Blog Post

Week 10: A Unique UX

Authored by Social Marketing Intern Rebeka Tannenbaum

With our second Demo Day two weeks away, this week at Flashstarts has been an exciting and busy one as teams work on their final iterations of their products and platforms. The focus this week seemed to be on user experience, which was not only the subject of our Food for Thought but has become increasingly important as teams hope to gain users, customers, and investors as time goes on and the accelerator program comes to an end.

reMesh’s Demo for Democracy

On Tuesday, reMesh had a live demonstration with The Governance Lab @ NYU. Up until this point, reMesh’s chat platform was limited to those working at Flashstarts. The GovLab featured reMesh as the first of their returning segment “Demos for Democracy,” which is a series of interactive and innovative demos that aim to foster greater government representation and collaboration.

A lot of the interns and team members tuned in and supported reMesh as their platform was featured on a larger scale than ever before. Co-founder Andrew Konya thought that “The questions where really insightful, and it was cool to see the product be used by complete strangers.” 

Watch the video of reMesh featured on “Demos for Democracy”.

Food for Thought: UX and UI

On Thursday, our Food For Thought speaker was Nicole Capuana from LeanDog, an agile software company in Cleveland. Nicole is an UI/UX expert. For those not familiar with it, UI/UX stands for user interface and user experience. Nicole covered a variety of topics in her presentation, from feedback ideas to how to find test users to how to ensure you’re actually solving the right problem.

User Experience

 

Some of her best pieces of advice were:

  • “No matter what we create, it’s about people. Users are people – make sure you’re solving a real problem for people.”
  • “Understand your users with empathy.”
  • “Test early and often.”
  • “Liking something is subjective – you need to make sure the system meets the needs of the person.”

She ended with saying “If I do my job well, nobody ever notices, because they just use the system.” This highlights the fact that sometimes some of the most necessary jobs go unseen and unrecognized, but that doesn’t undervalue their importance.

The Intern Experience

Today, the interns went off to present their “personal pitches” at the NOCHE (Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education) Entrepreneurial Internship Fair. At the Entrepreneurial Internship Fair, over 70 interns are put into smaller groups and share five-minute presentations on their summer.

On Tuesday, the interns practiced their presentations. It was great to see what everyone learned during their summer at Flashstarts, as well as the more specific projects that each person worked on. The interns are excited to share their presentations at NOCHE. Ruidi Lu, Flashstarts’ accounting intern, said, “As someone working in the Northeast Ohio entrepreneurial community, I am excited to see what the rest of the community is working on.”

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