Archive for Blog

Google acquires Docverse

Blog, News on March 9th, 2010 Comments

Working with Docverse has been one of the highlights of my career. When I reconnected with Shan and Alex after they moved from Seattle to San Francisco, and heard their pitch, I got totally hooked by their vision for the product; what excited me wasn’t just how great their technology was, but how focused [...]

Just moved!

News on December 4th, 2009 Comments

I decided to move all design-related thoughts and stories to my blog.
Please direct your RSS subscription to http://feeds.feedburner.com/AmirKhella, where I will be sharing stories and thoughts about design, business and life.

Don’t violate fundamental design laws - even if you’re Apple

Design, News on November 3rd, 2009 Comments

When the iPhone O/S update brought a voice recording feature to the device, I was happily surprised because I love using recorders to take voice notes on the go then transcribe them later on.
When I started using the application, I liked the visual skin of the application but was frustrated by its usability: the application, [...]

D3 - Designing with Clients

Design, News on October 10th, 2009 Comments

Few months ago, we started experimenting with a new Design workflow that we called D3. D3 stands for Deep Dive Design. Prior to D3, we used a communication-intensive process where we involve clients and users in the input and output of each design iteration: vision, usability metrics, stories, tasks, requirements, brainstorming, sketches, wireframes, and visual [...]

Useful advice from Lao Tzu

Advice, News, startups on September 26th, 2009 Comments

Act without doing;
Think without effort.
Think of the small as large,
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult,
while it’s still easy.
Accomplish the great task,
by a series of small acts.

The Feature is Not The Experience

Blog, Design, News on September 17th, 2009 Comments

Design thinking for startups

Blog, Design, Learning, News, Tools on September 9th, 2009 Comments

During the 2008 web 2.0 expo in San Francisco, I held a round table discussion about design thinking for start-ups. The premise of the discussion was to 1) learn the difference between design (the artifact) and design thinking (the mindset), and 2) to discuss how to integrate best practices for design thinking into the product [...]

Client testimonials’ word cloud

Design, News, Tools, review on September 9th, 2009 Comments

During the last startup weekend, a friend pointed me out to a fun tool for creating  typographic word clouds called wordle. Today, I decided to play more with it and I gave it the testimonials that clients left in my LinkedIn profile.
After some tweaking to the fonts and colors, here is what the output looks [...]

Delve Networks ranked among the top 50 Most Usable RIAs

Design, News on September 6th, 2009 Comments

Last year I worked with Delve Networks to design their user experience. This week, O’Reilly’s InsideRIA blog mentioned Delve as one of the most usable Rich Internet Applications.
Here is what Theresa Neil thought of the design:
Delve designers realized content creators weren’t interested in navigating through a bunch of screens to accomplish tasks. They have [...]

Augmented Reality - The future looks exciting!

News on June 24th, 2009 Comments