Making better products

Do you think simplicity is the be all and end all of design ? Is it the panacea that we are all looking for ?

Quite a profound pic that has been floating around on the web.

Steve Job’s take on “What is design ? “

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.

PS: Emphasis mine

Jason from 37signals had a blog post on questioning your work. I think that everyone startup or for that matter any company doing anything worthwhile should ask these questions. Here’s what they propose. The image below is from Jason’s presentation at SXSW.

The above tenets make a lot of sense and it’s worth looking at this the next time you decide to start doing something.

Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.

Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago).  I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.

I think this product has some great potiential (especially going  by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market  and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.

Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.

Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product