Fictiv

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.

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, [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]