One of the biggest risks of building a product is to build the wrong thing. You’ll pour months (even years) into building it, only to realize that you just can’t make it a success. At Hanno, we see this happening time and time again. That’s why we’ve put together a Lean Validation Playbook.
"Lean" in this case means that you’re moving swiftly to figure out what you’re going to build and... Read More
I once worked with a digital agency that didn’t know how to hold a kickoff meeting. And they didn’t even know that they didn’t know. Weeks into every project, they’d simply find themselves frustrated over how they’d ended up in a position of following rather than leading.
They would fight to get their good ideas out the door but end up on defence all the time when their clients came back... Read More
Reviews, testimonials and word of mouth are winning the war in branding. A sea of research is out there about social proof and what to do and what not to do about soliciting customer reviews. It’s overwhelming to read and digest it all, let alone to know which nuggets are gold and which are fool’s gold. For a designer or business owner or marketer, knowing who or what to listen to can be... Read More
A company proves that it has a strong creative process by developing successful products repeatedly. We see this in companies like Apple, BMW and Google. Founders such as Steve Jobs formed a corporate culture with an intense focus on creativity and design. This culture highlights two core elements in the creative process: the ideas and the team.
The creative process can be described in... Read More
In the first part of the case study about Mail.Ru Group product design unification, I described our first approach — a mobile web framework. Aside from creating a unified visual style and interaction principles for a dozen services, we've also transformed our design process from the classic "prototype → design mock-up → HTML → implementation" approach for every screen, to a modern and more... Read More
People have many tough decisions to make; whether they should use your application or website to accomplish a task shouldn’t be one of them. Your design team can take advantage of our knowledge of the human mind and human behavior by accounting for a number of heuristics, or mental shortcuts, that researchers have identified.
You might be familiar with the term “heuristic” from the UX... Read More
Slowly but surely, the official app stores of iTunes, Google Play and Windows Phone Marketplace have transformed into a digital battlefield. App developers have to fight for recognition or otherwise be drowned in an ocean of competing mobile applications.
App store optimization (ASO), a strategy similar to SEO but specifically applied to the app pages in app stores, has become a handy... Read More
Big companies are always trying to simplify the support and development of their large product portfolios. Mail.Ru Group (one of the two largest Internet companies in Russia, with more than 100 million monthly users), has about 40 products — even more if you add mobile and tablet websites and apps, promo websites, etc. My team deals with almost half of them — that’s about 100 ongoing projects... Read More
The “diffusion of innovations” theory of communications expert and rural sociologist Everett Rogers attempts to identify and explain the factors that lead to people and groups adopting innovations (new ideas and technologies). Design teams that account for both usability and how people adopt innovation stand a much greater chance of having users accept and use their products.
The... Read More
