Traits of entrepreneurs

●​ Resilience
●​ Recognizing that what you’re doing are experiments and it’s ok to fail as long as you
know. And better to fail quickly
●​ Get outside of your room and start talking to people (to figure out what people want)
○​ Optimizely: we spent a lot of time building things that people didn’t care about
because we didn’t know what they wanted
○​ Learn how to probe and understand the customers you’re trying to serve

Ideas Brainstorm
●​ Problem: people that try going vegan don’t stick with it, either because they feel they are
nutritionally deficient or they think it’s too hard
○​ Possible solution: App that guides you through a vegan 22 challenge and
introduces you to vegan substitutes for things you like to eat
○​ But also: once clean meat becomes commercially available, we might not need to
ask people to make sacrifices in their lifestyle
●​ Problem:
●​ Problem: People spend too much time cooking/prepping for meals but still want
affordable home-cooked food (+ since the cost of labor is going up, restaurants have
become more expensive)
○​ Possible Solution: for indian food, sell freezable containers of mixes of minced
onions, garlic, cumin, etc.
●​ Clean meat: scaling up

Hooked
●​ Products often need users to come back to them on their own, using a trigger
●​ Trigger, Action, Reward (variable reward), Investment (doing something that will start
another trigger in the future, or stores something of value in the product)
●​ Vitamins vs. Painkillers. Social media apps started out as vitamins (they don’t have a
market, users can’t say that they need it)
○​ VC’s for the most part like to invest in painkillers
○​ Reason why startups run out of money is they’re fighting the apathy of the market
○​ If you solve something really important to someone (a painkiller or lifesaver),
they’re going to talk about it
○​ Vitamins are seen more as “nice to have”. You have to figure out how to make
the product “sticky” so that users keep coming back

Evaluating Ideas

Is your idea:
●​ Vitamin or Painkiller?
●​ Easy to monetize?
●​ Simple (can you explain it in a couple sentences?)
 ●​ Personally relevant (you care about it)
Do you have:
●​ Follow-through (your ability to organize a small or large team to execute)
●​ A big market
○​ Growing vs. mature market
■​ In a mature market, you’re just fighting for a slice for a pre-existing pie
●​ Secret Sauce

User Research
●​ Tries to answer the following 3 questions:
○​ What do people need?
○​ What do people want?
○​ Can they use the product?
●​ To start, have a list of the questions you are trying to answer
○​ Critical questions will drive the research
■​ A critical question stops your progress if you don’t have an answer to it
■​ “Is there a better way to make my city’s train system more efficient for
morning commuters?”
●​ Unpacking the critical question: What has the city done in the
past? What is the city’s long term plan? Is the city open to outside
help to improve their train system?
●​ For morning commuters - these are your customers. How can we
improve their commute so that they can focus on other aspects of
their daily lives?
○​ Research strategies
■​ Definition type critical question (“What does ‘better’ mean for morning
commuters)?
●​ Idea and market validation
○​ Surveys and interviews
○​ Competitive research
○​ Trends research
■​ Keyword Evaluation (Google AdWords) What are
people searching for? What do you notice after
filtering the high volume keywords?
■​ Content Competition (Google Search) What type
of content appears in your searches? (articles or
companies) Is this consistent for other keyword
searches related to your idea?
■​ Geographic Validation (Google Trends) Where do
people live who are searching for related
keywords? What barriers might exist to deliver the
product or service?
 ■​ Social Media Validation (Twitter, Facebook,
Pinterest) What volume of people use keywords
related to your idea? How are users talking about
related ideas? Handy for communicating your idea
and for marketing materials later.
■​ Detective question
●​ Need to find key city information and key people
○​ Read the city’s regulations and their transportation plans
○​ Read town hall minutes
○​ Read news articles that talk about public transportation
improvement
○​ From these, find managers and talk to them
○​ Bias
■​ Friends and family bias: talk to friends of friends and ask random people
●​ Ultimately you’ll still need to release it into the world to get real feedback
●​ Without a prototype
○​ Email
■​ Open rates, click through rates, and task completion rates for recipients
all provide insight into whether your idea has value.
■​ Purchase advertisements that target searches relevant to your business.
You can know what language customers are using to find solutions
related to your business, and you can measure click through rate to
determine customer interest in the copy of the ad.
○​ Landing Pages
■​ You can build a landing page to complement your advertising. The
landing page can be your proof of concept and allow you to test click
through rates on buttons such as “buy now”, “register” or “share”. The
clicks serve as further validation of the idea.
○​ Buttons
■​ Add buttons for specific features or services that your business will
provide. Even if the buttons aren’t functional, you can measure interest
and collect emails or other demographics on users. If a design element
(such as a button) doesn't actually work on your website, be sure to
indicate that to users and explain to users why it isn’t working.
●​ Further reading
○​ [Link]
lity-of-any-product-idea

Value Proposition
●​ Value propositions serve to inform a customer what problem they are addressing and
how the product is a solution to that problem. It is quite common for value propositions to
specifically define a pain point present in the customer’s life. Consider an example value
proposition for the Super Duper Shopping App:
 ●​ Grocery shopping is often a time consuming and frustrating chore. With the Super Duper
Shopping App on your phone you can find a store near you, pick out your groceries, and
have them ready for pickup or delivery to your door.
●​ [Link]
●​ [Link]
lue-proposition/
●​ [Link]
dwords/

User Experience Design

●​ the study of users and their particular contexts in order to design tools so that users can
perform tasks with the tools to achieve their goals.
●​ Break down into tasks that each user has to go through and what that interaction looks
like. Sketch it out in pencil or whiteboard. Then ask yourself: if the user accomplishes all
these tasks, have they accomplished their goal?
●​ The closer you can get to a real experience for a user, the better feedback you’ll get
●​ Types of design
○​ Interaction design (task-focused)
○​ Visual design (everything including color, layout, etc.)
○​ Animation design (getting the user to feel the system is responding to them)
●​ Further reading
○​ Material Design at Google

Accessibility - consider these things up front

●​ Make it so that your app can be used by someone with one hand
●​ Make it usable by users who are color-blind
●​ Google Accessibility Guidelines
●​ Consider screen readers - when they read the screen, the labels may be missing some
context e.g. “Next” -> “Next 50 results”
●​ Color contrast ratio standard needs to be met in order to meet certain standards

Personas
●​ Sketch, name
●​ Demographic info, behaviors
●​ Pain points, needs
●​ Solutions

UX Design Course
UI vs UX
●​ UI is just what you see (has to do with the front-end code). Both the front-end and
back-end code come together to form the UX

Login flow: use a social identity provider (login as Google/Facebook) to do this automatically
Shopping: 70% of users abandon shopping carts across the web
●​ Use google checkout or PayPal checkout

Avoid local optimization; don’t think too detailed at first

●​ Low res wireframing - allows you to think about the UX first without getting bogged into
details of the UI

Preference Bias: not really designing for a user; you’re designing based on your own personal
preferences

Persona = proxy for actual group of users

●​ Personas can be made from research, ethnographers, interviews, etc.
●​ Personas inherit from mobile app persona:
○​ Finite battery and data
■​ Make sure your app works in offline mode and syncs data intelligently so
it’s not draining the battery
○​ Divided attention
■​ One way to respect this constraint is to allow users to take actions from a
notification without having to enter the app
○​ Small screen size
■​ Combination
●​ On a larger device, you could combine two separate screens and
show both of them next to each other on the larger screen e.g. the
list and detail view
■​ Reflow
●​ Taking the major parts of your application and re-arranging them
on a larger or smaller screen e.g. horizontally stacked on a phone;
vertically stacked on larger device
■​ Margin point​
●​ When a screen is large, add margins so that the screen doesn’t
look unbalanced
○​ Handedness
■​ Make buttons in the center of the screen and big enough to tap. This way
if you have a single hand it’s easy to reach the buttons. The corners of the
screen are hard to touch.
○​ Sketchy network
Use case = how, when, and where your user persona would use the product

Home Page
●​ It should be clear: what this is, and what can I do here?
●​ Resources
 ○​ [Link]
[Link]

Onboarding
●​ Resources
○​ [Link]
3

Notifications
●​ Control - give user control over notifications
●​ Avoid low urgency + low importance notifications - that makes your app seem spammy
●​ Frequency - timed to build a habit, + Variable Reward
○​ Couple the notification with the time and place where the user is most likely to
need the solution

User Feedback
●​ Surveys
●​ Social Media
●​ Ratings
●​ Customer Support is everyone’s job

UX Resources
●​ [Link]
60923

Design Sprint
●​ Initial step: hear from many perspectives
○​ PM, Marketing, Sales, Strategy: “What is profitable?”
○​ User experience: “What is desirable?”
○​ Engineering: “What is feasible?”
●​ 5 phases usually
●​ Open up possibilities and then narrow down the choices

Terms

copy
Refers to written material included in your product (in contrast to photographs or other elements
of layout).

headline
Words that communicate what the company or product does; different headlines will work for
different products and user goals; choose wisely.
resource: The Ultimate Home Page Headline

tagline
Taglines contain phrases that explain the key benefits and purpose of your product. Taglines are
critical because people scan websites, especially first time visitors who are just beginning to
understand your product.
resource: Website Taglines
resource: Creating a Memorable Headline/Tagline: 20 Great Examples

value proposition
A promise of value to be delivered and acknowledged. A belief from the customer that value will
be delivered and experienced. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, or parts
thereof, or customer accounts, or products or services.

below the fold

The content area of a screen that is not visible without scrolling; many website home pages
contain additional content "below the fold".

call to action (CTA)

An instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative
verb such as "call now", "sign up", "buy now", or "visit a store today"; these often take the form
of buttons.