone with an idea could turn out the next Facebook. Technology takes no heed of gender, creed or race, but is reduced down to code and the desire to create. Everyone you meet has an idea for the “next great website or app.” However, there is a harsh reality: many new products fail. But what should you do if your product does fail? How do you close a product with dignity, so that both you and your users leave on good terms? In this article, Kevin Stone will answer this questions.
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The debate about what a “User Experience Design” exactly is, is as old as the discipline itself, and while sitting back and watching the drama is sometimes fun, let’s try to figure out which user experience techniques are useful for startups, in-house teams, big corporations and anyone who wants to improve their website, product or service.
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As a designer, the value you bring to any project isn’t only your ability to execute tasks. Good clients will appreciate the guidance and opinions that come with your experience, and it’s up to you to base your recommendations on more than subjective opinion. In this article, Jonathan Kochis will refer to specific mobile research projects he has conducted and build a case for audience surveys and review of analytics data.
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If you are launching a product, then your aim should be to make your product something that people would be happy to buy. You can then begin to develop additional features based on what customers actually want and need. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains, based on her own experience, how to start with a new product, develop and support it over time. She’ll describe how it is possible to launch with a really small product and grow from those small beginnings by listening to your customers.
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We have gotten serious about asking how to better serve users, which reflects a significant change in the designer’s skill set. Designers will use the same tools they have always used, but they are now responsible for more than just the interface. Whether or not a designer calls him or herself a product designer is beside the point; to remain relevant, they need to master these new user-centered values and processes.
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A digital strategy is not as intimidating as it sounds. It is just a document outlining how your client should handle the different aspects of digital from the website and mobile to email. It doesn’t need to cover everything in huge depth, but instead should establish some general approaches to these different areas. This post will provide you with a crash course on where to start and what kinds of things to include. I hope it proves useful.
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