Extremely well said, Andrew. I love all these points. I often say that products are only a conduit - a pipe - between people. When you interact with a thing, you're interacting with others. At least, I think the best products in the world embody that spirit.
I believe our mandate, as designers, product managers, etc. is to contribute and facilitate more humanity into the products that we're putting into the world.
Points to Drawer for creating one of the more esoteric and enlightening conversations on ProductHunt? ;)
I like the design, @jwd2a, but I have honest skepticism about the product*.
Do people want another service to recommend places? I feel this space is crowded with Yelp, Foursquare, and even Jelly's location-based questions have a role here. Thoughts?
*Massive disclaimer: I haven't tried the app yet!
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I want to go on a jag for a second, so if you just want my bottom line thoughts on this particular product see my previous comment.
HUMINT = Human Intelligence.
We're seeing quite a bit of this lately and I think it's really fantastic. I'm a UX designer so my job is caring about people and their relationship with a product or service. I think that big data has been hailed as a really marvelous transition from having too little data to having all the data we want. The truth of big data, however, is that without it being human it's worthless to most of us. I'm a Fitbit user, for example, and lately I've been using it just to monitor my sleep...what Fitbit does NOT tell me, however, is how my sleep relates to what is average or healthy...there's no human element. It is strictly numbers. This is really bothersome to me. The stats are interesting, but they aren't connecting me with others. In other parts of FitBit, I can compete with my friends to set a baseline for activity relative to others. There is direct human involvement.
Evernote is something I've been *dying* to use, but it feels very insular. I don't adore social media, but I do feel like collection for collection's sake is missing the point. Even stamp collectors collected stamps to show others and connect with other parts of the world.
My point here is that the human element in almost all product should be the driving force. This is the reason I love those DIY boxes with monthly subscriptions that ask you to make things. There is a human element involved. Digital technology has changed the way we live (in my view for the better) and it has also given us this wide open avenue for exploring new ideas, getting help, learning new things, etc. and it is all simply using a computer as a medium rather than the message.
I want my signal to be human made and my medium to be digital. What I don't want is noise human or digital. All signal and no noise should be the #1 user demand.
So much better than keep track of places you want to try (or love) on scraps of paper or in an unorganized Evernote notebook. The social aspect of it is killer too!
Hey Ryan, great points! Our differentiator is that we're not trying to put together automated, algorithm-driven recommendations, there are plenty of those out there!
For us, it's more like Pinterest or Evernote for places. We help people keep track of places that they hear about - whether from friends, on TV, etc. What we've found is that a ton of folks keep this information in scraps of paper or unorganized notepads on their phones. We let you organize and socialize that information in a much better way.
Lastly, we're a bit of an advocacy platform. By adding places to a Drawer that you love and want to recommend to others (the reverse of what I talked about in the preceding paragraph), you're able to share lists of your top spots with others.
Hope that helps illuminate the difference! Thanks for the conversation!
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I had Ryan's concerns as well, but honestly, even with Yelp, Foursquare, and all of that I still feel like I'm crowdsourcing my travel questions on Facebook and Twitter...and actually *Finding* the answer on TripAdvisor (which has got to be in the pantheon of useful but ugly websites).
Yelp feels fake, Foursquare has pivoted a few too many times and I'm not quite sure what to make of them (although I'm hearing good things lately), and Jelly only works for whatever the hippest new phone is (clearly not mine).
I believe in HUMINT more than anything, so I believe in products like Justin's. Also, not *everyone* has to use the same set of mega-services. I think there's room in the game for quite a few of these types of products.
Good points, Andrew. This weekend, we spent 4 days at a festival, and I had almost 1,000 people come by the booth and tell me, genuinely, how much they need the product. In fact, they were very surprised that this was the first time they'd heard of something like it.
It's clear - especially with groups of folks that don't fall into the typical Foursquare demo - that the space, while somewhat crowded, has room left.
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