• Slides available here 
• Woke up one morning with a great idea
• Why are we always rating restaurants, why not rate individual dishes?
• How can people learn about the foods around the world.
• “Yelp for dishes”
• At Adaptive Path, would help companies figure out what to build before they build it. Figure out their experience strategy. Interaction design: flow of the product.
• The only problem was….Couldn’t actual code anything.
• Ended up spending 6 long months looking for a cofounder. 
• Everyone she knew was a experience designer, didn’t know any developers.
• Critical thing: get out of your immediate social group.
• But these 6 months gave a chance to refine, communicate, and validate vision.
• Ate out a lot, carried a notebook everywhere. Asked people what they liked about their food, and how they would rate it, and what they would say about it.
• But the time she did find a cofounder, the product had evolved a lot. It started looking like Yelp, but what resonated with people was the visual aspects: the photos of the food. 
• When I did find a cofounder, we could hit the ground running.
• The cofounder was a Ruby on Rails developer. Didn’t have iPhone skills, but hired that out originally.
• What is the experience you want to create?
• The UX driven startup: Focus on the experience you want to create and let everything else support that.
     /  Experience
    /     Business   
   /       Product     
  /     Technology    
  ————————–
• Avoid common mistakes startups make
• Building something people don’t really want or need.
• example: Segway “It will change cities and create a new world”
• reality: it’s just novelty seeking tourists who use it. it doesn’t fit into people’s existing experiences.
• A UX Vision validates the experience and its fit
• Thinking Too Small
• Investors ask questions like: How does this get Big? What does success look like? What’s your world domination plan?
• They want to hear about what you want to big ultimately. If you just focus on what you can build tomorrow, that’s not a big enough vision.
• Moving Too Slowly
• Arguments of “this is the best design” , “no this one is” causes things to slow down.
• Vision: A concrete representation of where your product is headed. Can be words, images, or prototype. But it should be tangible.
• Having that gives you something to orient your path around, so that the decisions can go faster.
• Tools
• Coming up with a vision
• Communicate your vision
• Validate your vision
• Coming up with your vision
• Originally was considering a book.
• Contextual Interviews
• “Tell me about some of the highs and lows for your restaurant.”
• Yields understanding of pain points and opportunities you may not have considered.
• Ingredients: 10 people, 10 questions, notebook & pen
• How
• Meet people in context
• Ask open ended questions
• Use cues in environment
• Use discussion aids if you can.
• Examples:
• “draw me a timeline of your restaurant. what were some of the highs and lows of your experience. now tell me about those highs… tell me about those lows.”
• Make Believe
• Yields
• an outpouring of fresh ideas
• New ways to frame a problem
• A chance to taste whether an interaction feels natural in real life
• Ingredients:
• props, a friend, the real world
• example: Palm Pilot designer carried a block of wood around and considered what it would be like to use.
• How
• Act out some ways you’d use your product, using props to inspire and test ideas.
• Get out and enjoy everyday activities. –> makes it easier to interact with the product idea, rather than sitting in a room.
• Metaphor Brainstorming
• Yields: 
• Interesting properties extracted from the metaphors
• Fresh ideas and perspective
• Ingredients
• Core concepts on big stickies
• Lots of small sticky notes
• How
• Think about each concept in isoltation
• Write down whatever comes to mind
• Deconstruct the metaphor: what characteristcs are interesting?
• Use the characteristics to get ideas?
• Example:
• For foodspotting, uses stamp collecting and coin collecting as metaphors for collecting, and the characteristics of stamp and coin collecting that are unique
• Artifact From the Future
• A concrete representation of where your product is headed. Something you can rally around.
• How
• Imagine the TechCrunch blog post in the future written about your product.
• Imagine the future splash page
• Communicating your vision
• Experience Principles
• Yields: Concise, memorable guidelines that inspire ideas, gives you a basis for decision-making.
• How: 
• Brainstorm characteristics you want your product to embody
• Choose the ones that are unique to your product.
• Example:
• Foodspotting only talks about good food, not the bad food.
• Foodspotting lets you give a blue ribbon, not rate food.
• Foodspotting believes great food can come from anywhere, and we should celebrate it, not just from big cities.
• Experience Poster
• Yield: a pocket sized visual summary of what using your product could be like. Something you can use to sell your vision and vett your ideas.
• Ingredients:
• an elevator pitch
• descriptions of benefits
• principles, characteristics, and metaphors
• How
• Describe the benefits of your product
• Illustrate those benefits – capture the experience, not the interface.
• Thing about Nine Problems Your Product Sells: Just use stick figures to illustrate it.
• Pitch Kit
• Yields:
• a meaningful name
• a one setence ocktail party pitch
• a vision statement
• an “ah ha” reaction.
• How
• A few social events to practice at
• A few well known companies you can relate yours to (optional)
• Practice your answers to these question until you can get people to say “ah ha!” in a minute or less.
• Also, what is your bigger goal? e.g. Google is about organizing the world’s information, Facebook is about enabling people to build their social relationships.
• Validating Your Vision
• Prototyping
• Yields: a tool you can use to guerilla test your product where you go. Used: InDesign.
• Ingredients: cardstock or index cards or imagemaps + webkit
• How
• Create a lightweight, smoke and mirrors prototype of your product
• Pull it out and ask people how and why they’d use it.
• Example:
• Drew up five different rating systems, from stars to numbers to blue ribbon: and asked people how they would use it, and respond to it, and what it meant to them.
• Design The Future Homepage
• yields: 
• a concise summary of your product’s benefits in typical homepage form
• A way to test interest in your product
• ingredients: 
• blank paper and model homepage
• or typical homepage template
• instructions
• sketch the homepage of the future – include name, taglione, top benefits, glimpse into data
• show people andask “how would you use this and why?”
• KISS insights: a tool that allows you to ask people a question about any webpage.
• Throw a page up on the web, with an email signup to determine interest.
• I Love this product because…
• yields
• perspective
• a reminder of what it’s all about
• ingredients
• Write “I love this product because…” up on a whiteboard.
• how
• finish this sentence as if your mom or end user were saying it
• show people your vision and ask them how they’d finish
• Reaching Your Vision
• Building a cupcake and build to a cake over time. Don’t build an unfrosted cake and give it to your friend.
• Another way of saying it: Build half a product, not a half-assed product.
• Once you have the big vision, step back and ask what is the cupcake version of that vision.
• Pick a few most essential features, and ensure that they work really.
• Design principles should drive ideas. If the principle doesn’t drive ideas (.e.g “simple and easy to use”), then it’s not a useful principle. Everyone wants their site to be easy to use. Also, the principles should be unique to your product.