The Mobile Spoon

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…

My first boss was fanatical about using the right terminology and industry jargon.  He was right.
I recently came across an interesting post by a product manager, complaining that her CEO freaks out whenever a wrong term is used in a document, a meeting, or even worse, in the product.

It reminded me of my first CEO who repeatedly urged all of us (sales, PMs, developers, QA engineers) to use the terminology and jargon used by the industry our products operated in.

He used to argue with us, correct us, waste time on explaining that words are more important than features, and he even fired someone for using Disney-style terms in a product demo (true story!). He was fanatical about terminology, and while it felt like madness 20 years ago, today I know he was right and we were all wrong.

Reading that young PM question (and some of the answers), convinced me to write this post and emphasize why product leaders, developers, UX Writers, and basically anyone who's involved in developing sof…

4 years ago we founded Missbeez: a mobile marketplace for lifestyle and beauty services on-demand.  For me, it was a significant change from leading a large B2B product to co-founding a small B2C startup. 
From the very beginning, it was clear that data will play a significant role in our decision-making process. We moved fast, made a lot of experimental changes, and didn't have those large customer representatives to talk to when making our decisions. I had to change my habits and replace humans with numbers.

We've embedded Mixpanel, Google Analytics, AppsFlyer, Facebook SDKs, Crashlytics, and a bunch of other tools, we created our own dashboard as well as a unique and addictive mobile dashboard, and deployed a set of real-time logs. It was fun!
Over the first 2 years of our startup, we've learned the hard way that being a data-driven company is harder than it seems.
I would like to share with you some of the lessons learned while working with data. I believe our insight…

Mobile apps have been around for over a decade and even though it feels they are becoming a commodity - mobile products are still different than web or desktop products in many aspects. 
In this post, I would like to share my thoughts about mobile design and development, based on over 15 years of experience in this field.

This post will discuss the essence of designing a mobile user experience: UI, UX, and user scenes, which are all different for mobile when compared to desktop applications.

Let's dive in: 
1. Make graphic design a priority It’s a war zone out there, with millions of apps competing with each other for the attention of users.
People have higher standards nowadays, especially iPhone and high-end Android owners.

Your users treat their smartphones as a piece of jewelry with that gorgeous giant screen and slick edges, and they won’t let any app come-in and ruin that perfect look.

Nobody cares about your tech. Make it look gorgeous.
If an app doesn’t deliver a slick, b…