There comes a point in time when you have been designing your application for so long that the littlest things slip by. It’s not your fault. When you are working on something so often, thinking about it day in, and day out, you are attached. Not just emotionally attached, your eyes and brain are attached too. When you are testing your own application, you know what every icon means, where every button is, and your brain is programmed to the specific type of experience someone is meant to have. But if you put your application in front of an 11 year old boy, or a grandpa, they will make you do two things. One, pull your hair out. Two, realize there is no way you can design your application for a beginner in the first try. From the first day you start doing mockups, and writing out wireframes, you are already steps ahead of anyone when it comes to understanding, and using your product.

The image above is based on a true story. We were user-testing an elder, and he asked why he had to “pick a state” (when “Georgia” was the default font). On one hand, that seems like a ridiculous question. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense in it’s simplicity. Why not change it? Really, think about it, if a user is confused by something that small… don’t be stubborn, just change it.

Design your application for beginners, let the beginners test it, and then rebuild for the beginners. And guess what, experts will still use it!

Seth Godin, who always proves thought provoking to me, wrote this article in 1999 for Fast Company magazine. ( Change Agent – Issue 31 ). This was almost ten years ago and I think his argument made sense then and it makes sense now.

Seth writes:

Oh, there’s one other thing: As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change.

In fact, competence is the enemy of change!

Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat.

People used to say that large, bureaucratic organizations were like slow moving dinosaurs. The argument went that this is why leaner, swifter companies were able to take business away from them – that, in essence, they could anticipate change and adapt to it at a much quicker pace. I still believe this. But I think what ultimately gives them the advantage to behave that way is the culture that fosters the ability to make mistakes, take risks, to in essence, be incompetent.

Like many startups, the “get to know each other” and planning meetings happen in a coffee shop. On Monday, we met with John Long, who specializes in graphic design, Ruby, and JavaScript. John has recently worked on another local, group-based startup, MemberHub. We are excited to have John help put the finishing touches on our version 1 app, to launch in February.

Click here for John’s website, or follow him on twitter.

In early December, Group Story attended our most successful trade show ever - the Athletic Business Conference in Orlando, FL. We were able to bring the Group Story “story” to athletic directors of schools, community centers, military bases and leagues. But we also found “Group Story Evangelists” among keynote speakers and guests who have some great plans for the technology.

How do you create evangelists for your product? Shared passion. If you are passionate about what you are doing, and are a straight up authentic person, you will run into other people that believe in your idea, and also become passionate. Those people are almost as excited about your product as you are - and their insight and referrals are priceless. Although there is no financial gain for them, they want to see your success because they believe in you, your product and can see it working in their lives.

If you find yourself on a detour, at least enjoy the scenery.

The journey is as important as the destination.

Those quotes seem to be written by people who are “direction challenged” and are trying to make the best of a bad situation. Trying to stay calm as it finally dawns on them that they made a wrong turn two hours ago. Yes, I have made a wrong turn or two, staying on what I thought would lead me to my destination. And I did get there. Eventually.

But I have a new way of looking at those sayings now. All too often in business people adapt the attitude of “stay the course”, “never, never, never, give up.”

But maybe the first quotes about the journey and the scenery aren’t simply mantras to keep your stress levels down. Instead they are an opportunity to reflect, reconsider, re-evaluate. That’s certainly been our experience.

Anytime you start a business, you go in with certain assumptions about your product and your market. Many of the assumptions and decisions are based on research, others are based on gut feelings. But you never have all the answers. Your customers do. And if you go in thinking you only have one customer, if you “stay the course”, you may miss other customers who are begging for your product.

We started Group Story to give people a way to remember a time in their lives, a time that involved other people. Finally, there was a way for everyone involved to share an experience in photos and story, picking and choosing what they wanted in their own customized book. We had our eyes on some very specific markets - and still do. They have been overwhelmingly supportive of our product.

But we were unprepared for the other directions Group Story is taking. Unprepared, but open, to honestly listening to people describe how they wanted to use Group Story. Surprised, and humbled, by the generosity of new found friends who are helping to spread the use of Group Story to other areas by reaching out into their own circle of friends.

So, how did this happen? How did we learn to listen? We believe these things happen because of passion and authenticity. I don’t know if it’s because it’s remarkable to be passionate in business, but that is the word that is used constantly to describe us and our approach to our company. It’s infectious. Authenticity is equally important. People that we meet know that we are honestly and sincerely interested in listening to them. They sense that there is no difference between us as company owners and them as customers. They can tell that we love our product for what it can do for them and what it can do for us.

If we had stayed on the same road, ignoring details, oblivious to the scenery, we would not have noticed the other options. And we would have missed a lot of opportunity, some of which were on the side roads of our journey. Opportunity to meet new friends and to give Group Story a chance to work in other people’s lives.

Besides passion and authenticity, is there another reason this seemed to have worked so well for us? Some might credit The Secret. Others might think it’s just luck that has helped us become successful. However, we think Joseph Campbell said it best:

“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,
and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.”

Save…time and money by building a minimum viable product.

Improve…features through user feedback.

Master…the operation and usability of tools that are completely necessary to your mission.

Prioritize…the features that are most important, and only add more features as you realize users can handle them.

Limit…a user’s freedom. If they don’t need it, don’t give it to them in version one.

Easy…for everyone to use. People using your site was the point of creating it, right?

Simple works. Just ask the guys who thought it would be cool to make a running RSS feed with a 140-character limit.  Follow us on Twitter: @groupstory.

In the startup world there isn’t much that is black and white. A lot of times, entrepreneurs will find themselves in uncharted territory, but still working frantically to accomplish as many tasks as possible in a given day in order to push their product or service along. It seems every time a to-do list gets its’ final check mark, another list just as big (or bigger) is being compiled.

At Group Story, the white board gets filled up, the list is attacked with passion one by one, it’s erased, and it is filled up once again. This is what it will take to get our product out to the world.

We have brought on a development team to take the software to completion before 2010. That is our goal. LAUNCH BY JANUARY 1, 2010. Is that a guarantee? Of course not, there are too many unknowns to promise that. But here’s a fact: working hard, and finding talent where talent is needed gives us a real good chance to achieve any goal we set for ourselves. We are focused on the finish line and excited for Group Story version 1 to be launched.

TJ Stankus (@tjstankus), a talented Ruby on Rails programmer, now has the baton.

Publicity is great. It’s one of those things that deep down everyone wants. From my experience, publicity rarely falls into your lap… unless you work your tail off.

Hard work may be defined differently from person to person. We have found ourselves working hard in a lot of different ways. Our equation to recent success:

“Pumping out content about the journey of our start-up, and what we have learned”

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“Traveling to trade shows to spread the word passionately to our target markets”

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“Constantly analyzing/developing our soon to launch application (while avoiding perfection paralysis)”

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“Always thinking Group Story 24/7”

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Great article from TechJournal South.

Hard work gets noticed.