Joey Primiani | Pioneering the New Internet Revolution

I worked the amazing Superfuture girl Janet Hansen on the design and construction of the glowing Space Suit. She is the same designer that makes Daft Punk, Kayne West, Katy Perry and MIA’s tour clothing. I love how my clothes require batteries.

Presenting my experience designing products at Google as an intern, startup life, school, and futuristic technologies I am most passionate about at Teens in Tech Conference at Google in San Francisco. Great writeup on the event by Spark Minute.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple said he liked my presentation afterwards and chatted for a little bit, then wears my space helmet. Um, reality check?

My message to everyone is to be passionate in everything you set out to accomplish in doing what you love, keep working hard, be persistent and never give up on your dreams.

KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid.

A law that I abide by in my everyday life, including web standards. I have been learning (sometimes the hard way) the balance between good ethics in web design and user navigation.

When I am in my creativity and brainstorm mode, sometimes I realize some web designers (including myself at times) reinvent the wheel when it comes to the ease of use to the end user.

Ajax and scriptaculous provide fun and powerful scripts that enhance a pages simplicity, but if used incorrectly the end user can easily get frustrated and leave. This can make or break a internet ecommerce business model.

There in lies the battle between developers and designers. Two different mindsets. The designer, usually visualizes the way the site will encapsulate the features, how it would be laid out, and visualizes the tree of links. The developer, makes the features happen, but often does not know what is the best to represent visually to the end user. Just because a design looks aesthetically better, doesn’t always make it simpler.

For example, I have done work in the past with an online lapel pin company that creates sports trading pins and corporate identity promotional items (aka schwag).

Click heatmap in a 24 hour period using CrazyEgg.

On the left you see the first web page design, showcasing the product and making the links to the objects visually appealing and pretty. On the right, a simple wordpress SEO optimized theme with easy left hand navigation.

FIGHT – Which one wins?!

Well, pretty obvious. Overnight, when we switched from #1 to #2, we saw a dramatic increase in sales.

Major flaws include:

1) Lack of navigation on the top half of page. Also, navigation must be clear and consistent from page to page. It seems like a no brainer, but many designers ignore this key fact.

2) First one had many false clicks; users were not clicking on correct links. As the second, people had a much better understanding of where and where not to click.

3) The first had too many unnecessarily large elements (icons and images) and wasted space making it somewhat complicated for navigation.

As a designer, I learned a lot that day… I thought that the first one would be more appealing to have the main product showcased and representing a visual for each of the categories in such a way. In some sense it is, but it doesn’t matter, it all comes down to usability and the end user, Google’s #1 Philosophy.

Also, both developers and designers should build their site around the intended target audience before pencil hits paper. The audience for this site is mostly middle age moms, coaches and business employees. If it were more of a tech crowd, it often gives a little more flexibility for the designer to push the boundaries of age old web customs with navigation, page elements, etc.

Bust most importantly, it is about finding the balance between creative designing and user comfort. If you want to make sure that a website can be easily accessed and navigated, don’t be afraid to beta test someone in real life and ask what they think. The results might shock you, since no two people surf the internet the same way. There is no tool that measures this except user input and the powers of trial and error.

Photos Curtsy of Planet Argon

I recently submitted my business plan and beta models to Y Combinator.

“Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started.

At Y Combinator, our goal is to get you through the first phase. This usually means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale. Then we introduce you to later stage investors—and in some cases even acquires.”

They accept applications twice a year. Current businesses include: Reddit, Infogami, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Virtualmin, Buxfer, Octopart, Heysan, Justin.TV, I’m In Like With You, WriteWith, SocialMoth, Xobni, SlapVid, Versionate, Adpinion, Anywhere.FM, and Fuzzwich.

For my case, they “were very reluctant to accept proposals with only one founder, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person.” They obviously don’t know who I am. 🙂

Great company with great innovative startups. I wish them much success. I also hope to submit again to get as much help starting up my company. Of course they are not the only ones, but it was great to see that they were very specialized in mostly new media and social networking sites. With the amount of talent, expertise and investors rotating around the company it can only help.

One valuable piece of information I gathered was their application forum. Similar to my entrepreneurship club pitch forum, there are several key questions that make sense to think about carefully before entering development. For example, “What’s new about what you’re doing?”, “What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn’t exist yet?”, “Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?”, “How will you make money?”, and more.

These are very important questions to master when explaining your business idea. I notice I get so caught up in my ideas that by answering these questions lay out the basic blueprint for anyone to clearly understand what and where you want to go with the idea. The heart of most business models are the same, it is more important to think about why you want to create a business and solve a problem rather than going into detail about what you are creating. It creates a bigger picture.

For some cases, I do not believe all companies need a formal business plan. Some people can see a void that needs filled and can spend very little money developing it and launching it. Similar to Kevin Rose and Digg.com. But, in order to take the web startup to the next level and start asking investors for help, obviously they need to show a solid business model, competitive analysis, estimated income and growth, etc.

This Thursday, I will be heading out to Chicago for the National Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization. I attended last year, and had a blast. I met a lot of big industry leaders one on one, including the founders of Quill (later sold to Staples), Invisio, iRobot’s Roomba, Jimmy Johns, and more. I also want to meet Ryan Allis, who is a big inspiration, he is a 23-year-old tech entrepreneur and author that started a very successful company now grossing $8 million in sales. There are also several workshops focused on web startups. Plus, I petitioned a bill to our school so we get everything paid for! I’ll be reporting back from the conference, stay tuned!