William Stewart

The working prototype was a huge success with test markets, including young adults 17-25, 'Circle of Moms', prosumers, and AARP.

Iterative Testing & Influential results

• Invented & patented homescreen widgets used by over 1 billion users, among other unique inventions.
• Attracted rock star execs from Adobe, Second Life, DivX & LucasArts to join my management team
• Built 0-1 B2C cross-functional design & research team to innovate lucrfative social story sharing

We didn't raise enough money to get to market.

• Our presentations to VCs, instead of raising enough funds, inspired copycat products where VCs tried and failed to copy word for word the Moment vision, goals, and even mission statement.
• The greatest product validation was the attempt by several VCs & CBS Interactive blatantly trying to copy product & their inability to get it right, regardless of $18-$60 million budgets. They failed because I didn't reveal how the inventions worked and, most importantly how it could be lucratively monetized.

• 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.