Online marketplace acts as a source for price data in Indian economy

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/online-marketplace-acts-as-a-source-for-price-data-in-indian-economy/story-tdJseAftmpPhlv6XvLSlCL.html 
Good read about how prices on an e-com site can be used to calculate inflation index like CPI. The advantages of this approach being its cheaper, quicker and more efficient. 

Lyft new search bar design

https://uxdesign.cc/what-every-product-designer-should-take-away-from-lyfts-new-ui-742c9668b067 

Unlike other transportation apps, Lyft’s search bar isn’t at the top and it’s not at the way-bottom, it’s in a sweet spot for thumbs. A good example of making sure your most frequently interacted with elements are the most reachable elements of your interface.

Positioning Is the Part of Product Market Fit You are Likely Ignoring

Positioning Is the Part of “Product Market Fit” You’re Likely Ignoring

Most people when searching for product market fit, focus on the product - let’s release an MVP (product) to see if people are interested; if not, add more features to product and so on. Instead focus on positioning and keep updating that until you find the right mix.

Positioning is about finding answers to following questions -
- Who do customers think your product/service is for? - Wide vs narrow targeting
- What do customers think makes you unique?
- What pain points do they think you solve?
- How credible do they perceive you to be?

UX for Lean Startups

This is 3rd Lean book that I have read on Lean, the first two being Lean Startup and Lean Analytics. I can vouch this is definitely one of the best books and strongly recommend to anyone who has an idea about solution to a problem and wants to convert that to a product. The book offers practical advice for validating all that you need towards building a product. 

The book starts by offering advice on how to conduct qualitative research on the idea to check if customers really need that and then moving on to landing pages to confirm the hypothesis and then to A/B testing to get statistically significant data on whether proposed changes increases certain metrics or not. 

Between the various ideas, the books talks about how to speed up things aka faster user research, faster design etc. emphasizing the "lean" concept of doing just enough and thus avoiding wastage. 

Other key takeaways for me were designing the test first, when to use qualitative vs quantitative tests, tips on creating various types of MVP including landing page, Wizard of Oz, Fake door test etc.

Creating habit forming products

We all (ok, most of us) are hooked to Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and other similar apps. Such is our hook that some of us are actually addicted to these apps. What is the secret of these habit forming apps? Nir Eyal in his book Hooked tries to provide an answer.

He explains that any habit forming app has 4 parts as depicted in following image-

Lets see this with an example of Facebook –

1. Trigger

• First time trigger for downloading FB app could be –
• You heard it from one of your friends via word of mouth
• Saw some online ad for FB
• An automated email from one of your friends who has been using FB for some time. 
• Some product ad that has a FB page and has a campaign etc running that you would like to be part of 
• Once you have downloaded FB and have started using it, the external trigger would be the app notifications for one among many of the following
• Friend requests, 
• Video recommendations, 
• Friend suggestions, 
• Likes on your picture, posts etc. 
• The internal trigger could be that you are feeling bore and therefore would like to see Facebook. Notice that in this case Facebook has successfully mapped an emotion in your mind with their app. 

2. Action

• Comes in form of user opening the app and viewing updates from others, sharing his own. 
• Nir talks about making action task as frictionless as possible and that’s what Facebook has been good at - App is available on mobile and desktop, provides infinite scroll and for people in countries with limited data speed, it even provides for a Facebook Lite app. 

3. Variable reward

• Reward in Facebook comes in form of 
• “Reward of Tribe” which is a rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included in our community.
• “Reward of Hunt” which is to do with reward that makes us feel that we have acquired new knowledge, maybe about our friends, new skills (through some video, group pages etc. )

4. Investment

• Comes in form of user storing his personal photos, his check-in details, his posts with Facebook. 
• Also comes in form of user inviting more of his friends
• Eventually, user forms a network of friends who like or provide comments to his stuff and thus giving him a trigger to come back later to check what his friends have written and who all of them liked his stuff. 

Similar to Facebook, Hook model can be applied to other products too.


However, there are few cases where Hook Model doesn’t seem to have an answer. In my opinion, these are products which are not "social" in nature. As an example, if we were to apply Hook model to a successful product of last decade, say Acrobat Reader, this is what I get -

• External trigger- I receive a PDF from a friend/office etc. or I download a pdf from some site
• Internal trigger- The pain is related to ability to read content of pdf document.
• Action- Motivation is to read the doc and ability is ease of opening at no cost to buy a software (via free Acrobat Reader) to open pdf
• Reward- I can read content and that's possibly a reward but it doesn't fit into tribe, Hunt or Self category and there doesn't seem to be variability.
• Investment- I don't seem to store anything with Acrobat. I am probably inclined to use any other software which can let me open pdf. For that matter, I am ok to use any product A which lets me open a document of type B. 

As can be seen, reward and investment is not very obvious but still Acrobat has been a very successful product.

Understanding Indian society through advertising

Nawabs, Noodles and Nudes by Ambi Parameswaran provides interesting insights around how Indian society has evolved over the past 50 years (and more so after Indian economy opened for liberalization in 90s). Advertising has used both social trends as well as attempted to change behavior when selling products and services.

Few examples of such changes include -
- Changing men- In 70s, the depiction was of macho man (refer Lifeboy ad) to a man who is using Fair Lovey to remain ‘fair’.
- Dynamics of husband-wife relationship from a suffering women to empowered women (refer Airtel ad where wife is the boss)
- Changing role of women from being a housewife to aspirational (refer, Santoor ad in 1986 showing woman at wedding while one in 1994 shows woman doing aerobics.)
- Ads depicting older people not showing the pain/suffering but of celebration and second innings (refer SBI Life ads) due to improved longevity

Its interesting also to see how some ads in India have brought in major changes like –
- Commodity mindset to brand mindset in wheat. Refer Captain Cook ads
- Making eggs food habit for Indians. Refer NECC ad

The book is organized into 4 broad sections, namely, people, product, services and ad narratives, each of which looks at changes in society from a different lens. The author also predicts the trends in next few years at end of each section and sub-section. The book is very interesting read for somebody who wants to understand what goes in an advertiser’s mind when creating an ad. For me, born before liberalization and seen a ‘controlled’ version of television and ads, this book provides interesting memorabilia of old ads as well.

Book review- FIRE: How Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant Methods Ignite Innovation

FIRE is a book for project managers and people in leadership positions that outlines four core principles for a successful project – fast, inexpensive, restrained and elegant. ‘Fast’ is doing quality work on short timeline, no cutting corners, no haste, going in right direction, ‘Inexpensive’ is about setting cost ceiling, not about making a cheap solution, ‘Restrained’ means self-control in all other principles and ‘Elegant’ is making things simple.

The book has been authored by Dan Ward who is a Lieutenant Colonel in military engineering in US and he shares his insights based on analysis of several defence projects, the likes of spacecrafts, propellers, rockets etc, a lot of which have been highlighted in his book.

Dan advocates reliance on smaller teams, tighter budgets, shorter schedules and simpler goals. Smaller teams gel well and have fewer communication issues. Tighter budgets foster creativity to complete within constraints including dropping of unnecessary feature. Shorter schedules help us to see things better in short term (at the same time not losing control of larger vision). Simplicity is moving away from creating a complicated solution, one which is easier for users to train on.  

Dan also highlights why we keep following the opposite of FIRE. The reasons for the same includes notion of associating bigger project with costly and bigger team, notion of a better product only if it has more features and belief that complexity is same as sophisticated.

Personally, I found these principles as a good refresher. I had heard or read about these on a piecemeal basis and it was good to discover these principles also working for most complicated projects as in defence. I also found FIRE principles to be close to Agile manifesto, especially around smaller teams and short-term planning.