I'm super excited to start playing around with this. Although there is still friction in moving from one app to another, this API is a first step in weaving together what is now a disjoint mobile experience. Also, a great way to growth hack: I see app developers viewing URX as a toolkit to piggyback off other apps' audiences/views. Congrats to the whole URX team!
We need more female entrepreneurs with attitudes like this. Although awareness for equality issues is undoubtedly important, Collin hits the nail on the head by re-focusing on the undeniable truth: running a company is just plain hard. Sure, being female, minority, short, nontechnical, etc can all be drawbacks, but I'd argue that they all pale in comparison to the difficulty that is successfully running a sustainable company. Full disclosure: I am relatively young (20) male hacker of minority descent, and I used to use some of these factors as excuses but now I treat them as irrelevant. Those things simply don't matter to me (in context of running a company or building a product) because it's not really in my power (and not really my overarching mission) to change the culture of the valley and the rest of the tech world. Just my $0.02.
Super glad that this is on the frontpage. Dashboard design is probably the single biggest thing that analytics companies overlook when building product. It took us nearly 5 iterations to get our dashboard to a decent point.
What's worst is when offering free trials of an analytics product and then realizing that all freemium customers engage with a dashboard once, and then dropoff forever. Event tracking and various stages of a/b testing can be dangerous because they steer engineers to local minimums in designing a product.
Having a logical understanding of every element of the dashboard is the best way to approach the design.
Great post, we need more resources like this out there.
Don't forget to add realistic sample data for new customers, too, particular if you have a freemium model. An empty dashboard will turn some non-technical customers away -- it does not tell a story nor show how the product will serve a potential customer's needs.
Just make sure there's a very easy (and non-destructive!) way to switch between real data & sample data.
Not entirely flat design on the new homepage (the buttons have form), but the new wiki design[0] does seem almost entirely flat without bandwagoning. Confusingly, the old logo is still present in the new wiki.
I think the article is great, but I'm not sure about a few particular industry segments. For example, in SaaS, it often may make sense to actually charge for software up-front before even having product-market fit to see if there's even any viability in making it a business in addition to experimenting with pricing. Often times, the drop-off experienced in going from a completely freemium product to a priced one is fatal and gives you inaccurate data about the market's reception to your product.
In consumer web, the product -> strategy -> business model approach makes complete sense, but I'm unsure if it carries over to most things in B2B.
Looked at the screenshot, is this using some sort of integration with Screenhero? After playing/using Screenhero, I've been excited about the possibility of incorporating it into web apps.
Guess you could set up XP in a VirtualBox specifically for this purpose.
I know Teamviewer is compatible with Linux (They use a pre-configured WINE/Mono type build, alike Picasa for Linux). Used it myself and it works as well as the native thing on both ends.
Love the tech, but the design is spectacular. I'm one to get turned off pretty quickly if things aren't obvious/well-designed, but this is the exact opposite. Kudos.
