Design, products, n' stuff

Interesting dark pattern. 

After 7 days in a 14 day free trial, Socedo locks your account with a persistent popup until you make a “secure payment.”

Hey, how’s it going buddy?

Can you do me a favor? Lemme ask you:

What’s the first 5 qualities that come to mind when think of an Asian male?

Cool, thanks a lot. No, this is not a trap. Go ahead.

I’d imagine it might be some of the usual stuff… i dunno… good at math, bad at writing, likes boba, not particularly social, great at school, close with family, etc.

Your mileage may vary, but it’s perfectly normal.

Your brain recalls associative memory you’ve acquired throughout your life from either direct experience, stories from friends, TV, books, etc, and you have a perception of how Asian males are like.

Are you asian?

If you are, you can skip this next step. Otherwise, recall your perception of Asian males again. Think of those qualities and hold it on your mind.

And….

Say it aloud.

“Asian men are…”

Wow. Holy shit, dude. Why are you being racist?! I’m offended!

Relax. I’m just kidding.

But it’s interesting though, how when we talk about generalizations we have with a “race” (that your brain naturally forms), it can easily be seen as “racist.”

But to our brain, race is just the same as any other category.

We categorize everything. Here’s a few examples:

Hondas are generally…

Apple pies are generally…

The suburbs are generally…

You get the picture.

We form categorizes and patterns for everything. When it involves people, it is called a ‘stereotype.’

Here’s a few examples:

Starbucks employees are generally…

Men who use dating sites are generally…

Computer engineers are generally…

I bet you made some associations pretty quickly. Within a split second of reading, probably.

Did you just pre-judge?! How dare you!

No, I’m just kidding again. That’s perfectly normal. That’s just how your brain works. It fills in gaps whether you have ‘adequate’ information or not.

Things get dicey when it’s applied to race though, huh.

Here’s a few examples:

Blacks are generally…

Asians are generally…

Hispanics are generally…

I don’t know about you, but man, I felt a little dirty when my brain ran through those stereotypes (fuckin’ brain).

Funny how that works.

Here’s what even funnier. It feels OK when it’s applied to the majority or the “privileged group”. Think about it:

White people generally…

Play lacrosse? Enjoy the Oscars? Eat brunch? Attend music festivals?

I didn’t feel so bad thinking that. Hell, I wrote it on the internet. I would NEVER do that for any other racial group. (very curious if this applies to all ‘privilleged’ groups, say… Han-chinese in China, or whatever the power caste is in India, etc.)

So, we form generalizations on everything.

We just deny that we do when it comes to race (at least publicly).

Anyway, I’m actually very curious at the underlying mental mechanics behind this.

Say, when you joke with a friend, and you poke fun at various aspects of him/her. Many things are open season, but their race is probably something that comes last, if at all.

Is there a way talk about race and mitigate the sensitivity?

I wonder how.

Say, for instance, if you perceive “Asian” men to be good at math, and you wanted to express that in a “non-offensive” way. How would you do that?

“I perceive men who’s ancestral origin is ‘East-Asia’ to be good at math.

I categorize them as ‘Asian’ primarily from visual cues, although I understand this to be imperfect because other racial groups may share visual similarities. My belief is based on my friendship with several men of East-Asian decent who appear to be good at math. It is also based on my what I know of the occupations of ‘Asian’ men from my wider social circle, and from various media reports, although I do not specifically remember which ones.

I consciously understand this generalization may not be true at all, but it is the information I have been exposed to thus far, and because my brain naturally extrapolates limited information and forms a heuristic, this is the short-hand I will likely use in a pinch, or if I have limited brain resources.

For instance, if someone pointed a gun to my head and asked, ‘Which racial group scored the highest in standardized math tests?!” I would probably answer East-Asian, even though I do not know the actual statistics. This is an extreme case, but this will also likely be my answer in other lower stress situations as well, for instance, if I haven’t had lunch yet.

So, with all the stipulations I just mentioned: Asians are good at math.

Again, I understand this may not be true, and if I am not under time or resource constraints, I will attempt to be conscious of this generalization, especially if I am in a situation where this may be a factor, I will attempt to think critically and/or gather sufficient information before I make any decisions.”

Well, I’m Asian… and I’m not offended at all!

Awesome — you solved it, buddy!

Well, on the other hand, that IS pretty long-winded that reads like a fuckin’ legal contract…

If you were to break that down into parts, it’d read like:

This is the generalization i have

This is why I think I have it

I understand that is not necessarily true

however, under stress this is the default answer I will likely adopt

if resources are available, i will do my best to be conscious of this and self-correct as needed

I actually wish we’d be more open about racial generalizations. Everyone has them, whether we like it or not. And I think it’s valuable to know your stereotypes, and understand how people perceive you. Because it absolutely affects their attitudes and actions. We like to think we are completely race-blind, but that’s very naive and just not how the brain works.

People WILL be offended though, huh. Shit. Maybe i should just keep it to myself. With the all the aforementioned stipulations, of course.

Anyway, one day… we’ll all be racially ambiguous.

Then we’ll stereotype based on appearance, or language, or occupation.

It’ll be impossible to be culturally ambiguous…

Then maybe one day, we’ll be able to make modifications to our brain that’ll give us the processing power to validate or invalidate our sub-conscious generalizations in real-time.

That’d be cool. And this problem would be solved!

Yay!

On May 27th, 2013, I made a prediction about what Starbucks would do with La Boulange: 

“Starbucks will slowly expand La Boulange stores nationwide mainly as a way to establish its reputation as a high quality bakery. However, they will launch no more than a handful of stores in major cities so La Boulange keeps their “indie cred.” Starbucks stores itself will continue to explicitly serve La Boulange food and piggyback on its reputation.”

Of course, Starbucks announced they were shutting down La Boulange earlier this week, so we now know I was wrong.

*ramblings here*

Oh yeah, Techstars!

Knowtify graduated from Techstars Cloud’s 3 month program in San Antonio this April. 

It’s pretty cool that 1 year after graduating from Tradecraft, a career accelerator... I get an opportunity to go through a startup accelerator. Been very lucky so far.

Cool stuff off the top of my head

Mentor madness

The teams

Founder stories

Dane wrote in-depth about our experience and touched on most of those points, so if you’re interested, you should read his post. 

The founder stores, for me, were particularly enlightening. 

Alumni of Techstars would come in and share their story in an informal and transparent environment. What was said in Founder Stories stays in Founder Stories, so I will keep my thoughts general. 

Success seemingly happens by accident. I don’t think anybody knew WTF they were doing at the time they were doing it. 

One startup that pivoted halfway through the program based on mentor feedback (and is now doing very well). A few others were complete accidents and their early traction surprised even the founders. Serial entrepreneurs still make mistakes.

Hmm... I guess what I’m trying to say is, take advice with a grain of salt. Even from highly regraded and successful individuals. Success gives people a bigger soapbox but there is no formula for it. Feedback is always given through everyone’s personal lens and they might be not right for you. This applies to Mentor Madness as well. Often times, it isn’t the advice that is valuable, but rather the observations of how mentors react to your pitch. Observations are unbiased.

Oh yes, the teams were awesome. It’s great to be surrounded by driven individuals of various backgrounds.

You know, I went to a pretty homogenous high school and as a result, most of my friends are 1st generation asians americans... with similar views, aspirations, direction... I have some thoughts on what that means, but that’s a story for another time. 

Anyway, it is refreshing to be among high-level entrepreneurs. We are all building new shit that doesn’t exist yet... we’re literally building the FUTURE. 36 months ago I was serving coffee at Starbucks, so this is pretty fucking cool.

*rambling here*

CHALLENGES

Right now we are focus on getting traction... any way we can. 

And often times that means the best thing for me to do at a particular moment might not be designing. It might be writing content, supporting customers, improving our templates, building custom templates, making changes to the website, and more recently... doing a little outbound. 

There are an infinite list of things I CAN be doing.

This means: 

I dunno if I’m doing the right thing

switching contexts is difficult

my “design skills” are not improving

On the upside, I’m never bored and get to be very autonomous. But let’s address the challenges first. 

Doing the right thing

If I had to do it all over again, I’d focus more on customer development (which I’m doing more of now).

For myself, this is my first tech job and because of that I don’t have a mental model of our users (Knowtify is a SaaS platform for software marketers). I leaned heavily on the co-founders’ expertise (they’ve been startup-ing forever) but I still should have “got out of the building” more. 

Secondly, I would categorize work into 2 buckets:

scalable (website, content, app design)

non-scalable (talking to people, manually onboarding, support/sales)

I did a lot of scalable work because that’s what I knew, what I was comfortable with. Also, because I was hired as a “designer.” 

Now I know we needed to do more non-scalable work, so we know where to focus on. THEN we do scalable work. Otherwise it’s a scattershot. There’s a lot of shit we did that in hindsight were a waste of time. We did a lot of optimization on the app which were built upon a model which we now know is wrong.

There’s a lot of things I could talk about in hindsight.

 But when it’s in the present with many factors... like our runway, development momentum, and our natural optimism... it’s easy to make mistakes. We overestimated our early positive signals and tried to solve too many use-cases; our product was too generalized -- I believe it still is! It can solve a lot of use-cases, but is not specialized for any particular. That is fine for a large team, but a 3 person team must stay focused. 

We do have customer who are getting a lot of value with product though, so now I’d like to see if there’s a market for those use-cases and get our MRR up to ramen revenue.

Once that happens we have time and are no longer at the mercy of investors. 

Anyway, in general: do unscalable work. figure out WTF pain people have, if theres a market for that. then scale it (execution is another question, haha).

Switching context

It takes a bit of “warm up” time when starting a different task and it’s quite mentally exhausting. 

For instance, when I’m deep in design working on a flow, it’s difficult to switch to fixing a bug in an email template. I have to open up a bunch of different tabs, find the code, set up the environment. Then switching back, I lose track of where I was in design. 

I believe it gets easier once you build up more skill in a particular vertical though. What I mean is, if you’ve been doing design for 5 years, you have “cognitively free” skills you can lean on because they come natural through practice. But for a new designer like me, I must *think*... and that is expensive.

But it is difficult for everyone. Dane (our CTO) loses focus if he has to switch to customer support as well. Then again, he is not skilled at customer support so it probably drains him... Now I’m curious if someone is good at 2 completely different skills (for instance... sales and coding) -- can they switch freely between them without penalty?

The solution? Get traction and hire other people to do the job. Until then, we deal with it. 

Design skills

I’ve never worked as part of a design team. 

So I don’t have any idea on.. uh, design processes, collaborative techniques, pair designing, or whatever.

At some point in my career, I’d like to work for a larger startup as part of a team, and learn some shit. 

Will I pass the design interview?

Look, I’m not stupid. We built an awesome product at Knowtify that’s very valuable to our customers. People pay for it! But my concern is I can’t distill my “skills” to a process -- this shit is stuck in my head. Hell, we DON’T have a process. And when there’s a dozen people on the team, communication becomes very important. People have to be on the same page. You NEED a process.

Luckily, there is another way to get on a team.

Get acquired. :)

*rambling here to clear thoughts*

So I’ve been working at Knowtify since last May. Wow, can’t believe it’s already been a year -- lots of ups and downs -- also, this mean my shares have vested! YES! Finally an official stakeholder! WOOHOO!

Alright, cool... celebration over.

I originally wanted to ramble about lessons I’ve learned, but I’m not sure if there’s anything valuable to talk about. I mean, we’re a pre-seed startup still looking for product market fit... what can I say? We’re still deep in the weeds looking for traction... if there were magic sauce I’d share it. I’m a sharing guy. 

I suppose I can ramble about how it’s like being the 1st designer and employee. I bet fresh graduates might be curious.

Turn it back a year. I was still at Tradecraft mulling over whether to join Knowtify or not. I asked many people for advice.

Here’s what’s interesting. My UX design instructors wanted me to join a bigger company first, somewhere where there’s a lead designer who can mentor me. Surely I will learn a lot, but it won’t be about design, and I need to refine my process first, they said. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs I asked basically told me, “fuck it. go for it -- what have you got to lose? you’ll figure it out on the job.” Nobody knows WTF they’re doing anyways. 

Good points on both sides and I weighed them equally. But we know what eventually happened - so what broke the stalemate? I talked to Himani, co-founder of Wedding Party. She told me she was not trained as a designer and only took over the role when their design contractors didn’t work out. Her first tool of choice? Photoshop or Illustrator? No... it was Microsoft Paint. She REALLY had no idea WTF she was doing... and she made it work.

Refine my process, you say? Nah - I GOT THIS.

Anyway, yeah... it’s been a year. 

And as it turns out, my design process mattered less than I thought.

At an early stage startup, assuming the founders are full-time and modestly funded (not a side project or awash in cash), you rarely have enough time to go through a proper design process. Many of the decisions will be gut decisions. And as much as trained designers hate it, it’s ok. 

Let me explain. 

I believe most founders fall into 3 buckets:

Scratching their own itch

Has strong domain expertise and senses opportunity

Launched a lean experiment with unexpected traction

For the first two buckets, gut decisions are absolutely OK. If you are the user or you understand users deeply, essentially you’ve already done the research. Personas, user stories, and whatever design methods already exists in your head... it is intuitive to you. Of course as the product progresses and problems become more granular a design process becomes increasing more important... but at the beginning building the foundation, I believe it’s OK to shoot from the hips. It is critical to save time when you have a limited runway.

Does that mean we don’t talk to customers? Quite the contrary. We talk to customers ALL THE TIME. Almost everyday, in fact. 

What we don’t do is clinical research. Yes, I will ask non-leading questions as best as I can, but my primary job is to either get prospects to convert to customers, or help customers become successful.

How about usability testing? 

I actually like usability tests but am struggling to figure out how to execute it properly when successfully using our platform requires a “real” user. Yes, I can compartmentalize and test certain parts of it for clarity... but, somehow... I feel like usability testing is optimizing. And before you’ve found product market fit, when a chunk of your app might just be an experiment, it does’t feel like the right time to optimize. 

But what if lack of traction is due to bad usability? 

Good point. In a SaaS app like ours, we bypass this by manually onboarding people so usability becomes a non-factor. This way we test the main hypothesis. If it works, THEN we look to improve usability.

Exciting news - 

My company Knowtify has pivoted from Engagement Marketing to Food Truck - all thanks to being in the Techstars program!

We couldn’t have done it with the help of #techstars - being in the program has changed the trajectory of our compamy. 

YogaBuddy is an easy way for yoga teachers to host classes anywhere and students to find them. In fact, I actually tried yoga for the first time ever through Kristen D's class a few weeks ago (It was in the park -- just like the splash screen!). It's a great way to blow off steam and relax my body during lunch.

As a psychology buff (and a fan of Kristen's class and YogaBuddy), I'm always trying to find better ways to integrate a new hobby into my routine and develop a habit.

What can help me solidify this habit?

So, when I first started boxing, I watched instructional videos outside class, and got critique from my coaches when I was in the gym -- this created a feedback loop that allowed me to nail down the fundamentals and make quick progress early. And getting better felt great; humans are hardwired with a reward system that releases dopamine whenever we make incremental progress. So boxing became fun... and a habit. 

When starting a new hobby, the beginner phase is fragile and requires the most hand-holding, because every day progress is stalled, it becomes increasingly more difficult to build that activity into a habit. 

As beginner at yoga, I'd love to see a few basic techniques in emails. I don't have the time to seek out instruction, but if they came in my inbox as a low effort way to learn, like an animated gif, I'd watch it. It could come as a "pose of the week" along with a few personal stats. 

The instructional email could look something like this:

While watching others perform an action, our mirror neurons fire and nudges us to imitate it. The cool thing is, the action gets performed in the brain regardless of whether you actually perform it physically. Now that yoga is on the mind, following up with a list of classes in the area is a great call-to-action. 

If that is successful, we can get more advanced....

We can segment people who hasn't attended class in a week or more and send them an email with a different pose. They should get an email with an "office friendly" pose  -- stuff that people could do in street or office attire that won't involving lying on the floor or crazy stretches. It should also come with a different personal message. 

The re-engagement email could look like this:

Knowing the people behind the app thought about me shows a great deal of empathy... and I'd probably feel warm and fuzzy. I'd also be more likely to practice a pose that fits my context. This is a great way to re-engage users without being too obvious about it. 

We could even go further and also experiment with a "Featured Instructor of the Week" email. An important aspect of yoga is being part of a community, and I think this is a great way to humanize and show the personality of instructors. For something like this, the mere exposure effect will also comes into play and subconsciously build comfort with users. 

The community building email could look like this:

Heck, if this is successful we can even do an email with featured students!

Again, a strong component of Yoga is community and it's great to know you're part of a something bigger. For the students who were featured, it's a cool story and they'd probably want to share it with their network, but for the longer term, they'd be tied to the consistency principle and more likely to be an ambassador for the brand. 

In closing

I think starting with a "pose of the week" email is a great idea.

As an intermediate level boxing hobbyist, I see advanced techniques as something to aspire to, but it's also refreshing to see the basics and brush up on them. This sort of email would appeal to all skill levels, and following up with local classes is a natural call-to-action -- I'd love to see something like this get done. 

These are just some of my thoughts on using digest emails to help users build new habits. Although I used YogaBuddy in this example, this can really be applied to anything. 

You can learn more about building great digest emails from Derek Skaletsky, our in-house email guru. 

I also want to thank Fiticle for giving me the idea of teaching proper form with animated gifs... because I totally ripped that idea offa them. 

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Keeping a team focused and organized is difficult. There's an abundance of productivity apps in the market. How do you know which one is right for you?

Here at Knowtify, we needed help staying organized with a few specific projects. And we tried many solutions, but for one reason for another, they didn't fit our workflow - I felt like I was doing more work to try to get work done. No good. 

Enter Todoist

We heard good things about Todoist and decide to give it a shot. It's been a few weeks... and we're still using it! The ability to quickly create, assign, and complete tasks is amazing. Visually, the interface is simple and well organized. And we can start discussions about tasks in real-time - it fits great into our workflow! We love their delightful finishing touches too - for instance, when all tasks are completed, you see a different message based on the time:

They also send a daily digest email to help users stay organized outside the app. 

Their daily digest email

The completed tasks and productivity chart is great for keeping me engaged and motivated! The Karma chart underneath is a bit confusing, because as a new user I'm not sure it means. But I think they're definitely on the right track here with these data-viz charts. 

What I'd also love to see is a snapshot of yesterday's activity, speaking of which....

By default, I'd receive a notification about every action taken, which in theory is good for staying in the loop, but in reality you get something like this:

Yup, that's a lot of emails. I started ignoring them after a while.

Sure, I could go into settings and manually change my notifications, but the power of defaults are strong. Although I haven't seen the numbers, I imagine many users going through the same experience will stick with it.

Jakob Nielsen writes,

"Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience..."

Having smarter defaults and bundling related actions into fewer emails would definitely help. 

I would also offload some of this into their daily digest. 

Their daily digest could look like this:

Seeing a summarized recap of yesterdays activity is a great way to stay motivated without being overwhelmed by a sudden barrage of emails, and knowing what tasks are due today keeps me focused. This is more concrete and actionable in comparison to their existing digest.

Actually, they could have 2 digests.

Two different digests

While the new daily digests will cover the nitty-gritty and help me plan my day, the weekly digests (their existing emails) are great for higher level overviews of my productivity. These digests provide complementary information and I see it working great in tandem. 

If users find daily recaps and actionable tasks as useful as I think they will, their productivity should shoot straight up, which will then be reflected on the awesome charts in their weekly emails - this is an awesome way to keep users engaged in a positive feedback loop! 

Anyway, we love Todoist and will continue to use it for future projects. A more actionable daily digest would totally help us, and we think it'd help other users too. We'd love to see it happen!

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https://goshippo.com/   These guys are from the current batch of 500Startups. I don't know about the service, but I love the landing page!

1. Their CTA isn't in the middle of the page and place subtly on the top right. My assumption is that because this is a new and unique service, they wanted to "defer" the sign-up and nudge people to read so they understand the service. The primary CTA here: SCROLL DOWN.

2. Their value prop is "simple." I love how the entire feel of the landing page reflects that, with sparse text and lots of white space. Notice how the descriptions are all consistently 1 headline followed by 2 lines of text. 

3. Also interesting is how they placed "How it works" (the button says learn more) as a secondary CTA all the way on the bottom of the page instead of just adding on and making a longer form landing page -- they didn't even place it on menu bar. Great way to reduce cognitive load, providing the information to those who are looking for it and getting people to sign up with the least amount of information.

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Humans escaped extinction with the thinnest of margins, and against all odds, staged a remarkable comeback to disrupt other, more established hominin populations. How we did this can shed some light into how some startups become successful.

2 million years ago, the hominins of Africa ran a few A/B tests to decide whether they should make a product pivot. Should they leave, or stay in Africa? One group, who saw leaving Africa as a winning test, hugged the Mediterranean coastline and traveled into East Asia, evolving into Homo Erectus. Another group left 600,000 years ago and traveled north into Europe, evolving into Neanderthals.

Both of these groups made the correct decision at the time, and produced a superior product that proliferated as the original group in Africa, following a different signal, saw their revenue model battered by harsh, dry (literally) market conditions. Their runway was almost up as they dwindled down to as little as 5,000 members.

But as the ancestral human population in Africa flirted with failure, they produced an incredible innovation in a desperate hackathon — a mutation in the FOXp2 gene that granted them robust language capabilities. It tested well with a select few, and quickly swept through the entire population.

Soon, all humans were carrying the improved FOXp2.

With this gift, humans worked better together, formed larger tribes, released bountiful product updates, and scaled blazingly fast outside of Africa, catching their meandering hominin counterparts off-guard, and finally securing unstoppable network effects through hockey-stick growth.

We completed our conquest of the world in less than 50,000 years (2 startup years).

Species that were more successful under the lens of the evolutionary process were ultimately usurped by an underdog with a radical innovation.

In evolution, sometimes accidents win, and these happen… well, accidentally. But unlike evolution, startups can be guided by a visionary leader who can foresee the power of accidental discoveries, and will take paths that do not appear to be immediately successful to surface them. 

In preparation for the Habit Summit next week, I should begin organizing my thoughts about psychology now.

So, I’m interested specifically in subconsciously influencing peoples’ behavior. I think research on human behavior has gotten to a point where we can predict behavior to a certain capacity, especially in the context of a digital product. I mean, we all derive from the same evolutionary ancestor and share the same universal fundamentals, such as morality, range of emotions, needs, fears, etc. We also share many of the same “bugs” in our brain, such as cognitive biases. And our brain is developed the same way, with the Neo-cortex covering the emotional and instinctive regions of the brain.

Brain areas

Instinctive: This area controls basic wants and needs that are critical to human survival and proliferation. It regulates hunger, thirst, sex. Also called the “reptilian” brain, it’s actually traceable to reptiles that predated mammals for millions of years. A human functioning solely on instinct is effectively a zombie. Most predictable.

Emotional: Research across several dozen cultures in the world reveals that humans recognize the same range of emotions. Although we cannot predict what emotion a specific stimuli will trigger at any particular moment, we can reasonably expect that one categories of stimuli will trigger similar emotions. For instance, tragedy triggers sadness, and success triggers happiness, etc. Because of this, if we can deeply understand a persona, it is possible to design to influence their emotion. Predictable in context.

Rational: This is the newest part of the brain. Known as the Neo-cortex, it hit its evolutionary growth spurt 2 million years ago when our homo habilis ancestors started consuming meat, giving its brains the nutrients to grow. This area of the brain does not actually receive stimuli, but rather, it interprets feedback given from the older brains. I believe the Neo-cortex is formed by mostly learned behavior, and maintains executive control over our action. It’s powerful. But, it uses “brain juice” for fuel.

This cause a few problems. First, if there’s a shortage, it gets lazy, relinquishing control to the emotional and instinctive brains. Secondly, it tries to conserve fuel by relying on shortcuts known as “heuristics.” Sadly, heuristics often make predictable mistakes known as “cognitive biases.”Executive control is unpredictable, but burns expensive fuel.

Knowing this, 

If we design with human fundamentals in mind, understand our users deeply, and can find use-cases where they may be fatigued, this is the opportune time to subconsciously influence their behavior, and where our designs will make the most impact. I can imagine how this can be used nefariously. And I am drawn to it. I want to understand this better.

It’s cool though. I’m a white-hat.

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It’s happening on Medium. 

Mostly ramblings, for now. My hope is it will get better, my writing becoming more fluid as the days progress. 

Googling for medical advice doesn't always bring up the most relevant results. 

WTF happens backstage at the stone pony???

That's why I'm thankful Healthtap exists! Over 1 million questions have already been answered by doctors. 

Let's check out their onboarding process:

I love the large images - they're well shot and instills a sense of trust. I think it'd be better if it wasn't a carousel. Studies show carousels annoy people, and convert worse. 

Embedded in the 3rd screen of the large carousel... is a small carousel. Double ugh. Carousels aren't all bad, but if you do it, they need to be done right.

I'm not quite sure whether the search bar or "sign up" is the stronger call to action, but I clicked the button since it wasn't moving. 

I love how signing up only requires e-mail and password. I've seen other medical sites hit you with a barrage of fields. 

I question the video placement though. If users are already intent on signing up, I'd let them progress through the flow instead of learning more. I also initially missed the "free" banner. I would instead change the CTA text to: "Sign up for free" (or a variation). 

Step 1. The progress indicator is great - I love how step 1 is already lit up. This makes people more likely to continue through the flow because of the endowed progress effect. 

The country selection is sorted alphabetically. It would be more intuitive to sort them by popularity because people don't think A-Z . 

Step 2. Let's say I want to learn more about breast cancer (my mom survived). 

Step 3. Here are doctors I can follow. As a new users, I'm not sure what doc score means. Are they doctors who answer a lot of questions, or the ones who are most relevant to me?

And since I was interested in learning about breast cancer, I'd find doctors with cancer expertise most relevant. Perhaps relevant specialities can be highlighted. 

Step 4. I'm prompted to find my doctor by entering his/her name. The auto-complete is a nice touch as I've had multiple doctors and can't recall their full name. 

And I'm in! First question on my feed: My period was due today, but it has not showed up. Am I pregnant?

If you were backstage at the stone pony, you might be.

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Hope this helps! I think I'll test their mobile app next!

Peek is an activities and tours booking site that just launched an awesome new iOS app last month. It's simple, beautiful, and well organized. 

As a fan of the app, I thought it was well designed, and fairly intuitive. 

But what do “normals” think?

So I recruited a few friends (who don’t work in tech) to test it. I encouraged them to think out loud and explore for a few minutes before giving them specific tasks to complete.

This is what I observed:

Booking options confused people

What's the difference? Should I book or should I call?

This "Call to Book" option is actually visible on the upper-right corner throughout the 4-step flow. Here, in the final step, users also had questions about the default blank e-mail state. 

“I think I would call if I needed more info. I’d rather book it online though.”

-Ronald Alunan

Users assumed Napa activities  would be listed under San Francisco

When tasked to book an activity in Napa (users are SF locals), most looked through the activities in San Francisco, then used search, before returning to dig through activities again. They did this futilely for several minutes. To complete the task, they actually had to first switch their city to Napa.

After seeing people visibly frustrated, I had to step to move the test along.

"I would have given up. Napa is usually listed under San Francisco in guide books." 

- Kevin Huang

Nobody discovered tapping their current city opens the location menu

Although not a huge issue as location is accessible under the main menu, it would have cued users and mitigated a lot of unnecessary frustration in the previous task.

People weren't sure what the "map view" icon does

When I inquired, most thought it was either a check-in or showed your current location. Interestingly, when I gave a task to look for activities in a particular neighborhood, users preferred to use search over city guides or map view (even after they discovered it was map view). 

Users weren't sure if Peek prices are discounted

This may prevent some from booking if they have seen a similar deal on a discount site. 

"So, is this like Groupon, or is it retail?" 

- Ronald Alunan

Event duration mistaken as travel time. 

Some thought it meant ETA to activity location.

Nobody read the City Guides

People saw the wall of text and tapped through within seconds. Admittedly, I tested locals, so I'm curious if people planning a trip elsewhere would read the guides. 

Nonetheless, they can still can be improved. The guides inform people what to do/see without clear direction on how to do it.

People loved the visuals, so I believe replacing it with full page photos of a few interesting scenes in the neighborhood, along with short descriptive captions would much more delightful.

Overall:

I didn’t spot any issues that would break the product (unless you were an SF local looking for stuff in Napa). Even as people were confused about the “call to book” option, they still progressed through the flow.

Redesigning the flow:

It sounds like Peek's users are either booking their activities last minute, or even making plans as they are on vacation, as VentureBeat reported:

Peek said that only one in five people plan their vacation in advance, and this app is geared toward last-minute bookers.

Because of this, I think the activities page can be improved.

Things that bother me on the current page:

The photos on top are not expandable — they’re gorgeous, and visuals communicate faster than words. And I think the date selectors are unnecessary as there are opportunities to pick dates directly before AND after this screen; the precious space above the fold can be better used.

Because last minute bookers and are probably distracted, I think the activity descriptions are too heavy, imposing unnecessary cognitive load.

For my re-design, I had 2 inspirations:

1.) I love Hotel Tonight’s layout here. Only the necessary information is displayed while the details are hidden kept to another page.

2.) In contrast, AirBnb has a long-form page for its layout, with more detailed information available in the main flow, and landscape photographs staggered throughout.

It’s interesting to see the difference between the two approaches. One consideration is the uniqueness of personal homes vs chain hotels. Chain hotels are pretty standard, so users already have a solid idea of what to expect, while the quality of personal homes can vary, and users need more info to make a buying decision.

Because Peek’s activities are varied and unique, I thought an Airbnb-like layout, but with scannable text, would be most successful.

More importantly, as the activities and events Peek sells are “experiences”, I wanted users to be able to imagine themselves doing it. After all, people buy emotionally, THEN verify rationally.

My re-design:

I think captions on photos draw users into a compelling story. They may take up visual real estate, but in this case, I think they are worth it. 

I also put a review blurb above the fold, replacing the activity details. It's a blurb, because users don't need to read an essay, they just need to know it's legit and fun. 

Here, I expect users to scan the page, flick through a few photos, then tap to expand.

Gorgeous photos (preferably portraits to fit peoples' default orientation) paired with descriptive captions are key. If people can imagine themselves in the experience through expanded photos, they're practically sold. The rest of the booking flow will be filtered through confirmation-biased eyes.

I took a cue from Airbnb and put another photo further down the page to emotionally re-engage users when they scroll.

Also, understanding that our users are distracted, and that mobile content is twice as difficult to understand, I truncated the details into more digestible bullet-points and hid the nitty-gritty behind a separate page, presenting only the minimum information required to make a buying decision.

Lastly, I placed the location at the end. 

That’s it! What do you think? Do my design decisions make sense?

If you enjoyed this post, please say hi on Twitter! I occasionally link interesting articles!

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I've always liked looking at Groupon Getaways when I have a case of wanderlust. 

The problem is, there are seemingly hundreds of Getaways, and no way to filter through them.

The search function isn't specific to Getaways (combs through the entire site), and only returns matching terms. As you see here, both deals are all-inclusive, but searching "all-inclusive" will only return the 2nd trip. 

After scrolling around a dozen pages without seeing the "perfect" deal, fatigue sets in, and I give up.

Solution:

I'd find filters and a map view very useful! 

Filter options

I might have included too many filters, so perhaps the "Deal type" can be eliminated, if deals outside North America are by default all-inclusive.

Also, the number of results is displayed on the bottom, so there's no chance of people applying the filter and seeing a very frustrating "no results" state. 

Map view

This is useful for obvious reasons. Groupon actually already has map view in another part of the iOS app, so I would assume implementing it with Getaways wouldn't be a huge hurdle. 

SUCCESS! I can finally find relevant travel deals!!!

THE END. 

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additional questions:

Expanding upon a female-only feature I suggested for dating app Swoon, I had another interesting idea today. 

From Mashable article:

"If a women is evaluating a guy, she cares a lot more about what her friends think than if a guy's evaluating a girl," said Greg Tseng, CEO of Tagged. "Sharing to either get some feedback or introduce someone as a possibility, that's a very female-focused feature."

With this, I think the Swoon team is developing a feature that allows females to send profiles to their friends and get their recommendations. That makes sense. 

This might work as well: Allow females to create a group with their friends and suggest matches for each other. 

It'll work like this:

When a female sees someone who is perfect for a friend, she hits the orange button to propose a match. 

Modal window pop-ups (as opposed to a new page, user stays in core flow), and she can propose a match with one of  her friends.

Once a match is proposed, others in the group can vote. If passed, the dude will be notified and be allowed to chat, if he chooses to. 

The friend in the group will not be notified of the proposed match or any details of the vote. She will only know she's been set up with someone when she receives a message. If the guy sees her profile and decides she's not his type, he simply does not make contact. This way, there is no explicit rejection and everything is gravy.

This feature may be good for a few reasons:

Increases number of times users open the app (gotta vote). This will build a habit. 

Increase amount of matches without exposing females to an overwhelming amount of unwanted messages. 

When nudged by friends, there is pressure to move forward and potentially result in more real-life meetings. 

Girls like to play matchmaker and gossip anyways, right? Perfect.

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