Akshay, Ankit and the Pulse app - Creative Confidence #16
Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, computer science students at Stanford, joined a design thinking course LaunchPad.
In it, you've to start a company and incorporate before the quarter is over. They decided to work on the experience of reading the daily news by creating an application for the then-recently-announced Apple iPad.
Their first assignment was to build a functional prototype in four days. Both set up camp in a café, spending as many as ten hours a day there. They realized they were among their future customers, all sipping their coffee and reading the news.
They started with quick, rough prototypes, getting feedback from café patrons every step of the way. At first, they used a series of Post-it notes to simulate the flow of the user interface for their news app. Later, with actual software mockups on an iPad, it got even easier to gather input.
They would keep one out on the table. When a passerby inevitably stopped to ask whether it was in fact an iPad, they would hand it over with the latest prototype version of their app open and then watch them interact with it.
They observed what they did and made small iterations, changing everything from interaction patterns to the size of a button.
The result of their intense effort, rapid iteration, and relentless action was Pulse News, an elegant news reader launched. It was so successful that a few months after launch, Steve Jobs showed off Pulse from the main stage of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
Lesson:
Creativity is not just about coming up with the one genius idea that solves the problem, but trying and failing at a hundred other solutions before arriving at the best one.
Minimise planning, maximise action; have a "do something" mindset.
[Creative Confidence Newsletter: 16 of 25]
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