Loic Le Meur (@loic) recently did a very good interview with Dave Morin (@davemorin), CEO & Co-Founder of Path, at LeWeb 2011.
In this interview, Dave was very straighforward and candid about the journey his team took to build the second version of Path (aka Path2).
I have captured what I think are the key elements of this interview.
Development, Timeline and Success
- Path2 is the morphing of Path1 and With
- took more than 6 months to develop
- is driven from the successes and failures of Path1
- was an intense design process (Path Inc. is a design-driven company)
- is slightly social; can work on it’s own; can publish information outside the Path2 realm
- has “feature seen it” which actually lists who has viewed or seen things you have posted
- traction and AppStore success was really unexpected for Path2
- made top 25
Design-driven
- Path is a completely design-driven organization
- Path was designed and conceived for the smaller screen first
- a smaller screen is a much different focus
- for tablet, screen real estate and available gestures are larger
- need to rethink user interaction and flow along with information presentation
Post-PC era
- we are now in a post-pc era
- mobile is gaining or even surpassing web on multiple fronts
- design and deploy on mobile first
- align strategy to leverage mobile market penetration
Native versus Web/HTML5
- quality and performance is not there yet on HTML5
- especially when your app has a lot of finer grained UI / UX details
- example: clock marker in Path2
- native is currently the only choice for really responsive UI
- HTML5 is still good for lesser UI intensive applications
Feedback Loop
- design comes from designer intuition after product usage
- research user behavior from other mobile apps
- key observations for Path2
- users were taking and posting screen shots of personal data
- currently playing music
- personal notes
Monetization
- Path2 is using a freemium model
- to ensure relation between app and user is authentic
- No ads yet but ads cannot be added in a manner that will impact authenticity
- ads needs to be treated like actual content
Effort and Focus
- simplicity and quality takes a lot of time
- 6 – 12 month effort for Path2
- important to stick with the main problem you are trying to solve
- iterate a lot
- minimum viable product (mvp) not applicable for mobile
- iteration cycle is too long (about 2~3 weeks)
- each iteration has a permanent impact on product perception
- recorded via the AppStore rating system
- intend to ship a second version based on lessons learned from v1
Bottom line: producing a beautiful, superbly designed and UX-optimized mobile application takes time, a lot of time.
Newer technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 are coming up strong but they are still not “prime-time” ready to support these design-centric mobile applications.
Given Path2′s recent market traction, it’s clear that having a design-first strategy is a key winning aspect to get your application on top of this very difficult AppStore market.
L8er – Martin