There is a lot of excitement about the Internet of Things and electronics being smart. Actually the excitement right now is just around electronic devices being able to communicate with each other at all, never mind the smart part. If you can attach a Raspberry Pi to it, people will and probably already have. We recently saw a toaster oven that can send you a text when your toast is ready.
That's cool and all, but toast text messages are not nearly as interesting as a home of electronics that are designed to work together and solve people problems. Imagine your refrigerator communicating with your phone to let you know what ingredients you're out of when you're at the grocery store, or a washing machine that alerts your smartwatch that your clothes are done so you can move them into the dryer so they don't sit wet all day. That will be the difference between just an Internet of Things, and the magical world of tomorrow we're all waiting for.
This type of seamless connectivity, connectivity for a purpose that solves real problems, is what we set out to achieve with the new Notable, our product design platform.
Designing a Winning Product for Winning at Product Design
Over the last six years we've built a number of products, each designed to solve a problem or pain point that we hit when practicing product design. Notable was originally created to help us create product audits. Verify was built to quickly validate design decisions through gettting ideas in front of real people. Solidify was designed to create clickable prototypes with the goal of quick iterations, not wasting time building complex prototypes or spending hours attempting this in Keynote. Influence was made to help us quickly and professionally present our design work when we were manually posting everything as static HTML.
We love each of these products and as a complete product design solution use them significantly in our own process. Not only do they help us to solve acute problems, we've found that they actually make us better product designers.
But we always knew that what we were creating was more than just individual solutions. The real impact would come from all of the apps working as a whole. For example, getting the results from a concept test and being able to click straight to the prototype and see where people are getting stuck is an entirely different experience than hearing about the test going poorly in a meeting and trying to track down the designer to get a peek at the prototype.
Twelve months ago we began work in earnest to combine all of these distinct offerings into into a single platform. Now hundreds of sketches, thousands of commits, and millions of pixels later it's complete.
The New Notable: Helping You Win From Concept to Code
Notable was the first product we created. It was about leaving notes on screens, but it was also about doing 'notable' work. Some teams build products to make a lot of money, some build products to serve a company or community need, still others build products to create marketing value. But all creators or products want people to take note of what they have done, they want their work to have value and mean something. They want to do something Notable. That is the aim of our platform, and why we took the name from our first application (Notable) and made it the name of our entire platform.
Like the Internet of Things, our goal was to do more than simply connect our products together. Our goal was to create a set of design tools that are cohesive and easy to use to connect you, your team and your work. The new Notable walks you through product design, from concept to code, helping you collaborate more easily and keeping your whole team in the flow of forward momentum.
120 Days to Public Release
We've been using the new Notable in production here at ZURB every day for the past 8 months. It's all of our tools and techniques in one powerful package, and has both sped up and improved our work. Battle tested day in and day out, we're continuing to iterate and evolve the platform up to our public launch and beyond.
The new Notable will be available to the public in 120 days. Until then, it's in private release and we're letting in a limited number of people to start using the applications now. If you're interested in getting your hands on these powerful design tools and seeing how your team can build something truly Notable, sign up for the Private Release today and let's get you started.
