The Mobile Spoon

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…

2020 is here and I thought it would be nice to reach out to some good old friends of mine, leaders in the product space, successful entrepreneurs, and basically check how they were doing.

I apologized for not returning their calls, not being responsive in the last decade or so, and then I practically begged them to answer a few questions that I believe would interest the readers of the mobile spoon.

I asked them to share some important product decisions they've made recently, insights and lessons learned, successes or flops, and finally, I asked them to share some productivity hacks that helped them become so successful in what they do.


They all refused...

But I’m a stubborn guy.

I don’t quit that easily, and plus, I may know stuff about a few of them... and therefore, here we are:


10 successful entrepreneurs and product leaders share their insights and tips about creating successful products in 2020



Here’s what they had to say:




"We're no longer satisfied with simple auto…

Roundups season continues here at the mobile spoon, and this time I've collected a few posts about product management, as founders of your own startups or as product leaders in bigger companies. 
Let’s dig in:

Product management basics Let’s start with some basics:


B2B vs. B2C What’s the difference between managing B2B and B2C products?
Here are 5 things I’ve learned when I switched from a large B2B company to a small B2C startup. 

Product management is all about decisions Unfortunately, in most cases, there isn’t a right or wrong decision, just a set of priorities and constraints. To become a great product manager, you need to get into the right mindset and turn tradeoffs and compromises into your best friends. 

How do you prioritize your product backlog?  There are plenty of methods to prioritize product activities. Here are 5 unusual product management techniques you should try out someday. 

Product management is about improving conversion rates Learn how to use these 84 cognitive b…

Hey everybody!

It’s that time of the year again when all the cool websites collect lame summaries and recaps of their old stuff so that they don’t have to come up with fresh content (and also get a chance to boost their internal linking and page rank…).

Well, I’m no different.

Plus, I’m a huge fan of summary posts.
Hence, this:   So without further adieu, let’s welcome this year’s most popular posts in the categories: UI design and UX Writing:





1. The most comprehensive guide to cognitive biases and how to use them in products  This one is my all-time favorite post (and this blog exists for over 12 years!).

I love it not because it took me hours to collect all of those 84 cognitive biases and design over 40 UI snippets, but because the process was pure joy!

This guide turned out to be pretty useful; it includes plenty of psychological insights, ways to understand human behavior, biases we all suffer from, loads of useful UI/UX tips, small marketing hacks, and tons of practical rules fo…

20 rules for designing and developing great data tables. 

Tables and grids have always been an important UI component for products and dashboards.
And yet, even today, it’s easy to find data tables that are badly designed or deliver an inadequate user experience.

I came up with the idea to write this UI guide (which was written a thousand times before, but not as brilliantly as I'm going to write it...) while doing some maintenance work for our product (yeah, in our startup, the most senior person does the cleaning...).

Anyway...

I went through over 30 different SeaS tools and SDKs that we're using and played with their dashboards to review some numbers, collect some insights, and make minor modifications. I couldn’t help but notice how bad those tables were implemented, in terms of UI design and basic functionality (and those are good Saas products I'm talking about).

Given that I’ve been developing (and using) tables for 20 years (yes, I know I'm old, one day you'…

Entrepreneurs and product leaders are well-trained to relentlessly prioritize the important stuff, and say no to everything else.

And yet, despite using countless prioritization tools and decision-making frameworks, we are often caught off-guard, allowing our human weaknesses and cognitive biases to get in our way and make bad product decisions.

Often enough, those bad decisions mean bad features sneaking into the product making it cluttered, lacking a coherent experience, and practically making it worse.

Here are 7 deadly sins that invite bad features to sneak into your product:

1. Ego  There’s nothing like inflated ego to make good entrepreneurs behave like rock stars seeking personal glory.



When the “me” part comes before everything else (company, users, employees), bad features are invited into the product for the sake of creating a buzz, being trendy, trying to get noticed and becoming famous.

The thing about ego is that it usually comes with other destructive characteristics suc…