William Stewart

• Built & managed a large cross-functional design team to ideate, research, design, prototype & validate monetized social story sharing.
• Transformed photo-sharing by inventing a collaborative storytelling system. Led design team to execute against the vision for excellent results.
• Created patented innovation used by 2 billion users
• For Moment USA, my San Francisco-based startup

Moment addressed pain points felt by everyone who takes pictures. It's so easy to take photos & videos, but it doesn't turn into high value results. I rethought the problem space & invented a uniquely powerful & simple solution to yield high personal value that is easily monetizable.

I was responsible for building & managing a large, cross-functional design team to deliver unique ground-breaking innovation. I also invented the storytelling network as product genre and founded Moment as a San Francisco-based startup. While directly managing designers, researchers, UI developers, and copywriters, I also presented investor pitches & attracted rock star silicon valley executives to join my management team.

• short term: offer an effortless path for users to collect memories, keep them safe, and enjoy them
• long term: offer high value colaborative storytelling with organic, but lucrative monetization.

I surveyed parents to validate that they take tons of photos & videos, but don't know what to do with them. When faced with a burning house, the #1 thing people save is their photo albums because albums aren't just pictures; they are the stories of family history.

When someone pulls out a camera, they are capturing something significant, whether it's dumb, silly, sentimental, or a major life event. People know kids photos don't belong on Facebook but simply don't have something better.

• busy parents & young adults create lots of emotion-charged memories, but don’t have time to do anything good with it. The market has nothing a) fast enough b) easy enough or c) safe enough.
• There are lots of places to upload pictures, but it's either too much work or untrustworthy (ie. Facebook & other networks). Users want ownership & control.
• I led our research team to reveal that the highest value of photos is unlocked when we share content story with family & friends who can collaboratively create the story and add their own content.
• With friends & family increasingly dispersed geographically, a digital storytelling network was the natural solution for the ever-growing collection of digital photos & videos.
• clear need for simplicity, must be effortless for parents/ young adults making memories & connecting other personas to create the story together.

• The problem with every tech solution is that everything took 3 or more steps to access. We iterated until we reduce it down to nearly zero steps to unlock value for users.
• I invented desktop & mobile homescreen widgets to create NEW screen real estate - a place for interative content that is 3 steps closer to users
• splitting workload from client devices to decrease server processing
• designed organic monetization to allow the service to be early stage cash flow positive before the audience size tipping point

Hired & managed story consultants, web designers, ux & ui designers

• Flow Design: Optimizing Media Workflow
• Led product design team: taskflows, wireframes & early prototypes to validate concept & explore creative alteratives.
• Led ideation of new workflows to automate the full circle process of recording content, transforming it into event-based stories & then displaying them for easy consumption, augmentation & social interaction.

Pre-mortem & how to measure (what would success & failure look like?)

• Lots of market noise. if we didn’t offer enough value, it was just another pointless flickr wannabe.
• If it was too hard to get media into the system, users wouldn’t use it.
• if it was too hard to get media/stories delivered to recipients, users wouldn’t use it.
• Measure: time to get media in system, usability study of ease/difficulty of sharing
• Measure: # of items shared over time, # of items viewed, # of items commented on, # of events contributed to by other contributors
• Measure: various monetizing starts vs abandonment vs completion events over time

Behavior Design

• Created "Circles of trust" security model & visual metaphores to ensure user control.
• Invented patented techniques for deploying interactive media on desktop & mobile home screens.
• Devised a lucrative way to monetize media sharing & storytelling without charging customers anything to use the system.

People Management + Public Speaking

• Managed & hired design team researchers, analysts & both UI & UX designers to iteratively improve & test product design.
• Performed product & value prop presentations to raise funding.
• Attracted acclaim and rock star silicon valley execs for direct involvement in management & investment.
• Led design/dev collaboration to solve product problems, such as automatically aggregating media from devices & social networks into a single trusted, secure repository for memories.

The working prototype was a huge leap forward based on my inventions. We iteratively improved to incorporate usability test results from 'Circle of Moms', prosumers, young adults and AARP.

Iterative Testing & Influential results

• As the prototype improved, we found that the product design had universal appeal beyond primary personas. Everyone from parents to seniors to tweens to childless singles were enthusiastic & wished to pay for it.
• My work on Moment attracted rock star execs from Adobe, Second Life, DivX and LucasArts to work with me on my management team, as well as acclaim from tech luminaries such as Apple founder Steve Wozniak.
• Unfortunately, we didn't raise enough money to get to market.
• However, our presentations to VCs did inspire copycat products that tried and failed to copy the Moment vision and even the mission statement.
• The greatest product validation was the attempt by several VCs to blatantly copy the product & their inability to get it right, regardless of budget. CBS Interactive & others wasted $18-$60 million on copycat products that failed due to a) not understanding how the parts fit together and b) failing to understand the organic monetization method that prevented high server cost overruns.

Moment contained several of my new inventions, including the invention of home screen widgets in use by over 2 Billion users (US patent 8,881,047).