Proximity in social networks: Find, don’t explore.

Few months ago, Natasha Lomas  @riptar wrote on TechCrunch: “Proximity social networking has often been a tough sell to consumers”. Apart from proximity services related to dating I totally agree with that. In my opinion there are actually two success factors for proximity in social networks.

First, its style and UI have to fit to its purpose. For example, the “hot or not” design of Tinder obviously is a perfect fit for the dating area. It’s easy to make ten decisions within five seconds, and even if one of them was “wrong” - no problem, it’s just for fun. In a business context, it is risky to dismiss someone just because of a quick glimpse when they are nearby. That is probably the main reason why the traditional business card is still doing a good job. It is extremely helpful to be able to quickly exchange cards at the first meeting, but still having the chance to decide if the contact might be valuable or not - maybe even with the help of additional tools such as LinkedIn. In any case, there will be no problem to get in touch with these contacts in the future. Even if you had first decided to ignore someone, you can still contact them, for instance if your professional environment has changed.

The second success factor is that users really have to benefit from their proximity to other users. Recalling the dating example, it totally makes sense to recommend persons nearby, rather than from the other end of the country. People would not be interested in these guys anyway. 

From the business perspective, proximity between social network users is nice to have, but it isn’t essential. It might be a little factor, but to be honest, experience, introductions, and past success count way more when people decide whom to get in touch with. If you are looking for an expert in any field, why should you limit yourself to people nearby? 

In my opinion, proximity or location services should be used the other way around. It’s not about finding people online to get in touch with them later. The key to professional networking is being able to find and connect to people you’ve already met in your real life.

Our app is pretty good at that, but we now came to the conclusion that decisions about the relevance of a contact do not have to be mutual. Therefore, in our next major update, you will be able to simply follow or favorite people you’ve met, so that you can easily find them on the major social networks later on. No mutual contact exchange and no social network friend request are needed anymore, but you will still be able to keep track of important people from your real life. 

Phillip Bellé CEO of MoID

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From paper prototype to UI - the resource friendly way

The notion "lean startup" has become a buzz word by now. Yet, embracing change and being able to react quickly is for sure one of the most important characteristics of a startup. You start your day with several hypotheses regarding your target audience and their pains, needs, and expectations, and in the evening, you'll already need to sort out quite a lot of them. In the following, I will briefly give you an impression on why changes happen so often in the startup area, and show you a quick example of how to consistently handle a change of the UI with a lightweight tool.

Why does change happen?

Especially in the kind of greenfield projects startups typically operate in, little is known about what the prospective user is going to think about the product you're building. And even though there are methods like questionnaires, focus groups, and the likes, it is very difficult to foresee the necessities of all the different kinds of users - especially in the current software market. Obviously, you should know your audience well, but it so happens that you will sketch your target group too fuzzy, and you will need to rely on feedback to know what is really going to work. Naturally, I am not talking about revolutionary changes to your idea, but more about small improvements of its realization and refinements of your target audience.
There will usually also be numerous other triggers for change, including time to market, opinions of external stakeholders (e.g. business angels or VCs), competitors' products, resource shortage, better ideas, and so on and so forth...

How to handle a change to the UI of my product?

We first sketch changes to our UIs on paper - no stencils, no rulers, no color, just plain pencil and paper. This allows us to quickly show one or several new designs to the whole team and selected beta users. It literally takes only minutes to come up with something understandable, while the lack of sophisticated graphics and color helps to concentrate on the most important: the content. On Figure 1 below, you see a sketch of one of our views, proudly hand-drawn by myself.

Figure 1. Paper sketch of a new view.

We wanted to create a view that resembles the typical badge that you get on an event. It should only contain your picture, your name, your company and links to your social networks.

The next step we perform is to enrich the sketches to form a preliminary prototype. To this end, we use a tool called POP (Prototyping on paper), which allows us to visualize changes to several UIs and transitions between them in a cheap, quick, and yet very vivid way. POP is just awesome, it is really easy to use, has practically no learning curve, and no unnecessary features that distract from the main use case. We can really only recommend it. Above all, it's free.
With POP we can create a shallow prototype of an application in mere minutes. Of course, there is no functionality whatsoever - but we can investigate interactions and concentrate on a consistent interface. This allows us to find errors and wrong assumptions even before spending hours to develop the real UI.

The last step of course, is to take the sketch from the drawing board to the interface builder. This is typically the most time intensive part of the game. Not always will the pencil design work on the real screen. Sometimes the metaphor needs more work, sometimes it just doesn't seem right. In any case you should consider taking the design one step back and trying out other realizations before spending days with the interface builder - the right level of abstraction for the right task. In our case, we went back and forth for some 2-3 iterations. Figure 2 below shows the result we are working with in our current dev version.

Figure 2. Current dev version of the new view.

When to use what?

In the end, a startup is a project with few resources, so choose your weapon wisely. Drawing on paper is the fastest way to go. POP will allow you to try interactions and observe people using your app before writing a single line of code. Starting to build the real UI only with a clear picture in mind, will help you to survive longer.

Dennis Pagano
CTO of MoID

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