You need a sweet after taste.
Thats it, i am done.
But wait this is not twitter here man. give us some more you say.
Let me tell you a story about a store named Five Senses Coffee, they got some loud noises from a displeased customer over the twitter space lately, but they have opted the game.
My Guatemalan coffee beans stock dwindled and I needed a fresh batch. so i ordered the beans somewhere pre noon on a thursday and went along with my day.
The next morning to my surprise a courier with the bag buzzed the door, it was 8:15 am.
This surprise was so welcomed and left a great after taste over the purchase.
This is a great lesson to every business and especially a startup, if you can leap over the competition and give your customers some nice after taste when they expect the normal business routine do it! you will get much more customers at this point.
The competition of the coffee bean market is huge but making me rave about it without paying me is what you want.
To a web startup you need a product that will make your clients think “How nice and easy was that?” make them go the extra mile and rave about you.
They need to think what a great service.
I have just seen how its not done. when i was in the market for an online backup i was testing Carbonite to see how good are they and also used iDrive.
When i had issues with the speed with Carbonite i turned to the Customer support with a question as of why it is happening. to my surprise the tech response was so out of focus and blaming, it gave me a feeling of “why the hell did i bother?” and “better pack your bags and go!”,
But Carbonite CEO has his email in contact us page so i decided to give it a go and sent him an email with the trail of the email, surprise surprise, i got a better rep.
But all they did was to give me extra time to try.
Man that bitter taste is still lingering. will i recommend Carbonite?
No.
So what can we do when the product sucks and we have users who are complaining? how do we make them feel good and leave with sweet after taste?
This is your golden question, just don’t ignore these users and don’t over compensate them, let them feel the sweet after taste of a good deal.

Going to the Pixies show the other day made me ponder over what makes a good band or breaks a band like the warm-up show The Art who were on the verge of leaving the stage after the second song due to remarks from the crowd.

The line of thought was made during the boring show of The Art as it was a really interesting view, been on stage many times you could see the delicate relationships and feelings in the band. they are all good friends and have been too close for some time. The lead singer was mimicking the style of Jim Morrison, and the guitarist was kind of out of focus, they had a girl basist who was sure she was a top model and the drummer was hardly hitting the drums the first half of the show. all of this got my brain waves flowing having nothing better to do.

I will skipped the initial stages bands are formed in favor for the later success sections, these echoed much clearer in my mind as startup related.
usually when a band is starting to become known it has some line of thought that is quite common, and there are some thought processes that sound and look similar to the ones in startup.

1. Material is the world and the guitar solo needs to be AWOSOME!
2. Every rehearsal you tweak things and optimize but you are likely unaware of how lacking of energy your drummer is in the first half of the show.
3. Every exposure you get on a radio show (even the 2 am dubbo local one) makes you feel like a star.
4. You are all friends so its hard to let go of the bass player because he cant hold the bass properly
5. You think that you are about to change the world
6. You believe your music is unique and your performance is too
7. As a spectator you can generally say if you like or dislike the band but it does not carry to all spectators

Material is the world and the guitar solo needs to be AWOSOME!

If the band has a very good material with a great proposition the band performance is not a variable you want to measure as this does not contribute to the bands success, you can ask Sid Vicious.
On the other hand if they offer the same material with similar content they must perform great if not awesome to succeed in penetrating the mass.
This might be in relevancy to the startup and its environment, if the idea is really unique and has something that no other provider offers or is capable of mimicking quickly you dont need to have the best application, ask Facebook/imvu and others.
On the other hand, try to create a unique email client or web browser and you must perform like no other. no one will notice you with a good vibe if you dont.

Every rehearsal you change some thing and optimize but you are not likely aware of how lacking of energy your drummer is in the first half of the show.

band members have their own role in the same way we have in a startup, and we need to be able to monitor the performance in the day to day rehearsals and see if it matches our expectations, there are more bass players and drummers out there then you think, if you think your band can attract a great bass player get your childhood friend either a better matching role or out. look at Genesis, Phil Collins was a great drummer but giving him the microphone was the best decision they ever made.

Every exposure you get on a radio show (even the 2 am dubbo local one) makes you feel like a star

You are probably a star and this is nice but take the energy and keep ticking, create produce and make more. Be prepared to talk at any occasion and make your story/pitch look like you are talking about it the first time. Band in the beginning are just getting exposed and before you hit national people dont know you and you are fresh to them, be fresh not sharpened. Same go to startup leading, its nice to appear in media and it does give an ego boost, use the boost to move forward not sink to a content state.

You are all friends so its hard to let go of the bass player because he cant hold the bass properly.

In both cases it is hard to let go of a friend but you need to take the band/startup forward. give a man one second chance and then let him go, some people will perform better and if you are looking at a performance issue you may be surprised. if the person is not even listening to you when you ask him to use a fret to pick the bass, no second chance just tell him that you love him but he is not what the band needs, fighting is inevitable but you will save yourself trouble later.

In the situation of a startup you probably have formed some sort of an agreement that makes the release hard but you have to do that.

You think that you are about to change the world

Well you might, but that is not going to happen in the first album, every successful band had the dark b-sides you hear and laugh at. Look for System Of A Down 2 versions of the song Sugar, that eventually brought them in to the big league, The first version is something to laugh at no doubts about it.

So doed your startup venture,  you will always have the first alfa release that every one will laugh at when the product is out. it was a buggy product that has no relevancy to the current one.

You believe your music is unique and your performance is too

You are not unique and your performance draws on some cultural things you grew on, but you been able to pull it off is unique! so be proud and go perform. same goes to startup if you have an idea that you think is unique it is most likely not unique and many other people have thought about it, but you are making it happen! so be proud and go perform.

As a spectator you can generally say if you like or dislike the band but it does not carry to all spectators

You need a mentor, a great mentor, this is invaluable and can change your startups success rate. bands and artists fight to be mentored by the bigger fish in the pond and the ones that do have access to many things that give them the unfair advantage like label managers and recording studios, you need an uneven play field so choose your mentor right.
The accessibility to a mentor will come after you have covered some ground and was exposed to the market, remember that you need to appeal to the mentor.
A Good crowd member is needed to adjust the show and fine tune the band (could be the band leader) so get a critique you can trust, some one that is capable of understanding the business and giving you useful critique, this could be your mentor but i think it should be some one from the industry with less prestige to carry show can be more “real” with you, in the bands life it is usually some other band member who knows the intrigues of the performance and is familiar with the bands material from rehearsals, usually another band member that shared a rehearsal studio or performed in the same concerts. Just make sure the guy focuses on the band performance and not the pretty lady next to him.

While reading About Faces 3 by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin i began reflecting the information over the startup community.
The processes you get exposed to in the book, though aimed to the Interaction Designer / Information Architect, seem to be very useful to any product design process and seem to be very focusing when it comes to designing products from the ground up, as it is usually done with a startup.
Looking around the web for a one pager / cheat sheet of the books essence i drew a blank. there is a big void when it comes to interaction design.
So i will do my best to get this books essence in the shortest form i can to give the startup community a great guide for product design that requires less than the 600 pages in the book.
This will not replace reading the book if you want to get to the full depth of the interaction design, but it will be handy when you are limited on time and funds and want to get your product focused.
The book bundles together a few processes to create an aspiring for completeness process for creating a product.
When we think of a business about to create a product we let our thought roam in the realms of features/activities and functionality and in the look and feel of the product thinking about our users.
The reality is that we are not doing this in a methodological way and tend to try our luck more then fine tune the product before launch.
Most of us still approach the design of interfaces by asking, “What are the tasks?”.
The books takes us through the following processes

1. Goal-Directed Design
2. Implementation Models and Mental Models
3. Understanding Users
4. Modelling Users
5. Scenarios and Requirements
6. Framework and Refinement

I will try now to skim off the top of each of these and make some sense at the end.
Lets go

Goal-Directed Design
The first principle here is the Goals are not tasks, they are the end goals that the tasks lead to, the motivation for getting tasks done.
The main goal of a user is not to look stupid, keep that as one of the basic principles when you think of all the interaction of the user while using the system.
Most it products tend to:

• Make users feel stupid
• Cause users to make big mistakes
• Slow users down hampering performance
• Prevent fun and/or bore users

but how do we know what are the users goals?
User goals are not like tasks they change slowly, tasks and activities change often and relevant to context.
The way to find what are the goals are to do qualitative research understanding Why a user is performing the activity.

Goals will help later in the process to better understand the users as we model them into personas.
Implementation Model vs. Mental Model, You know how we always cry over software UI that it was “Developed by Developers”? a software like that was developed using the implementation model, thinking over the features from the developers perspective.
Mental model on the other hand is how a user perceive the experience, taking the car acceleration pedal for instance. the user needs to know nothing about the ignition or air intake to understand that pressing harder against the pedal will bring the car to higher speed, this is the mental model of the pedal.
Your users are one of these 3 groups

1. Beginners
2. Intermediate
3. Advanced

The biggest group out of the three is group 2, the intermediates, most beginners turn intermediate quickly and most of them stay like that and never get to the expert group they stay perpetual intermediates.
One thing to remember here is that users don’t use the product in a frequent thus forget how some of the knowledge they accumulated.
Software UI needs to cater to the biggest group while not harming the other group’s usability.
I recommend reading this section in the book (pages 42-48) as it is one of the toughest points you will have to deal with while designing the product.

Now the book goes into understanding the users where qualitative research is to be done to establish Personas and Goals.
The research that is described in the section requires the following:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
• User and customer interviews
• User observation/ethnographic field studies
• Literature review
• Product/prototype and competitive audits

When trying to create the initial product in a startup we do not have the means to facilitate such a research and thus will need to create some alternative method in order to acheive partial Personas and Goals.
Some simple solutions will be to look at the competition and find out who of our friends/family/coworkers is using it, observer them and interview them.
If there are no competitors in the space we might be able to get some information from the same people while asking them to imagine the software.

When asking questions about a desired product use the guidance “Imaging that the software is magic” this will get you some ineresting responses.

If we have non of these we can try imagining what are users will be and give them qualities, we can use persona cards like organizational zoo to focus you on the type of persona’s and their associated behavioral attributes.

When approaching the personas definition (hypothesis) ask the following questions

• What different sorts of people might use this product?
• How might their needs and behaviors vary?
• What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be explored?

When thinking about a persona we need to cover all aspects of the product usage.
Its nice when entering content is smooth and easy to a first grader but when the IT guy needs to create an export of that content and make it available to in the new upgrdaded environment we need to think of him too. He is a persona using the product.
In order to differentiate the Content Editor from an IT administrator we need to specify roles in the system usage. a role is constructed from a given number of tasks needed to be completed successfully with the system

Up to now we have a very flat persona with a Role and some character specifications but we need the persona to get some depth,
The depth of the usage is what we are more interested in as oppose to the theological thought that user might have, though they can indicate user behaviour.

The 3 measurement vectors are Frequency, Desire and Motivation.
Frequency represents the users frequency in usage of the feature.
Desire represent the will to do tha action.
Motivation is the reason behind the action, this could potentially be nowhere near the actions result.

So now you know more about the persona and its goals for some of the usage of the system.

From here the book will go into the methods of research which is valuble in the standard company improving product scanario, but has less relation to a startup before the first alfa, you can purchase the book by then with some funding on the table.

image curtesy of Design and Technology student

Software vendors to the enterprise spectrum of companies seem huge and daunting, and they are, unfortunately for them it means they are too big to wish to notice smaller tasks or out of the core product expansions.
The way product vendors work is in high scale mode filtering the noise to get the important stuff, and they are correct about working this way, there are too many people involved in projects to be able to notice every single complaint and request.
But this filtering also opens the market to the smaller players,
Imaging a little kid eating a cracker, the main bites go in but there are lots of crums left over. our Enterprise software vendor is probably more efficiant but there are still opportunities.
The opportunities can be vast and have many shapes and forms but they are there.
Some of the opportunities i am expose to are in the partnership and expertise areas.

1. Complete solutions.
2. Supplement software.
3. Bridging Gaps between solutions.
4. Supplementary products and solutions.

These have been the gaps always you are probably saying.
You are right, but these days the vendors had to cut most of their people to keep afloat at the recession.
Usually the first to go are the people interacting with clients since no clients paid their salary they became a liability.
The clients had their own issues and have released their people, thus in greater need for solutions or services.
The outcome from these actions is an increase in these gaps and many opportunities are not addressed due to the understaffing .

But you don’t want to be another “Partner” or a service provider do you?
If you do then go and do that and stop wasting your time, you need to make the most of now since partners always stuff up and get the boot.
If you don, you need to identify the opportunity in creating supplementary products or services.
There are 4 scenarios to these gaps.

1. The vendor is missing completely the market needs and is there only because he was there or he is the safest bet (no one got fires for buying IBM).
2. The vendors product is ok but there are a lot of features and twaking to do to get it working.
3. The vendor product is great but there are some features and integration points missing.
4. The vendor product is perfect. there is side business to be made.

The Vendor is missing the market needs completely, this one is simple, make a product that is better in the market vertical you found the problem in and make it hard for other partners to penetrate.
The vendors product is OK, look at how you can create installation processes, visual configuration aids, addons and plugins that make the product complete, try to start within a vertical.
The vendors product is great or perfect leaves you less to deal with the product and more to enhance it, create enhancements or complimentary products like tracking and recommendations.

There are a few more unexplored solutions like hosting of major Enterprise products and reselling them as a hosted service, WCM market will be a good starting point.

In my mind there are so many points where you can become a player in the Enterprise market and be successful because you are small and very hungry.
The barriers of entry have been dropped due to the wish to lower the cost of external resources and current project, this is the best time to act.