'Google Hobbies' proof of concept | Hacker News Reader

'Google Hobbies' proof of concept

blog.prototypr.io

143 pointskunle129 comments

Reminds me of http://www.nina4airbnb.com/ who made an extensive analysis of where airbnb should target next in an attempt to convince airbnb to hire her.

After her website went viral, she did eventually get an interview with airbnb. While making such an analysis is no guarantee of a job, she was rejected because the interviewer couldn’t contextualize her experience because she "hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford".

She did however in the process land several interviews with different companies and picked a company called upwork in the end. So this kind of work can have several positive side effects even if your initial objective is not reached.

Her complete report can be read here: http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...

Yikes. If the CMO of Airbnb actually said that, that's awful.

Of course he didn't.

Why is that?

It's exactly the sort of thing people who didn't get a job say was the reason ("ah they didn't like me because I'm not from Harvard") and it's exactly the sort of thing interviewers don't actually say.

Maybe he thought it - he might have said something like "I don't think we're looking for someone with your background" or "we're looking for someone with different skills", but people always read what they think into comments like that.

There's almost no chance he actually said "Sorry we're looking for someone from Harvard" (especially as that is obvious from the CV so you wouldn't even get an interview).

According to Nina Mufleh [0] it was the person who had been interviewing her that said that rather than the CMO. Apparently she did not get an interview with the CMO (it was cancelled).

[0]https://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the...

This is excellent work, almost a whole book here.

At Code 4 SF where I've been volunteering a subgroup has been running a series of tests/challenges using design thinking. This is a hugely effective methodology for understanding problems, identifying opportunities, opening up the creative process in order to address them.

Design thinking works, but you have to really invest in it. If you don't want to make the full leap, there's also a large number of individual methods/tools emerging in the design thinking community that you can try out.

http://www.designkit.org/methods

That's an awesome site. I've been reading this book on a specific implementation of the design thinking methods with GV's "design sprints" -- might be worth checking out if you haven't heard of it already: http://www.gv.com/sprint/

Why pitch this to google? If you think there's a useful tool here, why not built it and own it yourself?

Agreed - this looks cool and you could have it as a stand alone product.

The author seems to be a product manager and designer, rather than an engineer.

The author could still work with people to create it.

Google tend to innovate by acquihiring anyway.

If you call 'buying ideas' an 'innovation' rather than just a way to try and retain relevance.

Being relevant is the ultimate goal of innovating anyway

What are we optimizing for? Ownership or usage? Personal gain or Aggregate Utility?

I suspect because the author says he "loves Google" and presumably wants to work there.

TL;DR - don't take the product seriously. It's the UX process.

The article is more about the author learning UX methodologies and showing it off to Google rather than the product that's being pitched.

The product being pitched already has many issues and problems:

* Is "Hobbies" the right product? Looks like this product is trying to solve too much - trying to "make time for people to do hobbies", search for teachers, filter and organize information better, etc...

* Would people even use this for hobbies? How serious do people take their hobbies? It is actually a problem that people meander through youtube while attempting to learn something?

* What's the difference between a hobbie and something like taking a school course? It happens that if the person likes it, and can do it as a job, then that intersection works well. Otherwise it turns hobbies into a chore.

</2cents>

Startups have won on a lot less than the feature / ux innovation the author just laid out.

Forget google - build this with a "Show HN:" to find a cofounder!

Is this a form of appropriating other peoples' content? Google 's already borderlining, I think, with the instant answer stuff. This seems like it's definitely crossing copyright lines.

Also, I don't like Google to become a universal place to go to for anything. They already dominate search; they don't have to dominate the entire internet.

Further, I am afraid that these tutorials could lead to a "bubble" effect, where everybody who learns to play the guitar starts with the same songs. Boring.

Everybody who learns to play guitar already starts with the same songs. :)

Had more or less this exact idea for a website before, with the exception of using wiki for the main technology, and there being different paths to learning the material provided by curators.

Essentially it'd say go to this tutorial, now this tutorial. Now watch this video. Now do this exercise. Very similar to online courses nowadays, except it all pointed to external links and volunteer contributions, and there'd be more than one path for learning the same material (probably with comments and ratings to help you pick which one to try).

There's a billion tutorials online, but things get out of date, and you have to hunt them down, and some people might think one link is more important than another, hence the different paths.

But I shelved the idea after seeing online courses getting better and incorporating a lot of my ideas.

1) This seems awful close Google Helpouts. Why do you think that might have been discontinued?

2) If you're trying to get attention of someone at Goog, fix your branding mockup -- the product name is in grey, and doesn't have the jaunty "e". See e.g. the header of https://www.google.com/services

I think some reasons products like Needle and Google Helpouts don't make it is the time investment, minimal payback, and the fact that this type of information is generally available all over the Internet for free.

lmao at "Before and after showing how awesome the 960 grid is.". Half the page is now ads.

By the way, I find it incredibly annoying when a page performs some action 2 seconds delayed. It makes me click on things I didn't intend to because the content shifts.

Anyway, thanks for giving me a introduction to UI?UX.

Agreed, Medium makes me furious with how they load images.

It seems intrusive - questionnaires, tracking, etc. Very Google.

If you want to find out how to do something, Instructables is probably more useful. That's owned by Autodesk. Autodesk doesn't want to know about your social life; they just want to sell you tools for designing and making stuff.

nice, i call this modis: method of discovery

if i am learning something new i will log whatever i read or watch or listen to in the order in which i did in order to achieve the level of expertise i currently possess

my goal is more of a possible vector of learning instead of thinking it 'the' way to learn something

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