On March 1, the founders of Zurb came to Hacker Dojo to give one of their most exciting talks at our ‘IxD for Devs’ class!  Generously, they shared some of their most valuable thoughts and experiences with over 50 developers at the Dojo. The house was packed and the energy was high. Everyone was excited to have the Zurb team on board. Bryan, Jeremy, and Dmitry gave it all they had. Thank you, Guys!

In the first part, they talked extensively about how they manage to transform ideas into tangible practical stepping stones by completing the circle of idea-transformation through repeating these three steps:

1. Deep team collaboration
2. Reiterating sketches and expanding on the core idea
3. Constant user-feedback through established existing networks

Skillfully, and with real-world examples, they showed their audience the ‘Zurb-way’ of tackling and addressing one of the most challenging dilemmas that many companies seem to be facing these days: the gap among Strategy, Design, and Development..

The second part got even more exciting, as they got everyone dive into the ‘Zurb-way’, by having them practice these steps. The whole room was on fire, as each team got into brainstorming and sketching ideas energetically. It was quite a revelation to watch as each idea transformed into tangible one-minute pitch. Now, that felt good!

To sum up, and in their own words, their talk was about:
“How many product ideas were built, but never really made it to market? A little of that is OK, but why does it happen so much? We don’t believe it’s because of bad ideas. We believe it’s because a holistic approach to design for people is missing inside and outside your organization.

We’re going to avoid an abstract talk in favor of a practical look at the design process and the design techniques everyone should know how to use. We’ll show you how we screwed it up on one of our products and how we got it right on the next one. A few techniques we’ll cover are:

• Sketching to sell and open up the idea
• Creating a product blueprint with proof points
• Finding team overlap between Marketing, Design, Engineer functions

This people-centered, holistic approach to design makes Apple and other innovative companies what they are today. It has helped our 150+ clients create more than a billion dollars in market cap. We’ll end the talk with a hands-on example.”

Human brain structures and organizes the information received in order to retrieve information easily at another point in time. Information Retrieval, perhaps one of the oldest disciplines in Information Technology and Science, was most likely first defined by Mooers (1950):

“Information retrieval is the name of the process or method whereby a prospect user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him.”

One of the main goals of information retrieval is to promote easier access and facilitate search abilities of the information stored within a system. Initially, researchers mainly investigated laboratory framework, also known as system-oriented research (Jarvelin, 2007). In system-oriented research, the main metrics of measurements are precision and recall of the systems. In other words, the user never initiates retrieving information.

ID for Devz – Jan 2011

Continuing with our ID for Devz series at Hacker Dojo, this time,  Jon Hull,  David Snyder, and I mainly talked about User Research and User Behavior.

For my part, I covered ‘Informal Guerilla User Study; a quick and easy way to get useful user feedback on your app’. We had many enthusiastic devz show up, eagerly wanting to learn more about their users…

ID for Devz – Nov 2010

Sharing knowledge and insights on Consistency, Human Error, and Error Messages in web design at Hacker Dojo, together with Jon Hull and David Snyder. We try to hold these classes every month.

For the whole deck on Consistency, see here: