Development Blog

The Brief:

Designers learn best by working with other designers. However, modern team sizes mean that virtually all startups can only afford to hire a single designer and an entire generation of designers is emerging that has never had that experience. I wanted to create an organization that would increase the proficiency and productivity of designers by providing them with a chance to do the kind of collaborative design work one might find in a studio based environment.

The Problem:

From the start, I wanted the Product Design Guild to be an organization that great designers would want to participate in. Great designers, by their very nature, are busy people so, as well intentioned as they may be, lower priority commitments inevitably get bumped. I thought that the only reliable way to convince busy people to come was if coming would save them time over not coming. That is, spending an hour designing at the Product Design Guild would be more productive than spending an hour designing alone.

The Solution:

The Product Design Guild holds meetings once every two weeks in the Bay Area and once every month in New York. Each meeting lasts for 6 hours on a weekend with lunch and space provided by a different sponsor every week. Each meeting starts with introductions consisting of:

• Your name
• Your project
• What you’re really good at
• What you need help with

After the introductions and lunch, meetings are left deliberately unstructured and members self-organize in order to work most effectively.

Membership to the Product Design Guild is open to experienced designers only and I personally vet every single application for the Bay Area. During the meetings, we have three rules:

• You need to bring work
• Be intensely helpful
• People are trusting you, don’t be a dick

From the beginning, the Product Design Guild was deliberately structured to set itself apart from other meetups in a number of distinctive ways, all towards the aim of being a more productive space than solo design:

• Effective design collaboration requires understanding and trust. By pre-vetting our members, any designer can start working with any other designer and know that their suggestions come from a place of expertise and experience. This allows for groups to form and disband fluidly and rapidly.
• Our rules set up an expectation of helpfulness and productivity that affects the conversational tone. Because one of the shared requirements is that everyone has to bring work, conversations are started around the project.
• Each meeting is 6 hours long which allows for designers to fully explore the depth and nuance of a design problem. The timeframe naturally affords in depth exploration.
• Setting each meeting at a different company allows designers to be exposed to multiple design cultures.
• During each meeting, I am constantly figuring out who should meet who, trying to maximize the utility of having lots of smart designers being in the same room as you.

These deliberate design decisions have resulted in the steady, high quality growth of Guild membership and transformative experiences for those who attend.

My contribution:

• I founded the Product Design Guild
• I run the meetings for the San Francisco Chapter, including finding sponsors for every meeting
• I am responsible for all marketing & promotion.
• I lead the creation of the South Bay and New York chapters by finding appropriate local leaders, mentoring & communicating the values of the guild and providing assistance and guidance
• I vet all memberships for the Bay Area
• I moderate the private Facebook Group

More reading:

• Product Design Guild Homepage
• Essay: Designing a Design Guild
• Talk: BayCHI – Social Software: Creating a Design Guild

The Brief:

Apture was a contextual search startup (now acquired by Google) that allowed users to gain in page, rich media search results through text highlighting. At the time, Apture was just about to release Apture Hotspots and was seeking new strategic directions for its product. I was brought on to provide strategic thinking about potential new avenues for Apture to explore.

The Problem:

Although Apture had great reach, it had to strike a delicate balance between providing utility when needed while also not being annoying when not needed. This tension meant that the designed interaction was so unobtrusive that engagement was low. Apture Hotspots was one new way of bringing the Apture experience to a broader range of people. What were some other ways to balance these two competing needs?

One of the ideas that I explored was in how best to surface ambient behavioral information from people that you cared about. For example, if you were reading about Cleopatra, would it be useful to know a friend had also been researching Cleopatra a few months ago? When & how would this be useful? What would the privacy norms around this be and what would be the best way to present this to the user?

The Solution:

In order to gain insight into these questions, I built Ambient-Wiki, a prototype to be used by internal Apture employees only. Ambient Wiki used a browser plugin to log every Wikipedia page that any Apture employee visited and broadcast this only a shared, ambient display in the office. Simple annotation features were also provided and annotated entries would make an entry extremely prominent on the display.

It was decided that Wikipedia entries were innocuous enough that privacy was not a major concern but interesting enough that they provided an insight into co-workers curiosity.

Findings:

Over the 4 week period that AmbientWiki was running, we discovered that the threshold required to start a conversation was relatively high. However, people did enjoy the voyeuristic element and paid attention to what others were searching. AmbientWiki primarily sparked conversations when you saw someone else searching for something that you have knowledge of (rather than the other way around as we had thought). Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to integrate these findings into any solid product direction.

My Contribution:

• I conducted several user studies on Apture’s existing product
• I created animated interaction mockups of new interactions for new bottom bar and close window behaviors
• I coded the AmbientWiki internal app, including a Chrome Extension, a Ruby on Rails backend and a HTML+CSS+JS frontend.

The Brief:

Modern smartphones are capable of replacing a myriad of single purpose hardware devices, including the remote control. To date, most smartphone remote apps presented a rather literal translation of a remote control interface onto a screen. At Peel, we instead believed that this was an opportunity to fundamentally rethink what a remote could be and to fully exploit the power of an internet connected smartphone. In particular, a smartphone remote could serve as a gateway into a shared social television experience.

The Problem:

Existing social television products were largely uncreative concepts and I didn’t believe they captured the true power of a compelling social experience. I was tasked with figuring out what social experiences peel should build to serve as a key differentiator in the remote control marketplace.

The Solution:

I designed several potential social experiences for Peel:

Peel Overlay: Peel Overlay is like a mobile Quora for television. It allows real time, question asking and polling of other users watching the same show and also integrates with data sources like imdb and Wikipedia to allow it to automatically answer questions like “What other shows have I seen this actor in before?”.

Peel Groups:

Different people will watch the same show for different purposes. Peel Groups allows people with a similar purpose to find each other, organize and engage in a shared experience around a show. Sports fans can use groups to bet on whether their team will score this field goal, jeopardy watchers can compete to see who can answer correctly the fastest, watchers of cheesy sci-fi can make fun of the same show together. Groups allows television watchers to convert from a solitary experience into a shared social experience.

Peel Recommends:

Peel Recommends provides an elegant and lightweight way of notifying friends about a show they should be watching right now. It optimizes the sharing process by remembering who you’re most likely to share with and what mode of sharing they prefer and reduces the friction of sharing a recommendation down to just 2 clicks.