My Talk at BarCamp San Diego: How to Create Applications People Love

I showed up at BarCamp7 this morning and saw that absolutely no presentations were up on the board whatsoever, so me being me I spent most of the day putting together a presentation at the last minute.

I spoke for an hour about How to Design Applications People Love. I’ll add more to this post later after I decompress with some TV, but here’s my PowerPoint:

All in all, it turned out really well – I’ll try to update this post with some more detail tomorrow.

Update 7/13/2010

Ok, here’s the run-down of my talk:

1. We all begin with ideas for new applications or products, but in order to determine if it’s worth actually pursuing any given idea we have to determine who the product’s core user group actually is and whether or not they’d actually use it enough to merit its production.
2. We begin this determination using “the onion process,” a name I invented on Sunday morning, which elegantly formalizes the process I’ve been using for my latest group of projects.
3. During our execution of the onion process, we inevitably make a number of assumptions about our application / product’s users – therefore we have to map out those assumptions explicitly so we can systematically test them when we start our customer / user engagement process. I find that it’s best to use a mind map for this, but a simple outline can work too.
4. Once we have our assumptions outlined, we have to test them by interviewing potential users and determine if and where we are on/off-target.
5. Let the process of churning begin.

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I'm the CTO and founder of Petabridge, where I'm making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, Phobos, and more..

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