Onboarding customers to your new product is tricky. Onboarding customers to a new financial product is really tricky. For a mountain of security and regulatory reasons you’re required to collect and validate a towering number of data points. Of course, for each additional data point that we had to
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Back in August 1972, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced the late Massimo Vignelli’s new map of the subway system. New Yorkers were furious. Complaints came flooding in: “Stations seemed to be in the wrong places. The water surrounding the city was coloured beige, not blue. As for
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Admittedly it’s taken us longer than it should have, but here’s the story behind Fruitful and how we raised over £500,000 of venture funding, built and shipped a marketplace that attracted £1.8million of lending, captured the minds of recognised experts in the field as well as
Read more“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” — Isaac Asimov When you’re building a company, your ability to make good assumptions can be the difference between skyrocketing or skydiving. A few bad calls in
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It should come as no surprise: The best way to make a point, teach something or sell a product is to tell stories. Here’s one of my favourite storytellers: When I start preparing for a talk, I often struggle to think of stories that help explain the ‘thing’ I
Read moreManaged to find some time to flick through my music and produce a new mix. Tinged with autumn leaves, this mix brings together some of my favourite melodic house tracks featuring the likes of Guy J, Vincenzo, Radiohead and the very talented Dosem. I’ve made it available for download
Read moreYesterday I was in the market for some plughole unblocker. We’ve moved places recently and I forgot to put this useful little thing in our shower. So I head into Tesco and — eventually — I find the section for bleaches and plughole unblockers. I know that Mr. Muscle is a
Read moreLast month I spent some time updating my portfolio. As a product / user experience / web designer, it can be quite tricky to present your work to others. The rock star visual designers of this world can get away with presenting screenshots of their stunning visual work — job done, money due.
Read moreKeeps the doctor away. Just found this blog full of wonderful icons. This was one of my favourites.
Read moreI’ve been planning a rebuild of my blog for a while now. If I’ve learned one thing from product development, it’s know what problem you’re trying to solve. So I sat down and actually thought about my goal: To write more frequently. I wanted to worry
Read moreIt’s Sunday, late morning, and I’m right in the middle of cleaning the bathroom. In the other room I hear a frustrated girlfriend struggling to find accommodation on - lets say - website X, for our trip to the Amalfi Coast. Complaints flying left, right and centre, vented
Read moreLast Tuesday I popped in to DoES Liverpool to see Matthew Hughes give a talk on how to pitch your product to the press. He’s a tech journalist at MakeUseOf — so he had some lessons to share from the other side of the table. In no real order: Be
Read moreIt’s nearly been a year since I joined Fruitful - a fintech startup that’s working to rethink how savers save and how borrowers borrow. Since then we’ve been through a significant product redesign, a complete branding overhaul, a successful soft-launch and a customer response that has more
Read moreLast month Sage approached me asking if I could write an article on marketing for their small business community. To narrow the context a bit, I concentrated on marketing websites. The outcome of which I'm really pleased with. The short post offers an insight into my past 5 years of
Read moreFirstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a
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