When we set out to make Haiku Deck we had a few product goals. “Make it easy” topped the list, along with “deliver flawless beauty.” With these in hand, we sat down to establish benchmarks for measuring our success. During that meeting I joked that I would know we had achieved our goal of making Haiku Deck easy if my mom could create a deck without needing to call me for technical support. Don’t get me wrong- my mom is an intelligent, creative, and incredibly talented woman. She raised not one, but two “computer genius” sons (neither of us can write a line of code), she runs a medical office entirely by computer (1980’s era, no less), and she had the foresight to buy her sons an Apple II+ when all they wanted was an Atari. All this, and mom makes a brisket famous the world over.
Like lots of moms and dads out there, she didn’t grow up around computers and can’t always make sense of them. So we kept mom in mind when we were designing Haiku Deck.
When I told mom about our meeting and how we tried to build a product that she could enjoy using without a technical support call, she responded with the most delicous deck we’ve seen yet. When I asked her if we could share it on the blog she said, “Sure, just as long as you don’t call me for technical support when you’re making the brisket.”