Product on Afroleft

Working on Fetch

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 10:39:13 +0000

I wrote a short intro piece for our Software Engineering blog at Ideal Modular Homes.

We’re building real-time, high-dependency software that assists with the design, manufacture and installation of our sustainable modular homes.

We’ll be sharing more about of technology choices, lessons learned and our process in upcoming posts.

Patchwork: Lessons Earned

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 20:43:00 +0000

A few months back I moved on from Patchwork—a health-tech startup that’s bringing flexible working to healthcare.

When I joined as its product lead, we were at 1 NHS Trust. Just shy of 2 years later and the company is fast approaching 20—double digit marketshare.

Fetch Logo

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 12:34:34 +0000

After a few years away from the graphics editor, I dusted off my old copy of Sketch to make a logo for a thing.

Chuffed I have an excuse to use a doggo in a logo.

Need @andy88jones to help me with kerning. He has a friend called Kern.

Here is the shot on Dribbble.

Onwards

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 18:10:18 +0000

It was pissing down with rain—in ways only London can—and I show up at the office for the first time. Before I can even take my coat off it’s:

“We have a half-baked Rota feature, it’s a bit rough around the edges, shall we go ahead and ship it?”

That was my first 30 seconds running product at Patchwork (then LocumTap). Later that day I was reviewing an investment pitch deck with ceo/cofounder Anas.

Stakeholders. What are we optimising for?

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 10:39:27 +0000

One of the things I’m piss poor at is stakeholder engagement—enabling everyone see tradeoffs the way I can. Sadly the problem exacerbates as your company scales.

Helpful to see Chris Thewell speaking at the UX Crunch last night.

On the dial ask

What are we optimising for?

Unpack the tradeoffs.
Involve the right people.
Optimise for the right thing.
Make your informed decision.

Look around: Costs are everywhere

Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to rest on the assumption that costs are only monetary. In product design, this misses an important point — costs are everywhere:

Waiting for a webpage to load is a cost.
Typing in your card details is a cost.
Figuring out whether to trust a company you’ve never heard of before is a cost.
Learning how a product works is a cost.
Signing-up is a cost.
Waiting to find something out (yes, uncertainty) is a cost.
Having to print out, sign and post a form is a cost.
Handing over your personal information is a cost.

Identifying costs [and] what they might equate to for your users is an insightful way to inform how you think about the products you make.

We used Intercom to add £100,000s of marketplace investments at Fruitful—here’s how

Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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 collect = additional cost to the customer = increased risk that they might drop-off and watch videos of otters eating lettuce instead.

Fruitful’s onboarding steps

In Fruitful 1.0 (more about the pivot here ) these were the steps for onboarding new users:

This is how you package consumer goods

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 10:52:45 +0000

Yesterday 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 popular brand for this product, so I look for the logo.

Bingo. I find the Mr Muscle.

Just as I’m about to pick up a bottle, I notice the bottle next to it. It’s called Buster — a brand I’ve never heard of.

Questions to ask your design work

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 12:47:33 +0000

Last 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.

But if your day-to-day consists of making user flows, interaction designs, napkin wireframes, trade-offs, A/B tests, and minimum viable products, then you — like me — need to do a bit more groundwork to do the show and tell properly.

How to Pitch Your Product to the Press

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 08:55:00 +0000

Last 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 as concise as possible - journos receive mountains of product pitches each week.
Sounds stupid but: There’s a difference between product pitches and press releases. The former is an anchor to entice the journo to sign-up for your product, check it out and write a review.
If you have notable investors > name drop them. This adds validation.
You need to entice the journo - lead with the problems you’re solving.
Personalisation is important. Do your research on the journo. What have they written in the past that might make them want to write about your product?
Gifts are cool, but not bribes $$$. UPDATE from Matthew: “Should probably clarify I meant gifts with no monetary value though, and after an article has been published. ;)”
Obvz grammar is super important.
Journos like phone numbers for follow up - so share yours.
Don’t talk about yourself (founders) - especially if it’s a product pitch.

Bookmarks:

press.farm find journalists to write about your product.
blonde20.com good PR agency. Do retainers from around £4,000 a month — much more competitive that London agencies we’ve spoken to.
uber.com/presskit Uber’s press kit is a good example.

You produce results: Learn from these

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:54:00 +0000

It’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 than overwhelmed us. With customers investing with Fruitful from all over the globe, it’s clear that people are in search of an ‘alternative’ that offers fair interest rates, secured lending and the flexibility that we should expect from a modern investment product.

Product Design Process

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 08:05:00 +0000

When we have a new product idea (and are lucky enough to have the skills and tools to execute on it), it’s often more than tempting to jump in with two feet and start building the thing. Before we know it, we’re pitching the hows before whys and problem solving becomes a battlefield of miscommunication. As a result, our product concept becomes more complex and less focused.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been investing a lot of time and energy into a product design process that we’ll be using for an upcoming project.

The Future of Interaction Design

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:39:00 +0000

Check out this video that sheds some light on what we can expect from the future of interaction design.

Lots of discussion around the ‘internet of things’ and how user experiences will become less intrusive and more natural as this area matures.

I guess this dovetails with my analogy that we’re moving further and further away from abstract computer interfaces. To piggyback on Luke Wroblewski’s paradigm, we can see where we’re heading by acknowledging the big interface developments:

Product Design: Extending the Metaphors

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Around 2 years ago this August, Mikey, Sean and I began conceptualising our ideas for outheard.tv.

Our idea was quite simple; to create a website for sharing gig videos. On top of this, we wanted to group videos from events together – meaning you could browse up and down videos from the breathtaking gig you attended last weekend.

Quite quickly we realised that we’d need to ask users to tag the event in their video once they’d finish uploading it. The technology and function behind this decision was solid and worked brilliantly – upload your videos and tag them to the event.