Turning Mediocre Products into Awesome Products

Google Tech Talk (more below) February 23, 2011 A User-Experience Brown Bag Talk Presented by and Bryan Zmijewski and Jeremy Britton. ABSTRACT How many Google 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. Speaker Bios: Bryan Zmijewski is the founder of ZURB http://www.zurb.com/. After teaching product design at Stanford for 10 years, Bryan founded ZURB which, over the past 13 years, has helped over 150 start-ups create nearly a billion dollar in exits. ZURB's clients include: Facebook, Yahoo, Britney Spears, eBay, NYSE, Reuters, Zazzle, and many others. Jeremy Britton is Partner at ZURB. He acts as Design Lead and Strategist with the team. Setting up problems that people care about and then solving them in ways that work for businesses and delight customers are his focuses. Before joining ZURB, Jeremy worked as an independent design consultant, then animator and interactive designer for Walmart.com.