UX Week 2009
Aaron Forth: Mint.com – Why Good User Experience and Design are Essential
- Traditional tension exists between user experience and business objectives.
- “User Experience is where strategy must begin.”
- There exists a history of frustration with personal finance tools.
- The brand establishes an affiliation with a certain type of content, which in mint’s case is delivered through its blog.
- Key Aspects of the mint.com UI:
- Setup in less than 3 minutes
- Reduction of work and repetitive tasks wherever possible
- Designing for ‘wow’ moments
- Focus on providing insights
- "This is about not getting in the user’s way"
- “Reduce Risk. Hire Product People. There are perceivers in this world…"
- “Mint’s competitive advantage is that we can build faster than the competition.”
- Mint does limited, friends-and-family-based user testing (but is nearing the point at which it thinks it may need another approach.)
- “Stay nimble. Don’t over plan.”
The History of UX
http://tinyurl.com/uxhistory
Bernhard Seefeld & Elizabeth Windram: You Are Here – How Google Maps Keep Innovating
- In 2005 there’s some complacency re: online mapping solutions. But not only had online maps not been solved, they hadn’t even come close to being solved.
- How Google sets the innovation stage:
- Be self-critical.
- Be open to new ideas.
- Consider your product a work-in-progress.
- Beware the tension between a proliferation of new ideas and the maintenance of a cohesive whole.
- Google’s sources of innovation:
- Technical insights.
- Anybody anytime.
- Study of behavior and motivation of users.
- Google is flat and data driven.
- Principles that frame ideas:
- Design for power users.
- Develop core framing concepts.
- Use power to drive simplicity.
- “There’s no such thing as the average user.”
- Check out Google voice search…
- Beware of feature clash.
- Google Maps’ core principles:
- All info is organized around places.
- Maps is Google on a map.
- More info should be revealed as you zoom to closer levels (a result of feature clash observation).
- Over time, street view becomes a core piece of the product rather than a feature add-on.
- “Google increased business searches by removing the business searches feature.”
- Dogfooding = eat your own dog food before serving it up to others = pre-release internally..
- Google’s technical insights = Google focusing on its core competencies (engineering).
- Be inspired by people who push the edges.
- Establish a framework of core concepts in order to evaluate new ideas.
Henning Fisher & Charlie Brown: Design for Social Good – Changemakers.com and Community Driven Design
- Simpatico. Client-consultant relationship works only after RFP bid is submitted with caveat that Adaptive path doesn’t want the project.
google, google maps, innovation, mint.com, UX, UX Week
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