With Your Guide to Telling a Compelling Story and Driving Conversions on Landing Pages, you’ll have all you need to:

• drive users to sign up to learn more about your product
• establish a content structure for your product landing page that ensures market interest and engagement
• build a product landing page that meets mobile and SEO requirements
• learn how to gauge interest in your product idea by publishing a minimum viable product (MVP) splash page
• guide users to your essential call to action (CTA) with website design tips and tricks
• learn from user experience optimization examples and screen shots that cover layout, form, and code optimization

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I’ve received a lot of great feedback and enjoyed some followup conversations after my latest MVP strategies article, The Experience Makes the Product, Not The Features, which was published in UX Magazine.

Segueing from this article, I’ve got two upcoming talks I’d encouraging you to come out to.

Feb 17—Agile Experience Design Toronto: Why starting with features will kill your MVP.

The first talk is Feb 17 at a local Agile UX meetup. There I’ll be talking about aligning UX with Agile, focusing on some of the difficulties of bringing design into a predominantly engineering focused workplace.

This Tuesday evening event is free to attend.

RSVP on Meetup

March 7—FITC’s Spotlight UX/UI: It’s the Experience That Makes the Product, Not the Features

At this talk, I’ll expand on the heart of the article to look at what it means to bring a focused, valuable Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to market. I’ll highlight MVP strategies that can help you learn how to better serve your users, and the business that’s footing the bill.

Early bird pricing for this full day event is available until February 22, with pricing starting at $49 for students, and up to $129.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Lee.

The post It’s the experience that makes the product, not the features. MVP product strategy speaking engagements in Feb and March. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

I sat in on this talk just a few months before we founded Say Yeah. For me this was a transitional time period, when I was making the change from “guy who designs websites” to “guy who cares about users”. Beginning with those first few projects at Say Yeah in the fall of 2008, our user-centerd design philosophy has been the foundation for our work over the past 6 years.

While keeping in mind that this talk was given two months prior to the initial iPhone launch, these points stick out to me as what would eventually become mobile first design process and the MVP movement.

• Remove features that aren’t being used when the benefit of simplicity is more than the benefit of the feature.
• Remove items to create visual simplicity.
• Figure out what you need to launch, the core features and watch how people use it.
• Get the site out there. Optimize later, when the site scales.

It’s impressive how adaptable this talk is to today’s emphasis on agile and lean product management. The talk is certainly as relevant now as it ever has been.

If you’re interested the event slides can be found on SlideShare, but read on now for my detailed notes.

MeshU – Notes from Presentations – 20/05/08

Iteration & You – Designing Adaptable Websites

Daniel Burka, Digg, Pownce

High Road Architecture

• Lots of planning, years to build and iterations take as much planning
• In websites, highly designed sites–flash, etc.

Low Road Architecture

• Quick, easy to build, change, adapt.
• In websites, built on frameworks, other peoples code/standards

Establish a Visual Language

• Design elements as a ‘visual vocabulary’ similar unified style for the entire site.

Desire Paths

• Builders pave walkways, people use the grass, they build their own pathways.
• Watch what people do, how they use the site, or app, and then help adapt.
• Figure out what you need to launch, the core features and watch how people use it

Adapt to Scale

• Get the site out there. Optimize later, when the site scales.

Subtraction is Iteration

• Remove features that aren’t being used when the benefit of simplicity is more than the benefit of the feature
• Remove items to create visual simplicity

Realign, Don’t Redesign

• Don’t take out the wrecking ball and restart – it’s very tempting, too much work.
• Make adjustments over time, instead of huge increment versions.
• Major redesigns can remove the pathways that users have developed over time – break user patterns.
• Use innovations of others, not your own, people understand how the things they’ve seen work. – Ie tabs, pagination, are intuitive and people know how to use them.
• Innovate only when needed, not for the sake of it.

Make Time for Iteration

• Build in time to change things to your past work.
• Research how users use the site.
• Improve on what you have, instead of just making new things.

Don’t Panic

• You’ll get feedback, wait and see before reacting.
• Take a breather then come back in a week, or month, and see what all users are thinking.
• Once you implement a feature, you have to maintain it.

Adapt to Survive

• Convince of why iteration is important, usually based on the bottom line. Set goals, try to reach them.
• Usability tests – simple as friends and a pizza – ie. These people, this background, have this problem.

Key Points

• Low road design is much easier to adapt.
• Realign, don’t redesign.
• Create a visual language and iterate it.
• You can’t predict all eventualities.
• Remove as much as you add.
• Don’t be over reactive.
• Make time for iteration.

Product strategy as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

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Apple has put a great deal of effort into the Apple Store app (effectively creating an iPhone friendly view of everything under the “Store” link at apple.com), and they’ve long had a somewhat responsive desktop site, which adapted in height and width from 9″ screen sizes to 27″ desktops, but their website has never been smartphone friendly.

Following today’s keynote, that’s changed, with efforts being made across all new product pages and the navigation with a new mobile-optimized (non-responsive) site at apple.com.

The new, smartphone friendly Apple.com

Here’s how the “Mac” landing page at apple.com looks on Desktop along with today’s new smartphone view to the right:

You can imagine if you were looking at the above image at full size on your desktop or smartphone the text would be equally large and legible across both devices. Now, instead of shrinking 4 columns of content down to a narrow smartphone screen, apple.com sports a single column layout on iPhone.

To further accommodate for the smartphone view, Apple simplified the product icons at the top of the page, reducing the size of the main menu and footer, while relying on horizontal scrolling for the main menu and product selector. (However, we do take exception to their choice to hide the main menu, given how it’s been implemented. More on that tomorrow.)

Before today, squint, zoom, or give up.

By comparison, before today, you would have just seen a scaled down, near-illegible view of the multi-column desktop layout on your iPhone, like this:

Going mobile, slowly.

Overall, this a positive initial foray into the substantial undertaking of making Apple.com smartphone friendly.

Sure, the Store and Support links still remain non-smartphone friendly, but those are two completely separate technical systems from the rest of Apple.com and the Store link is already well represented by the Apple Store app.

You’ll note as well that older product pages have not been made smartphone friendly. While today’s iPhone 6 product page reads great on iPhone, all the Mac pages, including the just released Macbook Pros, iMacs, and more remain minuscule on iPhone.

To be sure, these additional product pages are sure to be updated with each successive product release.

Start small and ship.

It’s impressive to see this iterative path being taken by a company who is careful about the changes they make and always sweats the small stuff. Even they were willing to start the march toward a smartphone-optimized site with a partial release, rather than spending hundreds of man hours adjusting old content.

As always, a first step to market is better than no step at all. And now they’ve set the foundation to have a fully optimized site by following the natural course of their product releases, instead of backtracking across years of products, adjusting old code and designs.

More insights are just a click away.

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Stop polishing and ship.

The post Stop polishing and ship appeared first on Say Yeah!.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

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