Jeremy Britton: Turning Mediocre Products into Awesome Products

I'm sorry to post that Cathy Shive had to cancel her talk for our September meeting. But I'm happy to post that Jeremy Britton will be filling in with a talk that looks equally awesome. Here's the description from Jeremy and his design consultancy, ZURB:

Turning Mediocre Products into Awesome Products

How many product ideas never make it to market? Why does this happen so often? ZURB doesn't believe it's because of bad ideas. We believe what's missing is a holistic approach to design for people, inside and outside the organization. In this talk we take a practical look at the design process and techniques everyone should know, including:

• Sketching to sell and open up the idea.

• Creating a product blueprint with proof points.

• Finding team overlap between Marketing, Design, and Engineering.

This people-centered, holistic approach to design makes Apple and other innovative companies what they are today. It has helped our 150+ clients create more than a billion dollars in market cap.

Jeremy Britton is Partner at ZURB, a 13-year old interaction design consultancy with over 150 start-ups under its belt (some of which include Facebook, Netflix, eBay, McAfee, SalesForce, Yahoo, Reuters). Setting up problems that people care about and then solving them in ways that work for businesses and delight customers are his focus at ZURB. He still loves to draw pictures, which comes in very handy at these tasks.

A San Francisco Bay Area native, he graduated from the hilltop forest known as UC Santa Cruz (Banana Slugs!) with a degree in Fine Art and an emphasis on digital media and electronics. His background in theatrical set design led him to create some pretty far out art installations during this period and his stint as a graduate teaching assistant gave him his jump into the web industry. “Getting a bunch of students to take their crazy ideas and actually turn them into something with Flash or on the web was extremely cool,” he said.

Before joining ZURB, Jeremy worked as an independent design consultant, then animator and interactive designer for Walmart.com, and later co-founded his own digital media company NING Empire, though not the Ning that closed $44 million in financing last year.

Admittedly, this is not an iOS-specific talk, but I promised Jeremy that in our Q&A followup we will make it one. :)

Add Game-like features to your app with Beintoo

We'll also have a short presentation from Antonio Tomarchio and Ferdinando Messina of Beintoo, who will tell us how their service can help add game-like features to our apps. From Antonio:

Beintoo is the first do-it-yourself mobile gamification and rewards technology that creates a true gamification layer. Developers can use a set of SDKs or our APIs to introduce cross-platform game mechanics such as leaderboards, social graph and social network elements, contests, challenges among users, achievements and cross-apps missions, location-based features, and more.

Developers can deliver geotargeted rewards, such as mobile coupons provided by brands and retailers, to users who achieve goals in the gamified experience, enabling developers to introduce a new, innovative monetization channel that is fully integrated in the app user experience. Beintoo aims at gamifying the apps discovery experience too: developers can create "sponsored missions" with achievements of their interest and distribute them inside the missions of third party apps , paying for the generated engagement. The idea is to go from a "pay per install" model to a true "pay per engagement" model where users are led into a cross apps experience and really discover new apps.

Protecting Privacy is Our Business

Jason Beatty from PrivacyChoice has offered to tell us about Mobile Policymaker, a tool that we can use to create custom privacy policies for our apps.

One More Thing

Finally, I understand there'll be "one more thing" -- a special announcement from Logitech.

See you there!