 What was my favorite UX or UI sort of inspiration of 2018? So what was my favorite product this year? That's a very hard question actually. Hi, my name is Amar and I'm the UX Research Lead at AJN Smart. And I'm here to talk about my favorite products of 2018. So my favorite digital product was Realtime Board, which is right here. We use this every week in our sprints to run remote sprints on the iteration week. And we also use it to run all of our user testing and take notes on it. So this tool is really cool because it just works the way you expect it to. It has all the keyboard shortcuts that designers are used to. It's very easy to duplicate stuff and to edit stuff and all of that. And it's very reliable. It's never failed us once. And it's just like really, really good and way better than paper because you can search everything and you can very easily share it all to the client. Obviously, I'm not showing something that's a real example of what we do here just because we can share client data, but I really recommend Realtime Board. This is a tool where we capture information basically. So when we're doing the user interviews, that's where we capture all of the notes. So maybe I can show what it looks like from the top level view. What I like about it is this infinite canvas. Yeah, and this is how we organize all of our user research. So we have five columns for the five users that we want to interview and then we have this is where we set up all of... We break it down screen by screen as we design them and we put posted notes for questions that we want to ask them. And then we have this color coding. So if they tell us something good, we give it a green note. If they tell us something that's critical of the app, we put an orange note. Yeah, it's an awesome app. Okay, so for this one, I have a very boring answer which is books. People don't read enough books and there are a lot of books that are directly related to products and sometimes not so directly related that just alter the way that you think and eventually make you a much better product designer. So you read books about marketing, about growth, like we have hacking growth over here on the shelf. We have many copies of it because when you first read that book, it's not going to be immediately obvious how this is going to help you in your design job. But when you're designing your apps, you will think of how can I put a feature in here that will help spread this app virally, for example. So this is the kind of stuff that will just, it will seep into your thinking and it will change the way that you design things. So I think that's the best way to level up your design game right now. Oh hey, what's up? What's up, how can I help you? My actual answer is quite boring because it's YouTube and in second place it's Instagram. But since that's a boring answer, I'm going to talk to you about what I find to be a really interesting app. So it's cake. Cake is a new browser that just got launched. It kind of re-thinks how browser search works on a mobile device. So let's search for cake, for example. Just enter cake and instead of getting a list of results, it goes straight to what it consists of. So for some reason it just went straight to Google Maps because it thinks I'm looking for food. I swiped to the right, it's showing like what the first result would have been on Google and you just sort of swiped through the results which I find really, really useful. You saw that I had Mario character looks was in there. That's because I was looking also for like things that I could like cheats or ways to play the game a little bit better. But it's cool that you don't have to see the list first. It removes the steps because mostly you go to like one of the first three sites. So you type in what you want then you just like swipe twice and you're there. I think cake is a really interesting browser. I've been using it. I don't think it's going to replace Safari for me because Apple doesn't really allow you to choose different native or different default browsers. But yeah, I think for me cake like took the most basic thing on the planet and most like obvious default thing, which is a browser on a mobile device and took it in a different direction than it wasn't expecting. Hi, I'm Tim. I'm a program design director at Agent Smart. I run sprints with clients. I work as a product strategist. I have a product I really like and the funny thing is I don't actually use it myself because I just never have time to do it. But it's essentially like the trivia quiz show broadcasted at I think two times during the day. So you actually have to set a reminder for yourself to open the app at a specific time to participate in that in that quiz show. And why I like this product is because it's like on the surface level it's super simple. It's almost like taking the concept of like the decade old concept of a quiz show that could have been broadcasted on TV and doing it at scale on a digital platform. I think the way this has been executed is just done so well and I think it's a great example of how you can actually differentiate your product by adding personality to it because you see it's not just like this platform where you're just like almost like answering generic questions. You actually have like this host and I think there are actually two or three hosts now and these people are basically the face of the service and this is something that I think is often overlooked in products that it's not just about the technology behind it. I mean people tend to be like super infatuated with like the smartness of the technology but honestly the technology has to be great but ultimately users often don't care like what's going on under the hood. If you don't catch like some kind of personality to it then it's very hard to differentiate your product and make it clear like how this is different and I mean something like HQ Trivia I mean let's be honest I mean Trivia apps have existed in the App Store probably since the iPhone came out or the App Store so the way they kind of like just came up with a completely different spin to this is just really interesting and always like a really cool example. I think there's so many different like so many cool design tools coming up now like basically you have the choice between a lot of tools that are really really useful and great but I think what interests me at the moment is figuring out like not necessarily the user experience part of a product but what actually makes a product successful and why do people choose to invest time into a product. This is why I love listening to a product strategy podcast at the moment so one of my favorite podcasts is called Exponent it's hosted by Ben Thompson and James Alworth they work for Silicon Valley companies venture capitalist companies funds and they're just deep diving into specific topics in each episode of the podcast like for example looking at knowledge from subject meta experts so this is one of my favorite podcasts my name is Fyodor I work at AISMA as a product designer the first example is called Lo it's basically a software which you can teach like AI how to organize objects and it's still in beta and like they were like already acquired by Microsoft so like it works like this have like an input like for example is like an image or a video and then you can teach the AI to transform the image into something like recognizable it's an example like how it analyzes the video of the hand into the hand emojis they have lots lots of examples and the cool thing is that it's not very geeky like it seems like pretty manageable that like almost a person like without any programming skills will run so for example like here it can recognize different plans just from its picture and then maybe some of you seen the show Silicon Valley and the guys basically build the same thing as in the show so like they can recognize if it's a hot dog or not hot dog and another example I can show you is an app called Must it's basically an app to manage your movies and shows like which ones you watch which ones you want to watch and it also inspires your like choices I can see what my friends like from Facebook like watched and how they read it like this person I created Gladiator by 8 and I can see everything by the movie and of course I watched Gladiator so I'm also gonna read it and I think it's gonna be online I mean like it doesn't like have an integration with Netflix necessarily it just like analyzes what is happening in the movie industry and it basically helps you what to watch for example like here this like Spider-Man cartoon came out they want to show you like some other like superhero movies so yeah this is it I'm Jonas I'm a product centered agent so there are two things one is more like really product related focused on the customer or on the consumer and one just has a very very cool sign first I want to show you it's called No Zero Days because it just encourages you to create something help people that's unchecked me so learn something work on your health help other people and create something and every time you did something like that for example I learned something I tapped this of course the goal for me is and also for my brain because the brain always likes to close these circles is to have these filled circles and it's just a very nice feeling and actually I'm using it since I think two days or so the second product is actually SIFT that's a news therapy app and it's actually a very cool way to discover news first I love the colors and the design and when you actually use it you can swipe through news stories and when you swipe there's like a small animation happening which just makes it interesting to discover new news interesting news and that's just the product which I really like when it comes to design I don't have it on my phone but I recommend it does it come as an app? yeah it actually does but only for iPhone I'll beep that out thank you so much for watching this video we'd love to know what your most inspirational UX moment of the year 2018 was if you liked this video make sure to give it a like and if you'd like to see more AJ and SMART stuff make sure to give it a subscribe we love making videos here at AJ and SMART here's that little room where we make stuff and here's Fedor just like watching me make this video boop if you like this video give it a like if you like this channel if you want to see more of that give it a sit let me get my thinking pose oh! it's not my favorite I don't get a few interesting products come out there's still