The Mobile Spoon

Outbound activities are the best way to collect product feedback and validate your ideas, but external engagement is not always available or achievable within budget, timeline, or COVID. 
There are, however, some internalactivities you can do at any given time, that will help you put your product (or idea) to the test, identify flaws, and help you evaluate your decisions. 
Here are a few simple hacks I used on various occasions; they helped me identify gaps in our products, and are all extremely easy to do - in-house. 

1. Turn your mockups into a teaser video So let's assume you don't have a product yet, and instead, you have some fancy designs and some user stories.  
How do you guarantee that everything is covered?  How do you make sure the story fits into place? 
Instead of using some mockups, try to visualize a complete story by turning your mockups into a quick, step-by-step video. 
Think about it as a teaser video (or a GIF), designed to be sent to your customers or pote…

Let's talk about App Clips for a minute, and forgive me Android readers, I know you had Instant Apps since 2018, but as product experts, entrepreneurs, or designers, surely you have to agree that Apple simply does it better with marketing, technology, developers, and users - all fall into the right part of the story.

So watching iOS14 keynotes (and App Clips) got me thinking about the future of mobile apps.

It also reminded me of the early days of our startup Missbeez, and how we used to describe our product as a simple "magic button".

Whenever people asked us what does the product do, we used to say:

"It's just a button. You click on it, and someone comes in and gives you a massage". 
Unfortunately, the reality was not that simple: users had to download our button from the App Store (or Google Play),  go through a long onboarding process, provide their name, email, address, enter their credit card, and only then could they click the magic button.

So much …

So your product starts to show traction and you want to collect some data and start making data-driven decisions.

It’s time to think about segmentation.

You know the drill:
Different types of users => different usage => different needs => different priorities.
Different types of users => different spend  => different priorities.
Different types of users => different pain points => different messaging.
The list goes on…

You need a systematic, scalable way to divide your users into smaller segments based on the characteristics they share.


Here’s how I think you should do it:

1. Collect as much data as possible At the early stages of a product - scale, performance, and data efficiency shouldn’t be a concern.
The volumes are still relatively low, so you can store as much data as possible, even if you don’t need it right now.

Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to optimize when you’re successful and rich…


2. Make sure it’s all in one place Whether you’re using a p…

Some readers have complained that my posts are getting too long.

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I black-listed all of them (they won’t bother us again), but for the sake of making a point, this post will be a short one:

Sign-up forms...
Conversion rates...
You want to collect the user’s name...

Should you go with a single “full name” field or split it to "first name" and "last name"?
My answer is: split it (see? told you it will be short).

The answer is: to split. 
Here's why:

Why you should use a single name field:  For the sake of the sport, here are the reasons to use a single "full name" field:
Better user experience - things go faster when using a single field.
More fields = more friction (unless, of course, you want to create some friction on purpose). Prevent confusion - having one name field eliminates confusion in some places (and cultures) where the name is handled a bit differently (i.e in Japan, Korea, and Romania the family name is pl…