The Mobile Spoon

I recently had the chance to help a young startup building a marketplace, and it reminded me of the long process we went through to find and refine our matching workflow (the one that help the buyers connect with the right suppliers). I decided to write this post hoping it will help other marketplaces analyze their challenges and come up with the model that fits their need.

If you’re leading a marketplace product, you know how important liquidity is.
Liquidity describes the chances of a buyer or a supplier to perform a transaction, and although it doesn’t have an accurate formula - it is driven by the number of options (number of buyers/suppliers) relevant to a certain service/product, in a given location and time.

Take speed dating as an example: if you invite 6 people to a speed dating event, the chances of some participants to find a match are pretty low. On the other hand, if you bring 100 people in - some of them will probably be able to find a match, and of course, the matching…

In product design, friction is usually the “bad guy”: a conversionkiller that prevents users from getting things done and accomplishing their goals.
Friction is that thing that causes anxiety, confuses the users, slows them down, or distracts them from doing what they originally wanted to do or what the product wants them to do.
Friction is usually bad for business.  Unless... it’s done intentionally...
There are situations where friction can help the product (or the business) perform better.
Users might still feel frustrated, but “good friction” is usually something that’s planned to achieve a certain goal that is more important than good user experience.
So when can friction be a good thing?
Here are 6 legitimate examples (followed bu some illegitimate ones): 


1. Filtering unwanted users Short sign-up forms lead to higher conversion rates and more users, but sometimes you just don’t want “anyone” to become a user.
Think about early-staged products that are chasing certain early adop…

In a world where quantitative data drives so many product decisions, interviewing users is still an important tool for understanding your users and get qualitative insights.

I invited Yael Oppenheim, a market and a user research consultant, and the founder of FitMyTime (a platform for online live personal fitness and yoga classes) for coffee.

Yael was kind enough to share some of her tips about conducting user interviews, and our conversation ended up with me interviewing her for the mobile spoon 😉. Is that a remarkable journalism work or what?


So here's an interview about how to conduct user interviews:


When your product exists, and you’re talking to your users, there’s a clear set of rules to make sure you eliminate biases and get genuine answers. But how do you do this when the product does not exist yet, and there aren’t any users to talk to? You would think that doing user interviews without having an actual product (nor actual users) would make your work more difficult, bec…

Modern professionals are expected to spend time growing their knowledge-base and professional skills through self-learning.

It’s a competitive edge that helps both the employees and the organizations they work for.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the capacity to deal with the wealth of content that exists today, not to mention the time required to read it all. And so, this important task is often getting neglected.
I suffer from this problem too, but with the help of a few powerful productivity tools and some habits, I managed to create a sustainable self-learning framework that helps me read and learn new things every day.

Here are 5 productivity hacks that help me consume quality content faster and more efficiently:

1. Listen to professional podcasts and build a knowledge base with saved snippets Listening to podcasts allows me to enrich my professional knowledge and even save important takeaways without having to spend time in front of a computer.
I do it while I’m at the gym with …

It has been over a year since my post about mobile design trends to watch out for in 2019.  Reading back this post from December 2018, it seems that not much has changed, and many of the trends are still happening: chromeless designs, gestures, gradients, deep flat, big bold fonts, and more, they are still here and will remain dominant during 2020. 

Here’s a closer look at some new mobile trends that will continue to grow in 2020:  1. Dark mode  Yep, I know that's old news already, but you know what they say: "once apple decides to go black, no one can go back...". With the release of iOS13, dark mode has become built-in in every mobile app running on Apple devices.

This is, of course, not just an Apple thing, as Android and Windows also support this mode, but Apple has its' way of pushing such initiatives really fast, with devices that are almost immediately up-to-date with the latest OS version and a developers community that is very disciplined and following Appl…