Actual article date: May 14, 2013

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Interface, experience and interaction designs are core to Jublia’s effort in delivering the easiest and fastest way for event attendees to sieve through the relevant attendees and make valuable contacts at a conference, effortlessly.

As we run a closed networking platform for attendees at events and conferences, the emphasis in our product design is not immediately noticeable for many. Furthermore, since we are moving ahead with key developments in the next update to our networking platform, I thought this is a good time to share (and archive) how design has played a key role in our formative days!

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1. Design is as good as the progress of your product

It is easy to start designing for a utopia and strive for perfection in the product. It is easy to dream up new design functions and interactions. However, in the formative days of product development in a startup, those notions simply serve to distract your focus of the product.

It is actually far more challenging to make a product design simple and effectively drive home the core focus of your Minimum Viable Product to your clients.

One example is a distinctive feature of the Jublia match platform, the personalised listing. We built it to be dynamic, easily searchable and wholesome enough for all attendees to pinpoint relevant others on the go (yes, it’s mobile compatible!). On top of that, the relevance of others to you is rank from the top to the bottom with a graded background colour scheme to subtlety emphasis the relevance.
We still have much to iterate on to reach our envisioned feature. However, focusing on the core focus of your product and effectively communicate it to our clients, is probably the best favor that I have ever gifted to my team.

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2. Setting a design language

A design language is pretty key to keeping your design uncluttered. By adopting a homogeneous (yet holistic) design language over your product(s), it allows for the bits and pieces in your design to seamlessly fit together. Google’s recent overhaul of its design made their products so much more pleasing to use.

My experience is that it is fairly easy to design a static mockup for your product. However, to allow for a ‘deep’ design language in your product, one needs to think beyond graphics and emphasis more on fruitful combination of ‘interface elements-experience-interaction’ with your users. Think beyond wireframing; adopt a storytelling approach.

Over here, we adopt a Flat user interface design (that has since been popularised by Microsoft) with an ultra minimalistic approach to interface elements. Minimalistic approach are definitely pleasing to the eyes… on the first glance. After which, it is pretty easy to throw your users in to a state-of-confusion and leaving them feeling rather uncomfortable with your product. What we use to circumnavigate this issue is the great emphasis on using design interactions (rather than elements) to guide users. We are honing this ‘art’ daily and this brings me to the next point.

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3. Test, listen and iterate

Your design is as good as a senseless bet against your market if it is not repeatedly tested. The worst is, this senseless bet increase in it’s value (and risk) the more time you spend developing and not testing it.

A key lesson we learnt is to always listen to clients’ direct requests. Listening to event organisers and attendees has brought us a few eureka moments. The people who understand best is those who have a need. And many times, these people are not us (and not focus groups).

Fast iteration and testing your new interface elements is, in our opinion, far more valuable than making the interface elements flawless. Agile development (code wise and design wise) is pretty much what we practice on a daily basis!

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4. Speak to your users

And lastly, we learnt to always establish a interface-to-user communication channel rather than building a barrier to that channel :)

We would love to hear and learn from your experiences too!