Fictiv

Fictiv is growing slowly and strongly. Last year, I relocated the business to San Francisco and it’s been the best decision yet. I am enjoying the weather, the restless startup community, and the endless events.
A couple of months ago, I traveled back home (Egypt) where I spent 5 weeks with family and friends, and visited many software companies and start-ups (more about this in a later, more focused, post). Out of that trip came some fruitful partnerships with some of the coolest development agencies in Egypt, run by amazing folks that I’ve known and worked with for more than two years.

OpenCraft is an open-source web application development firm with branches in Cairo, Egypt and Vancouver, Canada. Their clients include Intel, Microsoft, Reuters and PriceWaterHouseCoopers.

eSpace is a web/iPhone application development firm based in Alexandria, Egypt. eSpace clients include Google, Vodafone, Yamli and Texas A&M University.

OpenCraft and eSpace teams will be working closely with Fictiv’s design and program management teams to provide integrated design and development packages that are fast, iterative, and cost-effective.

I am also excited that we just moved to a gorgeous new loft space in Downtown San Francisco, right across the street from Moscone West and Yerba Beuna park, at 363 Clementina.

Here are some photos of our new space:

Yesterday, Adobe made a pleasant surprise and quietly announced that the Beta version of Flash Catalyst is finally out. I’ve been teased by many presentations over the past few months and I was excited I could finally get my hands on this product and try it out.

In case you don’t know what Catalyst is, it’s an ambitious effort to bridge the gap between design and development workflows. This is a very interesting topic to me as I worked hard with the Expression Blend team from 2004 to 2007 to solve that problem. Blend and Catalyst are very different from each other, and I will not be attempting a comparison here.

I played with Catalyst for a couple of hours yesterday, simulating some workflows for a couple of RIAs that we’ve worked on before, and trying to get some graphics into Flex for a project that we’re currently working on. 

Here are some of my first impressions of the tool

 

• The import from AI and PSD is flawless. Graphical elements appear exactly the same as they do in Illustrator and Photoshop. 
• The environment looks familiar with existing Adobe graphics and illustration tools, and the keyboard shortcuts and modifiers work the same, providing a minimal learning curve to get started with the tool.
• The tool converts graphical elements into native Flex drawing elements. This leads to a very lightweight application that maintains high quality look and feel since nothing is rasterized. ( Some components got converted from Photoshop into sliced CSS, so I am assuming that the native graphics is only available for imported Illustrator files only, which makes sense).
• The new timeline provides state based animation and effects rather than keyframe based animation, a model that I admire in Flex over Flash, and that’s far more convenient for Rich Internet Applications.
• It is still unclear to me who should be using Catalyst. I happen to be a devigner (developer/designer) and I know how to move between tools. Since Catalyst blends many aspects from Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex, I’d imagine it’s convenient for both designers and developers to use.
• The fact that Catalyst doesn’t work with Fireworks is bothersome to me, as this is my favorite program for mocking up interfaces and delivering graphical assets. During a Protofarm presentation last week, Adobe mentioned that support for Fireworks will come in future versions. I guess I’ll have to be patient and wait.
• I strongly believe that Catalyst should be integrated into Flex, and not a separate tool. May be I am biased by what I’ve learned while working on Blend and doing my earlier research on programmer’s productivity, but I know that there is some resistance from developers and designers for adopting new tools. It also makes sense to integrate it into Flex Builder as it’s got many features that already exist in Flex (State-based animation, code/design views, etc…)
• My biggest challenge using Catalyst would be round trip design/development workflows. Almost every RIA project we’ve worked on involved late transfer of graphical assets into the application after the wireframes have been delivered, a prototype has been developed, several iterations of prototyping and redesign have been performed, and final assets were delivered.
• While CSS separates presentation logic from business logic, Catalyst makes the presentation assets part of the code, which is a drawback for me. We’ve enjoyed switching assets dynamically on several projects by simply providing a different CSS file that was blissfully generated from Fireworks through the Flex extension, and we’ve worked on several projects where clients needed the interface to be skinned dynamically. My initial investigation into Catalyst didn’t provide a way for me to do this, at least not easily.
• Currently there are half-dozen UI components that are supported. When I tried converting graphics for a tab container, I couldn’t find a corresponding UI component. I hope that Adobe will ship the final version of Catalyst with as many standard components as Flex currently supports
• No library support: An Illustrator file typically contains multiple instances of the same component. For instance, a dialog box design would contain two buttons for Ok and Cancel, using the same graphics as an Illustrator symbol. There is no way that I found to designate an existing button graphics to a previously converted button instance. Especially with PSD files being converted by Catalyst into bitmap images, it would be nice to have a way to unify the button designs that are created. Moreover, it would be awesome if Catalyst could parse Illustrator symbols and automatically convert them to controls based on some naming convention.
• Navigation in and out of groups and layers was a bit hard. Double clicking does not navigate into groups, which made it hard to navigate sub-elements for conversion or animation.
• The timeline needs some work for it to become more intuitive. Currently, there are no UI hints or affordance mechanism to call to one action or another once a state is selected. There is definitely a good amount of empty space before any transition is created to hint users about what needs to be done.

 

Flash Catalyst is ideal if you’re building a new RIA based on Flex Builder/Actionscript and you’ve got your user interface assets ready. Overall, I am very pleased by the approach that Adobe is taking to help bridge the gap between designers and developers. I believe that this is a very important gap to fill in every software life cycle, and I give Adobe credit for being one of the first movers into that space with a very robust tool.

If you’d like to learn more info about Flash Catalyst, here is a short video by Kevin Lynch:

 

In his book, Purple cow, Seth Godin gives very valuable advice on how to stand out from the crowd.  Here are some key points from the book:

• Being remarkable doesn’t mean likable. Remarkable means “worth making a remark about”. Whether it’s positive or negative, that’s up to you.  Or as Oscan Wilde put it: “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”
• You need to figure out who cares about your business, and cater to these customers.
• Being normal is boring. Being very good is the opposite of being outstanding. Being safe is risky.
• Once you have a purple cow, milk it to the last drop. Create a team of milkers who take full advantage of your success, and a team of innovators who create your next purple cow.
• Differentiate your customers, and cater to the most profitable and reward the most influential ones.
• Pick an underserved niche in your industry and cater to their needs. Pick the smallest conceivable market and create a product that’s remarkable enough to overtake it. Make it fresh and intriguing. And market it to those who desperately need it.
• Being remarkable isn’t always just about the product. It may be the way you pick up the phone, or the way you care about your customers.
• Make your product or service conversation-provoking. Make it an idea and a story that spreads.
• Find the influencers and target them. They will create a great word of mouth campaign for you.
• Examing your four P’s (Product, Pricing, Positioning and Publicity), determine your outer limits, get out on the edge, and don’t be afraid of getting started.

The book is a light and enjoyable one, and I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to start a business and succeed by being remarkable.

And here is a video presentation by Seth from TED about the same topic.

Few weeks ago, one of my friends asked me to help him hire a full time designer for his startup. As it takes a theif to spot a thief, it takes a designer to spot a designer.

There are of course questions that I ask about the person’s background, experience, style and ethics. There are the common questions that I ask in every design interview: describe a product you love, how would you improve it, describe a feature you hate, how would you fix it, etc…

But the one question that helped me spot a bad designer has been the simple request of redesigning something common and simple. Like a pencil.

This is probably one of the trickiest design questions because it doesn’t involve much design. Pencils have been arounds for centuries, and people are very comfortable using them. Is there something wrong with them? I don’t know. But that’s what I’d like the person I am interviewing to ask. This question is mostly about measuring the designer’s ability to ask good questions. The quality and quantity of these questions will help me understand how much the designer wants to understand who he audience is, how they use the product, what they like about it, what they hate about it, how much they are willing to pay for a better pencil, etc…

Design, like many things in life, is about getting over one’s previous experience, learning and conditioning to open one’s mind to different possibilities. When I was at school, I wasn’t taught to ask the right questions, but to find the right answers for the questions I was given. In learning design, I learned that the quality of the answers I am getting depend on the quality of questions I am asking. And that the sooner I reach an answer and I decide that it’s the right one, the more I close up the potential for innovation and creativity in finding the best solution.

Next time you interview a designer, ask them to redesign your favorite product, and listen carefully to the questions that they ask. The more curious they are to learn about you, not just the product, the better chance they have in helping you get your product design done right.

Last year has been good. It’s been actually good beyond our wildest expectations.
We met great people, worked with amazing startups, and enjoyed designing a wide range of exciting products and services.

Here are some of the highlights of 2008:

• In January, blist was shown to the public for the first time in Demo 2008.  Blogs raved about the product, its slick user interface and its ease of use, and Kevin Merritt’s presentation became the #1 most watched video on DEMO’s website. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences for us given the amount of work and number of iterations that were put in the product up to that point.
• In February, we started working with Delve Networks (formerly Pluggd) on their new platform and user interface. We worked with the executive and product teams during 6 months to create user experience roadmaps and innovative UI and interactions. In June, Delve showcased their new user interface which was received with great praise and provided the company with a competitive edge over existing platforms.
• In February, we also started working with inCampus on the new version of the product. We provided them with strategic design and product planning advice that helped them compete against existing products and win student’s audiences in several universities.
• In May, we started working with UStream TV on the redesign of their product. UStream is one of the most fun and exciting team to work with. Two months later, UStream released a redesigned homepage, and numerous social and viral features were added to the site.
• In August, we met with the DocVerse team who told us about their plans to take over the document collaboration world. We loved their vision and charisma so much and committed to helping them realize it. DocVerse was one of the product that we surprised ourselves with the outcome, being one of the most fruitful and elegant projects we’ve worked on so far.
• Finally, in September, we started working with Stuart Skorman and his team to bring the ClerkDogs vision to reality, solving many conceptual and visual challenges and accelerating the product release, which was raved about in the press and blogosphere.

At the end of the year, we realized that we worked on a social mainstream database, a media publishing platform, a social commerce application, a web streaming site,  a document collaboration software, and a movie recommendation engine.

That’s a handful of diverse projects that we never imagined working on in just one year. And we learned a lot from working with driven, positive entrepreneurs who want to change the world. Their charisma has been a constant inspiration to us, and their attitude towards problem solving always reminded us why we are doing this in the first place.

But what we learned the most, is that no matter what we are designing, the goal is the same: to empower people to do more than what they imagined themselves capable of doing in the first place. To make them unleash their creativity and enjoy some blissful moments of flow. To create extensions of their minds that enable them to express themselves and connect with others.

That’s the power of good design. And that’s what we strive for in every moment.