11. Design + Build Mobile-First
• The market is going to be mobile-first.
Where do you want to be?
• Don’t use your existing web service as a
starting point. It is easy to make this
mistake.
• Start from scratch. Do it as a cohesive
team and a cohesive experience.
• Compromises are focused around
mobile, instead of ‘legacy’.
13. Designing in means
• Design decisions are drastic on mobile.
Every decision matters.
• Less is always more:
– Mobile: less features, more focus, less data,
faster, etc.
• “Last night, a typeface saved my life...”
– every decision matters: MIT AgeLab research
shows that better typefaces can reduce car
crashes...
14. Designing in means
• Design decisions impact trust on mobile.
• Once you share something inappropriate,
you can lose trust.
• Personalization, when you share (you
also expose), your actions have explicit
and implicit consequences
• Every action can amplify or nullify.
• Your hypotheses are probably wrong.
Measure.
16. Latency Kills
• 10 / 100 / 1000 ms - map out your
interactions to these buckets and make
sure they align with the UI/UX
• To win: mobile-friendly design, great
engineering, and magic.
– (translation: focuses your user, help them
quickly, and hide this complexity.)
• Do things at the right time. Measure.
Don’t miss. Responsive != Fast
18. Embrace Beauty
• Aesthetics matter.
• Polish is expected.
• Design for the next billion users
– Don’t use a floppy disk icon.
• Caring about design should be
everyone’s job.
• This is even more important for social
apps because you are building a trust
relationship.
20. Embrace Touch
• Sometimes, this is what people mean
when they say mobile-first.
– Touch-friendly targets
– Not too much functionality on small screens
– Paradigms that are touch-friendly (but
gestures are not discoverable if designed
poorly)
• This should make you redesign your
interactions from scratch (important to
not rely too much on past for social
apps)
22. Build Around A-ha!
• Know what your product value actually is
• Know what actually makes your users
happy
• Once you know this, then you can focus
your design, testing, engineering to
make this better.
• Remember that a user will only use your
app briefly. This is how you get them to
come back.
24. Cache is King
• Web Stack: building for scale still applies,
but focus is now on latency and building
• MVC + Network Requests stack...
• Syncing device to servers...
• Offline scenarios
• Graceful connectivity
25. “All things entail rising and falling
timing. You must be able to discern
this.”
– Miyamoto Musashi
(Have perfect timing.)
26. Have perfect timing.
• Reach out to your users: Passbook, etc.
-- social really helps with this.
• Do things at the right time (this helps
hide loading times)
• Little things that connect users are way
more important on mobile...
• Slice at the right time to kill it.
28. Should you build a mobile
• Get to Yes/No ASAP
• Work with a company like us to build initial
product + kickstart operations around process,
project execution, training and hiring.
• Adopt process that helps you ramp up fast.
– Pair programming, Agile, etc.
• Do you want to build a team that knows native?
Then need iOS and Android leads.
• Go with your strengths. If you’re much faster at
web, build a dev team with mobile web stack
knowledge.
29. What you should look for:
• Generalist + Design-Minded: you need people that
do not see UI and polish as dirty work
• Young/Fast-Learner: you need people that learn new
platforms and stack quickly and light on set ways
• Strong SE Fundamentals: helps pick up and learn
platforms quickly and establish good practices.
• Pair programming-friendly: you need people that can
communicate if you’re creating a team that can
onboard consistently.
• Previous experience (optional): background in
application / mobile app development is helpful.
31. Know Your Users
• Build a great agile engineering process...
• Crash reporting: Bugsense, Crashlytics,
Crittercism, etc. at least: email-your-logs-and-
catch your crashes
• Analytics: Flurry, GA (for web), Kontagent
(games) -- need data before you can test. Lots of
tools.
• Review/Feedback loop (let users rate your app
when happy, send you feedback when sad)
• A/B testing: pre-launch in smaller markets --
may be very time-consuming to build A/B...
33. Becoming Social by Default on Mobile
Part 2: Hard Lessons Learned the Easy
34. What happened?
• People use their phones to share a lot
more.
• iPhone era: Silos created by apps.
Existing models.
• 500+ MM Mobile FB users, OS
integration with FB/Twitter/G+, etc.
• People are using their phones to
communicate and share stories: trillions
of SMS messages sent in 2010
35. What we talk about in general when it
comes to doing social networking
36. Authentication (Know the Real
You)
• Tying authentication to social
networking can make it easier
to sign up for your service
• Single Sign-On
• Easier to get user’s
information and profile filled
out
• When connected to their
social networks, you have
users with authenticity
• Can think about new use
cases like social-proofing
37. Discovery and distribution
• Growth and user acquisition is often the main
reason to have social network integration
• But don’t do this as a starting point!
• Apps that are social by design will have this user
acquisition loop built in!
• Goal is to be aware so that you can optimize
• Best: your actions are related to personalization
and doing things with friends
• Worse: getting friends to participate out-of-app /
Worst: just inviting friend to try the app
39. Personalization
• Making things social by default means
making it theirs
• Personalized content is about increasing
relevancy
• Think about music: the interests of a
user and the interests of the friends of
users can make Rdio or Spotify a more
satisfying experience
• Recommendations based on past context
40. Using Social Networking
• Not just about getting users, about getting
useful.
• Using 4sq or FB places for a location-based app
• Uniting people with common interests, location
and other connections
• Provide context -- these signals can make you
do this better.
• beware of public sharing vs. private sharing!
(think open graph)
– designing in and out -- let’s revisit frictionless
sharing...
44. Rdio: Making Music Social
• Personalization is a
perfect fit for music
• Thinking mobile-first
is a must: streaming/
offline syncing/
consistent experience
across devices
45. Instagram: Mobile-First
• Sharing and
storytelling
• Focused on
experience
• Makes you want to
share more...
47. Draw Something: Growth...
• Growth was great...
• A-ha moment was
great... (fun to send
silly photos to friends)
• Still fun?
(sometimes...)
• Too many ‘friends’...
48. “Absolute silence leads to
sadness. It is the image of death.”
– Rousseau
(So make sure you get it right!)
55. eBay Mobile
• $10 Billion in Revenue on
mobile this year
• 100 MM App Downloads, 100
MM Items listed
• eBay app in launched in 2008.
• Listings on mobile doubled in
last 6 months (Dec 2011- July
2012).
56. ESPN
• Mobile streaming rights to all
their major sport partners...
• Users per minute over 100K
(increase of over 48% this
year)
• 70% of sport content
consumed on mobile devices
are on one of ESPN’s mobile
apps...
57. Uber
• Mobile-first UI: you see a
map, hail a car, it comes,
driver calls your phone.
• Removes paying at the end
from the experience
• Not just Car Service, but Taxis
in Toronto!
59. Fancy
• Show off things you like and
may be even buy them...
– over $50k weekly sales
• Social by Default:
– Personalized tastes and
recommendations
– Fancying something is
inherently social
– Connects to social
networks.
• recently launched suite of
apps...
61. Wheelz
• Car sharing with people you
trust
• Mobile-first:
– Owners: getting cars into
the network, managing
schedules
– Drivers: finding a car on the
go
• Social by Default:
– uses trust as a way to
enable better and safer car
sharing. (social-proofing)
91. Thank you!
Ask me anything:
@borisc / boris@xtremelabs.com
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Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
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Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
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Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n
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Even more so than hard work, passion is a finite resource. \nRefer to passion vs. purpose (sivers)\n\n\nNot long into their interview with public radio host Ira Glass, one of the three college-aged interviewers, a young girl, asks, with a desperate smile etched on her face, how to decide “which of her passions” to pursue.\n\n“Like how do you determine, how…”, she begins.\n\n“How do you figure out what you want?”, Glass interrupts.\n\n“How do you not only figure out what you want, but know that you’ll be good at it?”, she finishes.\n\nThere’s a pause. In this moment, when Glass prepares his answer, the young girl’s earlier admission that she’s a pre-med, and doubting her decision to attend med school, hangs in the air. Glass can relate: he too had been considering med school when he stumbled into his first radio internship, after his freshman year of college.\n\nHe proceeds cautiously, softly: “Honestly, even the stuff you want you’re not necessarily good at right away…I started working at 19 at the network level, and from that point it took me years. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.”\n\nOne of the other interviewers, a young man in a baseball cap, interjects: “Do you think hard work can make you talented?”\n\n“Yes. I do.”\n\nThe students let this sink in.\n\n“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass continues. “But I don’t believe that.”\n\nBy the students’ reactions, this is not what they expected to hear.\n\n“Things happen in stages. I was a terrible reporter, but I was perfectly good at other parts of working in radio: I am a good editor…I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them.”\n