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Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger’s 8 Principles For Building Products People Want. Mike Krieger, Instagram’s founder, thinks you can build apps that fit in the real world by watching what people want, not guessing. He presented his eight core product design insights today at 500 Startups’ Warm Gun conference. Here’s the cheat sheet to his talk. “Just because you’ve Googled something doesn’t mean you’ve learned,” Krieger explained in the intro to his design talk. To build something that solves a problem, “You want to know people better than they know themselves.”

For example, if you’re trying to disrupt the shopping experience, you have to actually know what the existing shopping experience and behavior set is. You should come away with serious insights, not just random facts. And now, Mike Krieger’s Eight Principles Of Product Design: Draw On Previous Experience and Understanding – The biggest problem is startups in search of a problem.

How Snow White Helped Airbnb's Mobile Mission. By the time Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky returned to work after the holidays last year, his company had cornered a critical portion of the rental market and started an international expansion. Its executive team was planning the next big move. Should they campaign to put more homes on the Airbnb platform?

Expand the peer-to-peer rental model to cars and office space? Chesky wasn't sure, but he knew how he wanted to talk about it. Over his Christmas vacation, he had picked up a biography of Walt Disney. “I realized that Disney as a company was actually at a similar stage where we are now when they created Snow White,” Chesky says. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began in the mid 1930s with a storyboard, a technique the animators at Disney had invented a few years earlier. Airbnb started the project, appropriately code-named "Snow White," by creating a list of the emotional moments that comprise an Airbnb stay. The final storyboards document the Airbnb experience from different perspectives. What Aspiring Designers Need to Know About Strategy.

By David Sherwin - April 4, 2013 This is an exclusive excerpt from my new book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, which was recently released by HOW. As I read through his resume, the designer stared at me expectantly. He had a wealth of great design projects under his belt. He had been seeking out personal projects to build out his portfolio. Not brand strategy, content strategy, interactive strategy, media strategy, or the MBA-land of business strategy. This has been happening more and more frequently, for a few reasons. But in our haste to be strategic partners, I’ve discovered that many designers don’t fully grasp how strategic services fit into their client offerings.

If you’re going to run a design-led business, it’s inevitable that you will need to talk strategy with your clients. What exactly is strategy? The dictionary says: a strategy is a “plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” And if you don’t? The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use - Warren Berger. How do Google, Facebook and IDEO jumpstart the process that leads to innovation? Often by using the same three words: How Might We. Some of the most successful companies in business today are known for tackling difficult creative challenges by first asking, How might we improve X … or completely re-imagine Y… or find a new way to accomplish Z? It’s not complicated: The “how might we” approach to innovation ensures that would-be innovators are asking the right questions and using the best wording.

Proponents of this increasingly popular practice say it’s surprisingly effective — and that it can be seen as a testament to the power of language in helping to spark creative thinking and freewheeling collaboration. Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, says that when his company takes on a design challenge of almost any type — and IDEO does everything from designing new products to envisioning new ways to deliver healthcare — it invariably starts by asking How Might We.

Mailbox’s Gentry Underwood: What Hackers Should Know About Design Thinking ⚙ Co. When Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood and his cofounder Scott Cannon left Ideo and Apple, respectively, to start a little software startup called Orchestra, they knew they wanted to solve productivity problems. They believed that while Apple had figured out how to design at a large scale, startups weren’t making use of the same philosophy.

But when they built their first product, Orchestra, the reception was tepid. It would take another year of experimentation before it would transform into Mailbox, the enormously popular Gmail client which was acquired by Dropbox earlier this year. Here’s what they learned about putting design thinking to work at an early-stage startup. What did Mailbox’s pivot from being the Orchestra to-do app teach you about pivoting? How did this play out with Mailbox? In our case, we pivoted from Orchestra to Mailbox, but we pivoted in a way that it was pretty different in a sense that we never let go of the "why" that we were trying to solve when we started. 1Reaction.