{"id":647743,"date":"2013-03-20T09:54:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T13:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=622201"},"modified":"2013-03-20T09:54:16","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T13:54:16","slug":"kleiner-perkins-michael-abbott-it-takes-two-teams-to-build-a-successful-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/647743","title":{"rendered":"Kleiner Perkins\u2019 Michael Abbott: It takes two (teams) to build a successful app"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to creating a successful app, human interface designers and lead engineers have to work closely together from the beginning, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers<\/a> partner Michael Abbott said at the Structure Data<\/a> conference Wednesday. That can mean thinking about apps in a new way.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore and more products are being built by having great pairings of those two players,\u201d Abbott, the former VP of engineering at Twitter, told GigaOM founder Om Malik. Engineers need to understand a user\u2019s experience with the app, Abbott said, but designers also have to \u201cunderstand the limitations of the environment they\u2019re building. It shouldn\u2019t just be a great experience in one small segment,\u201d but an app should work \u201cwhether you\u2019re offline or have a bad connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abbott often sees a \u201clack of real empathy\u201d between designers and engineers. \u201cThe tension on the design side is that it\u2019s never good enough,\u201d he said, \u201cand on the engineering side he or she wants to ship\u2026How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Malik raised other issues about apps and empathy: \u201cUber managed to piss off people every single time they did something interesting \u2014 surge pricing, or charging more at the time of Hurricane Sandy\u2026I keep saying, if we are going to build this future driven by data, how do we bring this empathy and humanity into the data?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe might be forced into it by some of the reactions we\u2019re seeing to Uber,\u201d Abbott answered. But he pointed out that, when it comes to services like Uber, the way that a user rates a driver is also unique to that user \u2014 and that brings up empathy on the user\u2019s end. For example, Uber could infer from data on what a driver\u2019s rating should be, based perhaps on the start and end times of a trip. \u201cYour rating of that driver,\u201d he said, \u201calso ends up building an implicit rating on you, and your ability to rate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here<\/a>, and a video embed of the entire session follows below:<\/p>\n