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Launching your new start-up - how slick does your UI need to be?

4 points by spydre100 ↗ HN
So you have had an idea for the next Twitter or Facebook app. The idea is like rocket fuel! Your personal brain is full of ideas to tweak and twist your concept, capture your user base, monetize your audience, to realise your dream from notepad to server.

You've invested endless sleepless nights building a rock solid scaleable backend - But your desperate to take that step and get your app live. To get your web-services responding, and your cloud filling with rich-user data.

You ponder your big move. If your idea is to really grab it's audience the UI has to be slick, right? Rich in Ajax and CS5 like sweet tasting ginger on a firm cheesecake. But of-course you could just sprinkle the ginger once your live - right?

After-all an app is not something that is complete, it’s something that is evolving. Twitter did it. Why hold back? Why keep it under the hood when a small base of users could start testing your app-model and giving you feedback. Right now.

If you were super smart you could just launch a mobile service. The UI is much simpler reminiscing sites way back before Ajax and CS5. And when you dig deeper in thought, phone users are a large target in your audience. That would get a solid UI out and running in a flash, and your beta users could really evaluate your IDEA,rather than how it does it. Comparing your mobile site on and even par to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. And while that’s getting feedback you can get the screen version live, in all it‘s glory.

Or on the other hand you could just hold back. Go to work on the sweet tasting ginger that tops your cake. Build your super slick interfaces, driven by that rocket fuel that has powered you this far.

You ponder your move. What do you do. Build the mobile site as a Beta launch tester, as a product to tease investors and on-lookers. Or hold back with your idea. Bite your tongue, endure your heart pounding and push on until you have the Ajax Ginger sprinkled beautifully over cheese cake?

Thoughts please…

5 comments

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aspir
It depends on the time necessary to develop it in my opinion. If you could spend a rigorous 7-14 days (assuming 10+ hr days) and get the UI done well, then do it. If it would need longer to branstorm and completely dream up a UI for the product- cram it into 2 weeks anyway. Push something.

Possibly the best thing going for you is that the "best looking" software and web applications of today are minimalist, so you'd only need to focus on making the bare essentials look solid, without a need for filler junk.

spydre100
Ah. I cant see us building a facebook UI in 10-14 days. Of course as you say. We could start off with the core items - but even then we need min 1 month. In fairness. So is it best to do just this or get the mobile much simpler server running so we can test the service - get some feedback?
kls
Slick has no bearing, what you should be focusing on is usability. Craiglist is the antithesis of "slick" but what it is, is usable. Shoot for usable first and then slick second. As well, never compromise usable for "slick", if you can accomplish both great if not always chose the former over the latter. Once you have usable mastered then you can target slick to areas that you want to draw attention to, like your revenue generation items on the page. Do so in a subtle manner, the flashing banner ads of the 90's where the slick of the time and many are still recovering from those grievous usability errors.
spydre100
Slick was perhaps the wrong word. I think that it is agreed that the use of ajax (in the right way) makes app more usable slick. I think facebook is a good example of this. Their ajax implementations make for a more usable UI.

I think that on that note the simple mobile implementation again refering to facebook can be done in a simplistic manner but with good usability.After-all it is agreed that simple is good. This it can be done very quickly. It's also a good way to test the "useability" of a concept.

Since we are low on resource and un-funded would it be a bad decision for us to tackle the mobile app in this way, quickly. Start testing the useabilty of our app with a handful of users while we move on to a more advance slick as i put it ajax'd version for more advance browser clients ???

kls
My personal belief, that has been reinforced by my experiences, is that one should take the path that leads to a revenue the fastest without damaging the brand. But it does take a lot to damage a software brand. A lot of people talk about PG's MVP I have never read or heard the exact conversation about it by PG but from peripheral conversation that I have seen about it, I looks to be a similar concept. Point is, don't target the largest market, target the market you can get to first and build the minimum feature set that will capture it. It buys you time, even if you have to scrap and rewrite the whole thing for 2.0 you should build it as rapidly as possible with the minimum feature set required.