Closing the product ↔️ customer build cycle 🔄
Imagine crafting an app so close to your audience’s thoughts, it practically mirrors their needs before they even vocalize them. This isn’t a futuristic fantasy, but rather the cutting edge of design and development — building at the speed of thought.
This radical approach throws out the rulebook of slow, laborious development cycles, instead forging a path of rapid iteration fueled by real-time user feedback.
Today, we delve into the heart of this lightning-fast process, exploring its tools, strategies, and captivating potential to revolutionize how we build apps that truly click with users. Buckle up, for we’re about to embark on a whirlwind journey of innovation at the pace of human imagination!
The speed-of-thought approach thrives on a feedback loop tighter than a drumskin. Imagine a cozy Starbucks cafe teeming with potential users. Each receives a gift card and becomes a partner in creation. Developers wield tools like SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, building lightning-fast app iterations every 40 minutes.
Each update is met with user feedback, fueling the next cycle. Over a week, hundreds of iterations refine the app into a diamond, gleaming with insights directly from its target audience.
By the end, you’re holding not just an app, but a customer-forged masterpiece, ready to conquer the app store. Fast, furious, and user-centric — that’s the essence of building at the speed of thought.
Important Aspects:
- Customer-Centric Approach: Bringing developers and designers close to the customers ensures that the product aligns closely with user needs and preferences.
- Rapid Iteration: The fast iteration loop, rebuilding the app every 40 minutes and incorporating feedback continuously, allows for quick evolution and improvement of the product.
- Developer Velocity and Innovation: Encouraging a fast develop-test-learn cycle fosters innovation and helps create a better final product.
- Engagement Strategy: Offering Starbucks gift cards as an incentive for users to test the app and provide feedback is a clever and engaging way to involve customers in the development process.
Underneath the Starbucks facade and rapid iterations lies a finely tuned tech stack humming with speed. Here’s a breakdown of the key gears:
Tools and Architecture
Using the right tools and architecture to achieve rapid development.
- Swift and Kotlin: These are similar languages for iOS and Android development, respectively.
- SwiftUI & Jetpack Compose: These hot-reload enabled frameworks let developers sculpt responsive UIs, reflecting changes instantly on both iOS and Android devices.
- Clean Architecture: Separation of concerns between data, domain logic, and presentation keeps things maintainable and testable.
- Dependency Injection: Mocking and testing code becomes a breeze, facilitating rapid iteration.
- Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI/CD): Changes pushed to code repositories seamlessly trigger automated tests and deployments. This ensures fast and reliable deployments.
Real-time feedback loop
Getting real-time feedback from customers to guide development. This can be achieved by:
- Testing with real users: Involving customers in the testing process can provide valuable insights.
- User interactions and performance data are captured and analyzed in real-time, informing the next iteration.
- Visualizing user behavior directly on the app screen reveals friction points and usage patterns.
- Rapid development cycles: Releasing new versions frequently and getting feedback on them quickly can help refine the app.
Collaborative environment
- A Starbucks Cafe as a Testing Laboratory: Forget sterile labs, imagine a vibrant Starbucks buzzing with user testing! The casual warmth, diverse clientele (everyone loves coffee!), and open atmosphere foster genuine conversations and uninhibited feedback — a melting pot of real-world insights to refine your app into a masterpiece, brewed with the human connection only Starbucks can offer.
- Diverse development teams: Teams that reflect the target audience bring a deeper understanding of their needs and challenges. So, having a team that reflects the customer base can help understand their needs better.
This intricate interplay of tools, processes, and human interaction pushes the boundaries of development speed, forging apps that are not just built, but co-created with users at the core.
Benefits
Building at the speed of thought offers several advantages:
- Faster innovation: By iterating quickly, you can test and implement new ideas rapidly.
- Reduced risk: Frequent deployments and feedback loops can help identify and fix issues early.
- Improved customer satisfaction: By involving customers in the development process, you can ensure the app meets their needs.
Using the right tools, architecture, and development practices, you can build applications at the speed of thought, leading to faster innovation and better customer experiences.
A Starbucks Cafe as a Testing Laboratory
Starbucks Cafe Testing Lab:
Forget sterile test labs; imagine the welcoming buzz of a Starbucks cafe transformed into a vibrant testing ground. The casual setting, infused with the aroma of coffee and friendly chatter, puts users at ease. This creates a fertile environment for open communication and uninhibited feedback. Gone are the artificial setups; replaced by genuine conversations fostered by shared love for delicious coffee and snacks.
Harnessing Starbucks’ Diverse Clientele: This isn’t just any crowd; it’s a melting pot of backgrounds, demographics, and perspectives. Starbucks attracts a cross-section of the population, a microcosm of the real world your app needs to conquer. Students, professionals, families — all united by a common thread: the desire for a quality caffeine, tea, drink, snack fix and a comfortable space to connect. By tapping into this diverse clientele, you gain invaluable insights from a tapestry of experiences and needs, ensuring your app resonates with everyone, not just a select few.
This new approach, fueled by the familiar allure of a Starbucks and the genuine engagement of its multi-cultural patrons, pushes the boundaries of user testing. It’s not just about data and reports; it’s about understanding people, their lives, and how your app fits into their unique puzzle.
This is the secret sauce of the “Starbucks Cafe Testing Lab”: human connection brewed with the power of technology.
Summary
Building at the speed of thought isn’t just a catchy phrase; it’s a technological revolution brewing in the heart of app development.
By blending hot-reload UI frameworks, lightning-fast build pipelines, and a relentless hunger for real-time user feedback, this approach sculpts apps that feel almost precognitive, perfectly in tune with their audience’s needs.
It’s a future where development cycles shrink to minutes, innovation sprints, and the user isn’t just a consumer, but a co-pilot in the creative process. So, the next time you hold an app that seems to anticipate your every move, remember — it might just be the product of a whirlwind journey built at the speed of thought.
This technology holds the power to reshape the landscape of software creation, and only time will tell how far its revolutionary ripples will reach.
The question now is not if we will build at the speed of thought, but how long it will take for every app to feel like an extension of ourselves.
Video Explanation
Details & Reference Material
Have spent years thinking about product design, UI/UX & marketing…
- The best places to get information is Think with Google.
2. D.School@Stanford / IDEO
3. And most importantly is Tom Chi
We have a section on each at the end of the article 👇🏾
What is Building @ Speed of Thought?
Bring the developer / designer both cognitively and physically as close to the customer as possible. Fast iteration of the product leads to rapid evolution.
We develop mobile apps in Starbucks (cafe´ & malls) with real time feedback, constantly iterating over the app until everyone who tries it wants to buy it.
The one thing that should NEVER be done is a homogeneous group (same age, same sex, same race) with no diversity in an isolated room build for the general population.
Sorry for picking on this picture but just trying to make a point
Tools to Build @ Speed of Thought
Android and iOS has moved to declarative / reactive programming. Without this fundamental shift we can not Build @ Speed of Thought.
Android
No Java 🚫 No XML 🚫 → Kotlin ✅ / Compose ✅ / Flow & Channels ✅
iOS
No Objective-C 🚫, No UIKit 🚫 → Swift ✅ / SwiftUI✅ / Concurrency ✅
And now both platforms look identical to each other.
- Operation System: Android = iOS
- Language: Kotlin = Swift
- Design: ComposeUI = SwiftUI
- RxProgramming: Kotlin Flow / Channels = Swift Structured Concurrency
This allows us to have the same metal model for both.
Android
We use this architecture where everything has a place and a place for everything leading to very clean code.
This makes updating and fixing apps extremely easy and fast.
iOS
We use the same exact development architecture on iOS as stated above.
Mobile Magic
Details on ML, AR, VR and Blockchain coming soon.
Ideas that help build the foundations of Building @ Speed of Thought.
Think With Google
Insights. Ideas. Inspiration.
Take your marketing further with Google.
- Consumer Insights
Consumer Journey / Consumer Trends /Visual Stories
- Marketing Strategies & Innovations
Advertising Solutions Center / App & Mobile / Automation /Data & Measurement /Industries /Search /YouTube
- Future of Marketing
Create with Google / Digital Transformation / Management & Culture / Privacy & Trust
- Tools
Find My Audience / Grow My Store / Market Finder/ Test My Site
Some of my favorites:
What you need to know about mobile app users /Principles of Mobile App Design: Engage Users and Drive Conversions./ The Customer Experience is Written in Data / https://developers.google.com/analytics/ Secrets to App Success on Google Play (A / B Testing)
After much edification one important lesson learned is …
Never underestimate the importance of design
Very impressive video series showcasing the importance of design.
Broaden your perspective with this collection of talks about the role of design in shaping our future. Featuring respected innovators from diverse fields, each talk explores a different theme at the intersection of creativity, technology, and ethics.
Key Lesson: Companies that focus on design build very successful products.
D.School@Stanford / IDEO
A huge fan of the D.School@Stanford Design Thinking
Dr. James Landay (https://twitter.com/landay) does an amazing job teaching CS 147 as evidence of the quality of the projects.
CS 147: Introduces fundamental methods and principles for designing, implementing, and evaluating user interfaces. Topics: user-centered design, rapid prototyping, experimentation, direct manipulation, cognitive principles, visual design, social software, software tools.
Attending / judging the student projects for the past 7 years …
From the D.School @ Stanford came IDEO.
What is important at IDEO
I have never worked anywhere where everyone works so hard to make everyone else successful, where people work so diligently to support and enable others, where the collective helps you calculate and calibrate your own impact, but where, when necessary, hard decisions are made, by people, for people.
The key to a good design is:
Put the customer at the center and everything else follows — Apple/Google
Design Thinking has lead to Design Sprints
Many of these ideas are derived from the work done by Tom Chi.
Tom Chi
Spoiler, they used this methodology to sell out of the product before the prototype was built.
Iterating on Design Thinking and Design Sprints has evolved to …
Building @ Speed of Thought: Data Driven Ethnography.
The three major points:
- We know fast iterations lead to superior products as opposed to long design cycles.
- As development tools get better the design process can be accelerated.
- Designers of the future are going to work with data more than users.
The overall point is to bring the developer/designer (& tools) as close to the customer as possible. This decreases the time to build prototypes and increases the evolution of the product.
Currently testing these ideas of creativity and design with mobile apps. Like a painter’s tools are canvas and paint, ours is the smartphone.Why? Because if you can build a self driving car from a smartphone you can do/build anything.
Developer velocity is the key to innovation. The faster the develop, test, learn cycle is the better the final product.
Steps:
- Buy 100 $5 Starbuck Gift Cards.
- Start with a simple app idea (Todo App)
- Do a quick Google search to see what other have done and copy
- Build the app with Compose (Android) / SwiftUI (iOS) for rapid iteration
- Give people a gift card if they are willing to test the app and give feedback
Repeat step 5 with updates after each review.
Cycle 100 iterations you will have a winner app for the app store.
We build with Compose (using Material Design)
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose
SwiftUI (using Apple HIG)
By using declarative / reactive programing which makes development extremely fast we can iterate to a solution much faster.
The better the tooling the faster we can build.
Teaching: developers to design & designers to develop
Speaking with a director @ Meta/Facebook she only hires developers as designers and puts them through a course like:
Her group releases products every two days and the only way she can do that is by having developers/designers who can iterate in real time.
This could be the way of the future …
Bonus Point — Your Icon is your persona to the world. So Important!
Small decisions can have colossal effects on the growth or death of a mobile app and stimulate or threaten the entire business. As one game house discovered when for Valentine’s Day they changed the App Icon to pink and installs dropped by 20%.
~~~Still a work in progress:~~~
Apple iOS Resources
Developer Insights
Planning
Learn how to plan and build your business on the App Store, take advantage of exclusive features and capabilities, monetize your app, and engage users worldwide.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/planning
Marketing
With App Analytics, you can track, test, and quickly iterate on your marketing initiatives to increase downloads and attract the users who will most value the features and benefits your app provides.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-acquisition-marketing
Submit to store.
More to come …
