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caterpillarcowboy:

1. “If Apple can launch a smartphone without Find or Cut-and-Paste, what can you cut out of your product requirements?” – Sramana Mitra
2. USV-backed foursquare uses Google Docs to collect customer feedback. No code, no maintenance.
3. Fliggo sells it before they build it.
4. Grockit puts up a notify-me-when-you-release form on steroids.
5. Auto e-commerce site uses manualation and flintstoning for their backend.
6. Semiconductor company uses 5 people and FPGAs to build a $100M semiconductor product line.
7. Consumer company uses fake screenshots to sell their product.
8. Allicator uses Facebook ads: “Ditch Digger? Feeling spread thin? Click here to complete a survey and tell us about it.”
9. ManyWheels uses Microsoft Visio to build clickable web demos for prospective customers.
10. Cloudfire uses a classic customer development problem presentation.

RockYou uses clickable PDF to do usability testing on products they are considering releasing.

heyitsnoah:

I’ve written a few times about my fascination with desire lines: “the unpaved paths that people wear down over time.”

Anyway, Peter Merholz, who wrote the first post that exposed me to the idea, just wrote a new post on the topic:

“Designers come from a tradition of figuring out the whole system, and putting it out there. But the success of Twitter has emerged from an approach that’s nearly 180 degrees from that. Twitter began simply as a way to post 140-character messages, and allowed remarkable freedom in following. Almost no structure was placed on the system. It’s through the paths that users have worn in the system (e.g., @ replies, retweets, hashtags, followfridays) that Twitter has grown to realize the value of the service, and they’ve made initial steps to “pave” those most popular paths (most notably replies, though Doug mentioned that they are considering how to more formally support retweeting as well).”

Via: More Desire Paths // NoahBrier.com

@mollybloom told me that at Purdue when then build a new campus building the don’t put in permanent pathways for over a year. The grounds people wait to see where people prefer to walk in to, out of and around the building and then they put in the permanent pathways along those lines.