I am excited to announce the launched of a new digital product and brand strategy/design practice called Humanist.
Humanist is a strategy and design practice born in Brooklyn with a focus on building awesome digital products and branding. Humanist is passionate about building products people want and brands they connect with. Continue reading “Announcing Humanist”
Help people answer life’s big financial questions, starting with first-time home buyers. Prior to SmartAsset, financial calculators were complicated, required information users did not have readily available, used financial jargon and did a poor job of explaining trade-offs or guiding decision-making.
User interviews with first-time home buyers to learn about their needs and how best to help them understand the decision-making process when buying a home. Moderated and unmoderated usability tests to validate ease of use and user understanding of recommendations. An Agile UX process to build and launch the product in three months as part of the Y-Combinator accelerator program.
A web application that asks a minimum of questions users can answer off the top of their heads. With this information, the product displayed dynamic text to deliver recommendations with easy to understand explanations and interactive data visualizations to help users learn about financial trade-offs.
A product launch resulting in positive press and a $1.5mm fundraising round.
[SmartAsset] is one of the best done sites I’ve seen and I wish I had had this site when I purchased my house.
Robert Scoble
What is great about [SmartAsset] is its usability. It is simple, looks good and you don’t spend a second trying to figure out where to click.
Thom Rogers, Hoop.com
By answering only six questions, SmartAsset can advise users how much home they can afford, if it is better to buy or rent, compare tax implications based on location and much more.
Right from the homepage SmartAsset dazzles with its good looks. In fact, while I was using I couldn’t help but think that it looked like an interactive infographic.
Dean Sherwin, AppStorm.com
e-Book publishing is a lot harder than it should be, often requiring developer skills. Despite ePub standards, developing for e-readers can be like coding for the web during the bad old days of the browser wars. Adding images, video, web-fonts or styling with CSS are all considered advanced skills. Once your e-book is ready, distribution can be equally challenging; navigating multiple e-book stores, file formats, requirements and meta-data.
The challenge was to remove all of this complexity and create a simple to use SaaS application that allowed anyone to create an e-book without the need for any development skills, distribute with the push of a button and track all sales activity from one place.
Collaborated with leadership on product vision and roadmap based on customer research, participated in planning and execution of product launch, development of a set of core product principles, collaborated with an Agile user experience team utilizing Lean UX while working closely with the engineering team. Throughout design and development, the core product principles served as a touchstone in guiding product decisions.
Vook is an end-to-end cloud-based e-publishing solution. With Vook, users can create and publish e-books anywhere; build and style awesome looking e-books without knowing any code; effortlessly incorporate fonts, easily add video, images and sound; preview their e-books quickly; manage metadata simply; conveniently watch sales from multiple channels all in one dashboard.
Vook was later renamed Pronoun and exited in a sale to Macmillan Publishers.
Publishers Weekly has been testing the platform and [Vook] could indeed be a game changer.
Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly
New Vook website after using a combination of web analytics and usability tests to optimize conversion, resulting changes that led to a 17% lift in trial sign-ups.
Very publisher-friendly.
Joe Wikert, Chair of Tools of Change/O’Reilly Media
Unified login and sign-up page—reducing the need to drive users to the correct page. Greatly reduced sign up friction, reducing workflow from a five-step process to a single step.
We talked about making it as easy to build an eBook as write a blog post—I think [Vook] delivers.
Pete Myers, newkindofbook.com
From one dashboard, users can start a new project, quickly see the status of current projects and get sales data from multiple e-book marketplaces—including Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
You guys did it, you created WordPress for ebooks.
CTO of major news publisher
One of Vook’s biggest differentiators is the Style Editor, giving users the ability to style e-books without the need to write any code. Users have control over typography, lines and color. On publishing, Vook handled generating code optimization for each of the popular e-book stores.
This is so user-friendly.
Author and TED speaker
Metadata is the lifeblood of e-book marketing and is key to discoverability and ultimately to sales. Managing metadata is challenging, as each e-book store has differing requirements—often for similar data—and using obscure publishing industry terminology. A streamlined user experience was created by analyzing all of the data sets from multiple e-book stores and collapsing them into a unified set of three forms.
I really liked the user interface and the process is very intuitive and clear.
Vook user
A core value proposition of Vook is push button distribution to multiple e-book distribution channels. Previously, e-book distribution required organizing files for each platform, preparing separate metadata XML files and logging into each channel where the user would have to re-enter the same data and upload files multiple times. Vook’s distribution user-flow distills all of this down to a single workflow.
Startup equity distribution and dilution are complicated but affect nearly everyone involved in a venture-backed startup. Many founders and startup employees struggle with understanding, or estimating, the effects of multiple rounds of funding on a company’s valuation or on the value of their equity stake at the time of an exit.
Great, simple cap table tool for Startups from SmartAsset..
Tom Nora
A web app that helps startup founders and employees understand equity dilution and the payout after an exit.
This is a useful website.
Phil Hill
The Film Photography Podcast had grown organically over the course of a year, spanning a podcast, blog, community on Flickr and a storefront—the number of channels had become unwieldy. we were challenged with creating a brand identity (including mission statement) and developing a strategy that united all of the disparate parts under the Film Photography Project umbrella. Services included design and project management.
A brand identity that evoked the feel of the podcast, the organization’s cornerstone, as well as a single website built in Drupal that united aspects of the company’s media and e-commerce offerings.
