Keynote by Simon Vallee at Product Hunt Toronto's 1 Year Anniversary Event. Simon Vallee is an entrepreneur and product enthusiast. He currently works at Slack, which he joined when Slack acquired his latest startup, Spaces. Before that, he co-founded OpenCal, acquired by Groupon in 2011 and Sitemasher, acquired by Salesforce in 2010. He holds an engineering degree from Polytechnique of Montreal.

1. Building Beautiful and
Highly Usable Products
Simon Vallee
2015-08-27

2. Hello Bonjour
👋

3. My timeline
Wonder years 2005 2006 2007
2008 2011 2013 2014

4. The Product Triforce
Utility first
Listen to
your users
Components-
based UI

5. Place Utility First

6. Your product is not an abstract
exercise in design.

7. Utility at two levels
• Idea: does your product answer a
real need?
• Implementation: is your product
optimized for users?

8. Just
ship it!
Take the time to think it through

9. Utility is Slack’s secret sauce

10. A couple of tricks on the
implementation side

11. Stay one step ahead of the user

12. Empower anyone to become
a power user

13. Listen to your users

14. Everybody has blind spots
Users can point them out

15. Make it easy for your users to
tell you what’s up!
• Clear affordances in your product
• Engage on Twitter

16. What we do at
• Pay close attention to our Twitter feed
• Everyone does support! 2 hour
weekly support shifts.
• Roll up of top tickets every week

17. Beware reactionary feedback
driving your product design
❗

18. E.g. Channel Info

19. User feature requests can
plant the seed for new ideas
💡

20. Requests for this

21. But we built this
Requests for this

22. Build a
Components-based UI

23. Components are the foundation
of your product’s UI.

24. E.g. The Facebook post component

25. The Groupon deal card: a missed opportunity
DesktopMobile

26. Components
(Few and primary)
Elements
(Many and secondary)
Logical grouping of features
under common umbrellas
• Content previews
• Content detail view
• Navigation
• Settings, etc.
Various widgets that support
your components
• Buttons
• Popovers
• Tooltips, etc.

27. Simple
Flexible
Extensible
Cross-platform (when it makes
sense)
Good components are

28. • Harmonious and simple product.
• Fewer pieces to design, develop, and
maintain.
• Less work when building new features.
• Time to perfect and polish.
• Product branding.
• Template for your organization and
your code architecture.
Huge pay off

29. • Harmonious and simple product.
• Fewer pieces to design, develop, and
maintain.
• Less work when building new features.
• Time to perfect and polish.
• Product branding.
• Template for your organization and
your code architecture.
Huge pay off

30. The Product Triforce
Utility first
Listen to
your users
Components-
based UI

31. Force Multipliers
×

32. Hone your
product sense

33. Train your brain: analyze the
products around you

35. Great products are not about the absence of
bad, they’re about the presence of great.
Focus your attention on the
positives.

36. Do the work

37. Sketch + Design + Code/Prototype

38. Be Relentless

39. The universe will try to stop you
from building a great product.
Don’t let it

40. Thanks for your time!
🙇

41. Q&A