All posts by bradleykal

Time to be Thankful

randomness

It’s been a long and interesting year for me. So many changes in both life and career. It’s been a year of choosing to live deliberately, not settling. Too often, I found myself settling, and distanced from my sense of self. This year has had it’s challenges but is equally balanced by life’s little successes.

A new home: that one falls squarely on Heidi’s great intuition. And great fortune of timing that we were able to find a home as unique as our family. While there is work to be done, it’s an amazing place to call home. I would have never guessed at the impact of living someplace designed with intent could have. It’s funny – I studied architecture, I sell the concept of design daily, but until I’d lived in a home designed with thoughtful intent, I would have never understood it. http://hoertdoerferarchitects.com/work/isle-of-palms-residence

Starting over: SPARC had been an amazing journey. The closest I can relate could be college – learning and experiencing so much at such a fast pace. There are many things I’m proud to have accomplished, growing a team and building a brand around a startup software company. But there was also the loss of self, getting a little complacent, and not having the projects to truly engage and grow. It was a hard decision to leave so many good friends, but a necessary one. Leaving a company changes many relationships, but strengthens others. I’m thankful for my friends & family who’ve seen me through this decision.

Finding great work: Taking Kaloupek Design from a side projects to full time consulting happened more quickly than I could have expected. In leaving Sparc, my mantra had been to do good projects with good people. A simple  goal was to find several great clients with good design challenges to solve.  Power Analytics and InKind are two new clients that have allowed me to do great design work again, and I’m thankful for it.

IMG_2444

And being with family. With all the chaos in the world today, this is a time to be thankful &  enjoy my family.

Choosing to Live Deliberately

big thoughts, Charleston, Creative, Design, Leadership, living, Process, SPARC

Recently, I’ve been given the opportunity to “live deliberately”. My friend Matt wrote a great post about his choice to relocate his business to Charleston and how he has found a tech community choosing to “live deliberately”. This idea has been on my mind and it’s finally time to do something about it.

Realizing & focusing on what motivates me: Good people and good projects are why I get up early in the morning.

This month marks my 4th year with SPARC. Helping grow a company and building a design team has been tremendous rewarding. Theres always a struggle between being both a leader and a designer, not one I’m always comfortable with. This experience has returned  tremendously to me, both personally and professionally. Sometimes you need to realize when the experience has stopped returning.

Several months ago, my amazingly thoughtful wife and I made a deliberate choice to move and raise our son at the beach. The new house is amazing and gives me a sense of quiet satisfaction every day. I also turn 40 tomorrow – some mindless mid-point in my life that means I’m in a different marketing demographic.

More and more, I’m taking pause to think about the what and the why. Taking time to go surf, live healthy(er), enjoy our new home and a sense of change. Versus feeling like I’m treading water and out of balance.

And focus. Focus on what type of work I should be doing versus what’s put in front of me. There have become far too few good projects and far too much busy work in-between. Work is always strenuous and not always “fun” – that’s it’s nature and accepted. But good people and good projects are why I get up early in the morning. There’s a way to be both a leader, and a doer, and make an impact in peoples lives.

Life’s short, and there are a lot of distractions. I’m taking the remainder of this year to find those good people, those good projects, and focus on living deliberately.

Agile Design for 18F Development Challenge

Charleston, Creative, Design, Leadership, Process, SPARC

18F is an government contracting agency that acts more like a tech start-up than a traditional government agency.  They introduced a short timeline, design & development challenge around the OpenFDA API to vet future development partners. We used the challenge to demonstrate our ability to design and develop a viable software product with a small, experienced team in an extremely short timeframe. My role as design lead was to assess the OpenFDA and design the most impactful product we could create with a small, agile team in a short timeframe.

Quick decisions

When the development challenge was released, 18F gave no specification of “what” type of product they’d like to see except that it should leverage the OpenFDA APIs and US Digital Services Playbook. An open concept played to our strengths: our design team has helped 50+ entrepreneurs visualize their product concepts over the past 3 years.

Design studio approach: We start with a brainstorming sessions and broad set of concepts, then narrowed down the product functionality based on the technical feasibility of the API and impact and usefulness to the user. Our design team initially considered an app to track a list of commonly used food for a restaurant against the FDA’s published food recalls. Given further research, we pivoted the concept to drug safety as it’s impactful to a larger group of users and the FDA’s stated business goals of safety and openness.

Limiting Scope for a short timeline

So there were a lot of product ideas we COULD have done… including pulling half the company into the development of an idea.  Instead we scoped our initial concept to fit the effort level or a small dev team of 5 over a period of 3 days. The goal of the development prototype was to showcase our ability to rapidly design & build a product of value in a short timeframe.

Collaboration & Constant Communication

18F-Monitor
Photo by Chad Norman

We set up a war-room atmosphere. Sitting together encouraged collaboration and made communication easy. And since we all have real jobs to do at the same time, we implemented a basecamp project to keep everyone in the loop and get feedback from the team throughout the design process. My design process was tailored to match the rapid timeline:

User & Technical Research

  • Researching & definition around Business Goals
  • Technical research into OpenFDA API
  • Design Studio composed designers, developers and a scrum master to brainstorm and vet ideas based on business goals, technical feasibility, and usefulness to the User
  • User research
  • Refinement of initial concept

Rapid Prototyping

  • User flows & wireframes
  • User testing through clickable prototype in InVision
  • Feedback loop within Basecamp project
  • Rapid iterations of the wireframes based on feedback

Visual Refinement

Early Testing & Results

Early on, we have leveraged clickable static image prototypes to elicit feedback from people familiar and unfamiliar with the apps goals. This feedback helped to quickly test our assumptions, discover if the user experience was intuitive & simple, and iterate on the apps user flow/functionality.

In the first day of design we user tested 3 prototypes for feedback through a series of InVision clickable prototypes. Then iterate on design and functionality based on feedback.

 

Explaining the “why”

We could have published a very minimal app, but it wouldn’t be clear to the user why or how to use it. The marketing aspect of explaining “why” the app existed and how to use it are a big part of the overall user experience. This “about” statement required a surprising amount of iteration, but helped keep the app focused and reinforced it’s original goals.

The Med Pal application allows an informed consumer to research individual drugs for recent recalls or label changes through the OpenFDA API. Similar to subscribing for updates on social media, you may choose to “follow” a drug of interest and be alerted of changes when you revisit medpal.sparcedge.com.

According to FDA research, there are approximately 106,000 deaths per year attributed to adverse reactions to prescription drugs. One in five hospital visits are the result of a drug reaction. And adverse drug reactions are estimated to cost our country $135 Billion dollars a year.

Pivot our Mindset: “Twitter of Drugs”

Our original concept had been building a list of drugs you take, then revisiting it that list at a later time to see if something had changed. But the early prototypes proved building lists was a tedious user experience. Somewhere over a beer, it dawned on us that we’re simply “tracking” drugs of interest – in a social fashion, this is a lot like “following” a drug. You follow people on twitter and see their updates on an activity feed. Why couldn’t this be the same?

By mimicking the social media experience of “following”, we are able to make interacting with the app modern and familiar to the user.

Our finished v1 product published here: http://medalerts.sparcedge.com/

med alerts search

And one more lap

The first iteration was on track to be published through GITHub when we discovered the challenge had been extended to allow more time for development. Being near the completion, we opted to publish and then treat the product backlog as a second release. This also allowed us time to pivot the original design and add new functionality of drug interactions.

Using the same techniques, we pivoted the product branding and layout. This streamlined the app even further. The new layout eliminated the need for a modal window, which had been a usability issue in the first release.

The v2 prototype is published here: http://medpal.sparcedge.com

medpal drug view

Conclusion

This is a great example of how quickly a experienced, collaborative design & development team can evolve a software product from concept to release.

Curating Email Subscriptions: You are what you Read

big thoughts, Charleston, Creative, Design, Process, randomness

I’ve a big believer in early mornings – it’s part of my creative process to get up at 4-5AM, brew some coffee, and get a fresh start on the day. Before diving into a design project, my mind needs a little time to wander & wake up. Selectively reading through my email subscriptions get’s me motivated and provides the right amount of creative distraction to be productive.

There’s something to having articles delivered and forming a consistent habit of reading, versus searching for content on the internet.

Some subscriptions arrive early in the day, some later in the day. I’ll take pauses throughout the day to check email and find a story worth reading. I’m also a tremendous news junky – it helps my mind flex on something larger than what’s in front of my screen.

The email subscriptions I read could be design focused or could be random. Part of being a designer is maintaining a curiosity about the world around us. That curiosity returns in every project you do.

Top 5 email subscriptions for any designer:

  • Quarz for News. This is probably the first thing I read most mornings. Excellent short write ups on the state of our planet.
  • InVision’s Blog for Design. Besides being a product that’s rooted into my design process, they interview product designers and offer an amazing perspective on our industry. I rarely miss anything they publish and often re-read the articles.
  • Medium – great publishing platform. Of the 10+ items they email, there’s typically one that catches my attention. The articles I read could be design focused or could be random. Part of being a designer is maintaining a curiosity about the world around us. That curiosity returns in every project you do.
  • Co.Design for the business of Design. Fast Company’s design focused news. I make a point of following through and reading at least one article per day here. These often have a business perspective I feel a lot of design writing lacks.
  • Crew inspires growth. Well composed thoughts from a company building their business in the open.  They inspire me to write more and start my own business.

Other things that keep me going throughout the week:

  • Little daily Simon Sinek inspiration never hurt anyone
  • Visual inspiration on Monday mornings from niice.co
  • brainpickings is what is sounds like
  • 99U always carries interviews that speak towards learning and career growth
  • and Laura Vanderkamp offers a great perspective on having a family and still being a leader

And of course, filter where you give your attention a bit. That woot deal that just came in may be amazing, but it isn’t the best place to focus your energy at 5am.

Giant Conf Day 1 Take-Aways: Skillsets of a designer and Designing for Experience and Memory

randomness

Recapping a couple of things that stuck with me from the 1st day of the Giant UX Conference.  While there’s was a lot of content to cover, it’s always interesting what was sticky and catches my attention the next morning. The presentation by Patrick Neehman on “hunting unicorns: what makes an effective UX professional” got my head spinning a bit. Having had the experience of growing a design team from scratch, a lot of what Patrick resonated. Especially him identifying the lack of definition around our profession.

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Specialist vs. Generalist

I’ve mentioned before that we hire generalists, not specialists. Patrick’s talk confirmed: UX is a broad set of skills requiring one to be a generalist. Doesn’t mean you can’t have an area you excel at such as visual design or user research, but any player on a UX/dev team is going to wear multiple hats. There were several talks about a “t-shaped skills” which was a new term for me.

design-disciplines-at-sparcPatrick’s slide blocking out the various hard skills a UX practitioner can have was complementary to something we created to explain the team as it grew. Scott Berkun’s opening talk disallowed the concept that job titles matter – stop creating title with guru and talking about innovation – creative ownerships is gained by doing & making, not by talking about it.  Still, without some definition it makes it a bitch to explain to my recruiting friends how to help scale our team.

IMG_1644Patrick also had a soft skills chart and explanations around what and why they were important to a well rounded hire.  I’d add to that the element of “client facing” – there is a necessary level of maturity needed to explain your ideas and listen when you may be the only person from your team there. And as a hiring manager, there is a lot of trust given when you let someone go in your place.

 

Our hiring secret sauce?

We may have told recruiting, get me another Matt or another Prashant, but we’ve never hired the same person on the team. Nor should we. Charts like these are great in thought drivers and help explain our professions skills to an outside audience. But little of it matters when you meet the person. Every candidate we’ve ever hired showed up with a skill that we didn’t know we needed. And it’s that hidden skill that brings something new to the team.

And just one more thought: Designing for Experience and Memory

This talk is unrelated but too good to let go. That the high and low points of a person’s experience with your product will average out to be their memory. So not only smoothing out the pain-points, but also focusing on the creative/unexpected high points a good UX designer can include. Those high points help create a better overall memory and create a happy return customer. Great talk by Curt Arledge and my thanks for getting my mind spinning on the subject. 

Agile Design: Crafting a User Experience Collaboratively

big thoughts, Charleston, Creative, Design, Leadership, Process, randomness, SPARC

The collaboration between a front-end developer and talented designer is how amazing user experiences get built and refined.

Harrison-Lisa-collaboration

Our team does periodic design reviews here at SPARC to review design quality and discuss the design process – what’s working well and what can be changed. Lisa and Harrison are both extremely talented team members on different ends of the design spectrum. Lisa’s crafts beautiful UI & can take a client’s brand and make it sing. While Harrison is a front end guru who helps translate Lisa’s ideas into a User Experience. They’ve worked several commercial projects together and have arrived at a solid working relationship. I’ll often observe them standing at Harrison’s monitor tweaking code and going back and forth. This behavior got me thinking about a few elements of our Agile Design process at SPARC that deliver results.

Separation of concerns: Design and Development 

I refer to a great designer who can design and develop with equal quality as a unicorn – because they don’t exist. Everyone on our team designs and writes code to differing skill levels, but Lisa and Harrison balance each other through the fact each has a specific are they excel at. As a designer responsible for both design & delivering the final code, I’ve found myself limiting the design knowing later I’ll have to build it. Your mind naturally thinks ahead to how it will be coded and not completely about the experience. It’s hard to separate these concerns.

There’s a huge advantage as a designer understanding code, it helps participate in the execution and understand what’s possible. Just as a developer needs to be empathetic to design to understand “why” something needs to work a certain way. But we’ve found being able to separate responsibilities on a larger project allows this pair to excel their specific work and then collaborate on a better end product.

Iterating design in code

One real advantage we’ve found is the ability to iterate in code. Often times we’re only talking about design “concepts” until they’re actually in browser. Our workflow is to move through our design phase quickly into implementing code. When implementing, we discover opportunities, things we missed, and are able iterate. Those iterations then flow back into the visual design.

We try and caution clients not to get hung up on the early visual designs – treat them as concepts, not a complete user experience. Once coded into a prototype or dev environment, you start to understand how the user will experience the app – in browser.

User Experience workflow
  • Wireframes and Visual Design are concepts or explorations
  • Design Implementation speaks to actual User Experience
  • The ability to iterate in code allows us improve the overall User Experience
Most designers operate under a series of assumptions, that change throughout the course of a project. Getting use to iterating in code keeps us agile to these changing assumptions.
  • There are gaps between static designs and interactive code
  • Static designs can only translate user experience 80-90%
  • Optimizing code is cheaper than iterating visual designs

Keeping it Consistent: Pattern Libraries

pattern library

One of the biggest issues in a large app being developed by multiple people is keeping the look and feel, and the mark-up, consistent. This isn’t a new thought. Our front-end developers start from day 1 with adding a basic pattern library into the development environment of the app. This helps the developers find the correct code snippets, and our team style the app in a consistent manner.

We develop most things in Bootstrap – it offers a clean, organized library of components to use as a base. From there, we narrow it down to the elements we’re actively using (less is more) and have a page dedicated to displaying the styled examples.

And people get bored. After staring at something too long, most clients or designers get tired of it and want to make changes. Having a maintained pattern library makes visual updates easy and consistent.

Evolving our Agile Design Process

Collaboration. Separating concerns. Actively maintaining a pattern library in design and code. These are a few of the workflow habits that make our Agile Design process & team successful. Being able to be hands on with the code, in open collaboration between designers and developers, allows us to deliver a refined user experience to our customers.

User Experience: the barrier-to-entry for better healthcare software

big thoughts, Brad Kaloupek, Charleston, Creative, Design, Leadership, Process, SPARC

As a design team, we have unknowingly become an expert in designing the user experience for healthcare software.

Intended or not, many of our  projects focus on some aspect of the healthcare space. Checklist apps for service providers. Back-office software to eliminate wait times and help veterans. Commercial software for a major healthcare providers patient records and business. Myself and many of our development team came from a company that creates healthcare enrollment software. We understand 835 forms and ICD-10 codes. We understand how to move a user through a 14 page form and make them not hate it… too much. Over the dozen related projects, we’ve accumulated domain knowledge in a space that’s complex and confusing.

And building this software varies greatly from our other projects. There’s never anything easy. Never. Nothing in healthcare is as simple as it sounds. And everyone’s business process is different.

We were reviewing one such project with the design team yesterday when it struck me:

User experience is the barrier to entry for effective healthcare software.

Not just software, the industry itself is overwhelmingly complex. And why? I can figure out my sons medical bills from a minor operation – 4 months later I received 4 additional bills from different providers with no context. And that’s one simple operation. Healthcare systems seems to revel in their complexity. How does any of this benefit the consumer or the user of the software? And how does continuing to design for this complexity help create a positive user experience?

IF the goal of “design” is to take something complex, understand it, and make it simple for the user  – are we doing this? Are we creating a positive user experience, or are we just adding one more layer to the cake.

So now that we’ve recognized the opportunity, where do we go with this thought? Focus back on the user experience. How can we improve their experience? How can we reduce complexity of a complex system? Make it smarter. Make it easier to navigate. Make the experience of completing a form more enjoyable. As designers how can we understand and remove these barriers to entry? How can we create a better healthcare experience through better software?

Always be creating value – Or my evolving role as design director in a start-up.

big thoughts, Brad Kaloupek, Creative, Design, Leadership, living, Process, randomness, SPARC

I have the best, and scariest, job in the world. When I’m doing my job right, everyone else is busy and I have nothing to do. And this isn’t to say there’s nothing to be done, I just haven’t discovered the next design project yet. My job is to insure everyone else is productive & happy, before I worry about myself. My job is to put my self out of a job. And then repeat that process over and over again.

As we approach the holiday season, there’s a lot of change in our office. Like physically: we’re moving furniture to accommodate another 60 friends. And we’re in the process of doing our annual reviews, which leads to a lot of introspection about your year. I could tell you 20 things my team has done successfully this year, but very few I’ve done. My conversation sounds a little like:

“We identified a design opportunity. I gathered the necessary requirements, set the creative direction for the project and delegated to Matt. I backed off & he went full bore and created some amazing logos … “

Did I create anything? Not really, I simply facilitated a member of the team doing amazing work. How much value did I add if I didn’t actually “produce” much of anything?

So my definition of “value” has been changing these past 3 years – from a one-man-band designer to leading a design team. It’s scary stuff as some days, I’m the first one I’d fire. But seriously, as a designer who’s done work-for-hire contractor positions before, you know you must always be creating value. Once you’ve finished the projects you were hired for, you’d find yourself sitting there waiting to be let go… “No more work, we’ll re-hire you in a few months when we need something.” It’s can be really scary shit to not have something tangible in front of you to constantly justify your perceived value. “I’m working on such and such project…”

And defining yourself too narrowly by your craft or what you produce falls into that trap as well.

The shift from execution to strategy leaves you wondering how much value you are creating?

And really, what is “strategy”? Strategy is simply any technique that leads to tangible results. Advertising agencies are based on their ability to convince clients on the value of their intangible strategy. There’s probably a distracting rant built into this line of thinking, but it’s exactly where I find myself. Packaging “intangibles” to generate tangible design results is now part of the value I create.

So what’s my next “project” look like? Last week was an office space redesign. Now that it’s underway, I’ve moved on looking for the next challenge.  Somewhat like captaining open water between the islands that are one project to the next. You can see it on the horizon, but not always sure how you’ll get there and what you’ll find when you do.

Nothing good gets designed in a day

big thoughts, Creative, Design, Leadership, Process, SPARC

Working quickly is a part of life. Juggling multiple projects & requests from within our company, we often have to respond quickly. And there are times speed is necessary over quality. As a designer you accept this, get your co-worker the graphic or presentation they needed, and move on thinking next time it’ll be “better”. It’s not a deep thought, but…

Nothing good ever gets designed in just one day.

That’s not to say some of my best work hasn’t been quickly. But for a designer, I think there is a point of digestion that needs to happen before you can really execute. It has to do with design thinking, or even divergent thinking when approaching an issue. The ability to understand a problem and then walk away for a while.

Our working environment can be chaotic – designers may juggle multiple long term design/dev projects, and in between get hit up to help support our growing corporate brand. A lot of time, the best value we can add is visually illustrating a complex development process for our business development team. Those graphics help our proposals shine above others and translate very complex concepts into something  that can be easily understood.  Seems simple, but we’ve invested hundreds of hours in our graphic library over the past 4 years.

First step is to simply listen & gather the requirements you’ll need. Finding the person and a whiteboard is one way. Another way could be simply to find the image assets you’ll need , start a new illustrator doc. This will take you 10 minutes, but this start lays the ground work for coming back at the design problem with a clear head .

How long do you pause? Could be a day, could just be a couple hours. The important part is actually taking a break. Because when you come back, I find myself both mentally prepared but also ready to enjoy solving the design problem. And when you think about it, why else do something unless you enjoy it?

As a designer, you need the ability to know your process and how to get best results.

creative processAnd that extends to your team – knowing how they works helps delegate projects and avoid poor quality responses during a fire drill.  Sometimes watching how they work tells you more about how you should be a leader. There are a dozen of us, all with different strengths and a different person. Lisa is one I can relate a lot to – she can crank out visual or UI design all day, and quickly. But when she’s spent time to digest the problem, and then iterated on it several times, the results truly get portfolio worthy.

Another designer Matt took home our graphic inventory over the weekend – something he’d contributed to before – and elevated the design pattern by rethinking it. Understanding, taking a break, and then coming back at the problem helped him elevate the  style we’ve been using going forward in our proposals.

Which brings me to my next moment of Starbucks introspection, what am I putting in a portfolio? And what work as a team are we proud enough of to keep? We have a pretty good throughput supporting multiple products, service teams and our corporate brand. Our process is loose, but achieves results. But what of those results would we share at our next job interview? Or online in behance?

And how much of that lack of quality comes down to the time constrains we work under?

Ok, too many deep thoughts getting broken up by the cackling old ladies of starbucks. But think about it next time someone does a “drive by” and requests a new graphic… it’s only going to take an hour to knock out. Or can it be something better to understand the problem, gather the requirements and give it a break before barreling headfirst into solving the problem visually? The best things I’ve ever designed we’re never done in a day.

Re-thinking app design

big thoughts, Brad Kaloupek, Creative, Design, Process, SPARC

Our design team was recently called to re-think the design of our mobile Stre.am app. It’s grown quickly – so before committing more code, it’s a great time step back and approach the design a little more critically .

The app’s primary function is to capture and stream live video to an audience that can watch it on a desktop. It’s gaining rapid adoption in live sporting events & similar venues. We created two mobile app to serve  Apple IOS and Android, and here lies the problem.

One universal App? Or two distinct platform designs?

So here is our conundrum: Do we continue designing once, and applying the design to two different platforms? Or is there an opportunity to leverage the features that make an “Apple” app and an “Android” app distinct. Each has a slightly different user-interaction pattern, each has a distinct brand if you will. There are pros/cons to how both work.

Apple is pretty static and established – familiar to most of us. There are certain best practices that are prescribed, and icons/typography that is very “iOS” in it’s look and feel. Heck, there are templates you can quickly borrow from, closing down the design process to just arranging the right buttons.

Android has a greater variety of interactions & gestures to control an app. It’s design theory is being cemented by Googles new Material Design principles which relies on layering and interactions to engage the user.

Process

So given the opportunity, we did a quick design charrette – 3 designers for 2 days.

One designer looking at a “universal” interaction pattern. The other two each focusing on a platform specific design – pulling forward the best interaction patterns of each platform into the design. The designers went heads down and spent some weekend time playing with different concepts. We set the primary goal to explore consistent navigation patterns. Secondary goal was to streamline some of recording tools that had begun to take over the capture screen and overall, make it easier to use.

This was an intentionally fast design & decision process – we probably could have iterated for several weeks, and incorporated more meetings & testing. The short-burst approach gives you multiple creative designs, each from a different perspective. All are quick studies, so no one’s super attached to “their” idea. All are high-return on their time investment, without the diminishing return for a long design cycle.

For my role, it’s simply to clarify and facilitate good design. Give each designer direct feedback and help clear up any questions about which direction they should be pursuing. Before we present, I’ll wrap it all together in a quick keynote presentation. The presentation primarily helps reminds the team the project goals before we jump into looking at designs. If you don’t have some clear goals or success criteria, it’s too easy for a group to get distracted when reviewing a design. The presentation shouldn’t be too  formal, it just enough to keep everything in one place & present each design in a consistent light.

We had 2 reviews: first a quick review as a small team, giving direct feedback that could be quickly acted on. The second review as a larger group of developers & product owners, with the goal of leaving the meeting with a design direction.

Results

As most exercises, there we’re elements of each design that had promise. One of our team captured an excellent profile view, while another focused on highly-legible navigation for the user.

Another unexpected result was how much our team thought about animation. I credit Material Design for getting our heads moving further in that direction. One of our team took the time to animate a concept for the record button as a quick movie we presented. The animations really helped convey the design.

Next steps

We agreed on a hybrid approach: There would be brand elements that tie the apps together. Both apps would have the same user flow & functionality. However they’d have separate interaction patterns that each user base is familiar with. There was no need to teach an iOS user how Android works, or vice-versa. And each app design is free to take advantage of it’s platforms distinct way of doing things.  And this speeds up development.

From here, our process gets iterative again. Smaller increments of work with light user testing in between. And working closely with the app developers; often times our developers are the first to introduce us to a unique interaction or possibility native to the platform.

Thanks for tuning in, I look forward to sharing the results when the next generation of Stre.am hit the app store.