Lift10 notes on the Christian Miccio Google workshop

Lift10 took place in Geneva from May 5-7. The group of students that won free passes offered by the City of Geneva to participate in Lift are blogging their notes and insights from Lift10...

Thierry Blancpain and Christoph Derndorfer talks about "Let's create a product " workshop (edited by Sachin Gaur)

Before the workshop the group was split in two groups, a product
development team and a group of users giving feedback. For half an hour
before the official start of the workshop, the five brave members of the
product development team met with Christian to invent a product on the
fly. After fifteen minutes of coming up with ideas, they voted on the
presented ideas and decided to go forward with an annotation-tool for
the web.

Another fifteen minutes later and they had an interface mockup as well
as a more defined product. This is when the users joined the workshop
and after a short intro by Christian, the product was presented.
Christian added that the goal of the workshop was to go through a few
product development cycles, share information and knowledge about it and
create more transparency regarding the product design and brainstorming
process.

The invented product was planned as a tool to annotate articles on the
web. Those annotations can then be shared, searched, or displayed on a
timeline. There was also the idea of the ability to link annotations to
each other.

After the prototype had been presented, the usergroup started to give
feedback. The main feedback points were:
– Privacy: public and private annotations.
– Annotated content that changes after an annotation is placed and how
to deal with it.
– The ability to annotate more than just text, for example places,
people or other things. Even the option to annotate annotations.
– The ability to rank annotations.
– Video or audio annotations.

The usergroup was then given a 20 minutes coffee break while the product
team worked on and developed version two of the product.

For round two, because of time constraints, the product team focused on
two main aspects: privacy and rating. The user interface was reworked to
introduce a privat/public annotation option, as well as a simple rating
function.

Another round of feedback was given, including the request of multiple
layers of privacy settings, how spam and unwanted advertisement could be
avoided – through the voting and a respective algorithm to interpret
very negative ratings – as well as the needed complexity of the
user-interface.

Christian noted that at Google, because they can quickly prototype an
idea, adding a feature is easy. The hard part of product development is
cutting down features and user-interface complexity to arrive at a
simple and efficient end-product.

This is how the end-result of the workshop looked. Still a very raw
draft of how this app could function, but it already allows people to
quickly and easily grasp the idea.

Pierre Spring of LIIP, member of the product development team in the
workshop, noted that the reality of this workshop meant that to create a
product in such a short time, one has to focus broadly on the product
without the ability to discuss or think about all the details involved.
It was also mentioned that the product development team members were not
able to follow their own interests, but had to work inside the given
framework and accept the constraints in time and freedom of choice. So
accepting that not all of your ideas will make it is an important aspect
of the process. At the same time this enables that the concept you end
up with is very likely significantly more amazing than what you started
out with.

The workshop was a great chance to have a small look into the life of a
product developer. Christian led the workshop with a safe hand, without
overreaching and dominating the discussion and feedback process. The
insights he provided on his own experiences in developing products at
Google was fascinating and covered a broad variety of aspects from
getting input from outsiders to how ideas are shared and discussed
within Google.

So aside from the hardship of waking up after a short night (since the
famous Lift fondue took place on Wednesday evening) all the participants
seemed to enjoy the workshop and actively participated in the feedback
and product development process. This led to a constant and productive
back-and-forth between the product team and the rest of the group.

Thierry's final thoughts: As a graphic designer, it was great to see how
similar the process of developing a product and a piece of design are.
In the end it is all about kicking off the process of idea generation
and keeping up a positive vibe so that no team member feels left out or
harshly rebuffed.

Christoph's final thoughts: This workshop was definitely one of the
highlights of LIFT10 for me. It combined an interactive hands-on
approach with excellent guidance and some nice anecdotes from
Christian's work at Google.