In my 10 years of working for products companies, these are some of things that I have learned in designing a great product brochure:

§ Less is More: show more white spaces, be it text or images, less is always more

§ Goal: Users absorb 3 or 4 major points once they read brochure. Even if they read the brochure alone on their desk with plenty of time

§ Images: Big images, infographics, and images of products being used by people or in applications is what people want to see

§ Show Humans: A brochure, irrespective of the product/ service should have a people’s pictures and expressions showing

§ Think Global: Your brochure should always be for global audience. Even if your market is 30 mile radius of silicon valley and NYC, your brochure should be global. Think of all the people in that radius who may be judging/ analyzing/ reviewing your products through the brochure.

§ Sports Theme: don’t use a specific sports theme on brochure such as NFL, baseball, Soccer, cricket, F1, or rugby. Apart from being illegal, it’s not global.

§ Design Rule: When you are designing the brochure from the scratch, always design the framework with blank spaces first, and fill the content later

§ Starting: If you have no clue as to how to start a brochure, look at your competition or similar products. Get ‘inspired’ about the framework, start drafting the content, and improvise.

§ Stone: Brochures are not written on stone. It should be dynamic and changing. Don’t create red-tape processes around brochures.

§ Length: Not less than 2 pages and not more than 4 pages. Ideal is 4 pages. First page for product brand and picture. Last page for features & benefits with contact info on next steps. 2nd page is for product introduction and break-up components, or exhibiting the product leadership. 3rd page is to answer the sales-resistance questions.

These are the top 10 UX principles to build the product. UX means the overall user experience from the time a user visits your website to understand your company, to becoming a delighted customer.

These were the principles used by Marketo to build their product, as per their VP of products. I believe that Marketo is a great company because I like their sales, pre-sales, founder, VP of products, product manager, and pretty much everyone who works there.

It is definitely one of the fastest growing companies in San Mateo. That’s saying a lot as there are, on an average, 25 great companies on each block in the Silicon Valley.

Back to the best UX principles:

· User research: don’t focus on focus groups alone. That’s the first group thing Steve Jobs fired when he took over to make Apple most valuable company in the world. Watch & observe as to what customers do and how they try to address each of the elements in the UX cycle. For instance, if your customers like to watch video datasheets more than PPTs, your sales cycle should be focused around generating and marketing videos.

· People don’t read: Some of the awesome products don’t come with user-guide. I didn’t read user-guide when I bought Audi. So, however tempting assume that your customers don’t like to read and design your system based around this hypothesis.

· Which is better?: go for large number of small features as opposed to one big feature. Many researches have proved this theory. However, it is product dependent.

· Remove system friction: Kindle to buy books, Apple AppStore to buy apps. You get it! Remove unnecessary steps in the UX cycle.

· Fire Fighting: Your company is judged by how you handle when things go wrong. So carry this fire drill often and improve on it.

· Global: your UX cycle should be global and neutral. Talking about ‘freeways’ and ‘quaterbacks’ may not make sense outside of US

· Don’t bend users: Users should never change anything to get adjusted to products. The product should align with the norm. Think of frustration when indicator is swapped with wiper blades when you rent a cheap car.

· Deliver great functionality: Details decide whether it is a great functionality or not. Go through every possible use-case while building that functionality.

· Don’t be risk-averse: No risk – no gain. Look for places to take risk and experiment.

· Fun to deal with: Ultimately this decides whether you customers like your product or not. Be a fun company and product to deal with. Don’t be up tight and over-sophisticated as a company.

Let’s go and build some great products…

I happen to attend a networking event at ‘Orrick’ yesterday, where I met founders of four great companies in the social collaborative consumption domain. Think of craigslist with payment processing and trust for collaborative consumption. Then also saw a news piece from India about a second car in the market for $2,500 from Bajaj.

The problem with these products made for the low price markets typically in the developing markets (‘bottom of the pyramid’) is that it is of really poor quality, me-too products. Large companies looking for short term profits are dumping poor quality products into the markets virtually destroying it for good quality products.

Think of the eBay revolution in late 90s creating a million small businesses from garage or apartments. Think of Amazonproviding high-quality fulfillment system to millions of small businesses making them compete with walmart.com with only superior quality products.

eBay and Amazon helped the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ with high quality products powering their users to compete with goods from Fortune 500 companies.

Majority of the products for the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ aims to solve only a piece of the puzzle, and does not think about rising them up the pyramid. Why?

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I love Ethiopian food. Is Walia the best Ethiopian food? No! Not really. We go to this restaurant, because it is close to my house and more importantly is next to the best Ethiopian restaurant I have ever eaten named Zeni in San Jose. We go to Walia because we don’t want to wait for two hours in line to get into Zeni.

Image via Wikipedia

How long was the wait in Walia? Zero! In fact there were many empty tables. The food quality is not bad at all. In fact my wife believes the food in Walia is on par with Zeni, but then why is that Walia does not attract more people? What makes Zeni so special?

Zeni gives an experience of ethiopian culture apart from the good food. It is unique in that it is well decorated in keeping up with the ethiopian culture and traditions. The painting, the live music, the way everyone sits around a large plate and eat from your hand makes Zeni a great experience. Every time we celebrate someone’s birthday or someone’s success, Zeni adds the cherry.

In your business too, the touch of differentiation is very important. Your product could mimic everything that the best product in the market could do, but still fail, unless you have a differentiation.

In one of the most inspirational speeches by Arnold Schwarzenegger, he says that the out-of-the-box thinking separates great person from a common man. Arnold also said that he likes achieving things that everybody says can’t be achieved. Let your products do the unthinkable, unachievable, and be unique. Zeni makes the same products as Walia but the differentiation and uniqueness makes people wait in line for over two hours in cold (no, they do not take reservations!).

Build revolutionary technology products such as putting flash on iPhone, making robots work 10X faster than humans, keeping 300,000 mail boxes safe through pro-active monitoring, deploying SoX compliance, automating eBay auctions, and so on; Fortunately I was part of all of them.

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A guy walks into a shop that sells ties. He’s opened the conversation by walking in. Salesman says, “can I help you?” The conversation is now closed. The prospect can politely say, “no thanks, just looking.”

Consider the alternative: “That’s a nice/ beautiful/ elegant/ great/ awesome tie you’re wearing, sir. Where did you get it?”. Conversation is now open. Attention has been paid, a rapport can be built. They can talk about ties. And good taste.

In a negative scenario, where the customer politely complains that “it must be hard to get a great on Mondays”, if the cook responds “I’m sorry”, the conversations in over. The customer is never coming back. The customer feels bad about the meal, and tells others not to go there.

Consider this approach where the cook asks open eneded questions such as “what kind of fish was it?” or “what style did you get?” and engages the customer for a talk, the cook takes customer inside the kitchen and shows how he cooks, and how he would have liked? Do you think the customer will come back?

Seth says that “open conversations generate loyalty, sales and most of all, learning… for both sides.”

This year’s Facebook Timeline has gone a step further and was able to scale the vending machine to a magnitude of creating a whole new industry. Yes! Facebook is not just a website, its not even a social network, it is now an Industry where entertainment, travel, lifestyle, and many other industries will have a paradigm shift in the way content is created, shared, and consumed, deals are transacted, and information is searched.

Google may not be monopolistic anymore. One of Google’s executive has predicted that online display ad market is over $250 billion in 2025, and if Facebook continues to do good work and innovate, they are going to get Lion’s share of it.

Of course it was RIM and Palm that showed the world what it feels to hold the most powerful and intelligent computer in your pocket, but like any other first mover stories, they did not carry it to the finish line. Google buys Motorola, HP chewed and threw the Palm bubble gum, Microsoft is staring at Nokia, RIM has almost become irrelevant, HTC & Samsung are the only two other giants that can swing either ways (Windows or Android). This is a great consolidation of the fastest growing business in the past decade.

Google is on a good high-speed rail to put the Android and Chrome OS on mobile devices, and stand toe-to-toe with Apple. Android has already proven that their model has worked better than Microsoft Windows mobile platform. Google should now focus on its overall portfolio consolidation of search, social, location, mobile, and gaming through the new flashy mobile platform.

Its time for Microsoft to get faster, better, cheaper products to market. PC market is slighly different, but mobility and internet (IE & Bing) needs a different strategy. A Platform based approach for these two businesses may help Microsoft to take back some of its lost share. RIM on the other hand should focus on better Go-To-Market strategies and worldwide distribution channels.

HP should make the best use of its awesome user-interface and navigation capabilities of Palm OS. Palm OS is a platform that has a full potential to compete with iPhone in terms of user experience, but HP needs to build a standard marketplace; HP does not still get it right.

Go Mobile!