Food for Startup UX Thought
Last weekend Adrian Howard presented a great talk on ‘Customer Development’ at UXcampLondon. 
Leave a Comment July 15, 2011
Filed under: Start-up
UX in startups: 6 tips from the frontline
Today we measure the worth of UX designers by the quality and sheer quantity of deliverables they produce. But startups need user experience practitioners who make stuff, rather than documents. Process is nice, but startup reality is really very fast, extra lean and your amazing idea is only valuable if it’s out there in the market.
My top 6 tips working with startups:
- Manage the product. To succeed you need to keep a firm grip on the essence of the idea and the resulting product. You are most likely the only person on the team who has ‘end users’ in mind. Introduce measures for success. Develop the concept but save the details for later.
- Make stuff, not deliverables. Think white board sketching with the team instead of wireframe tomes. Cohabit with your developers to shape the product throughout build sprints. Communication is essential to make this work.
- Don’t fall in love with your design. The product/service will transform rapidly from initial idea to your first beta launch. Low fidelity prototypes help the whole team not to get too attached. Iterate, rapidly.
- Keep your users involved in the process. Beg, steal or borrow, but make sure you test your ideas. Your target audience rarely understand disruptive products that challenge their mental models from day one. Super saver tip: User research doubles up nicely as QA testing.
- Be flexible. Know what’s vital, what can be adapted, changed, omitted, saved for later. Make sure you communicate trade-offs clearly with the team. Cutting corners doesn’t equal doing a sloppy job.
- Don’t be coy. We are all perfectionists, so this advice is not for the faint-hearted. If your initial release doesn’t suck you wasted too much time bringing it to market.
Scream if you want to go faster! Fail early, fast and often has never been more poignant advice. Working with startups is exciting and rewarding, if you enjoy making new ideas happen with a good dose of fast-paced energy, rather than a portfolio of delectable deliverables.
1 Comment June 21, 2011
Designing for discovery
You know the problem. You are looking for a holiday online. A bit of inspiration. See how much it costs to escape the office and picture yourself on a tropical beach, or in a hipster bar chatting up the locals.
The painful experience design of the mandatory search form of most travel sites brings you straight back to reality. Why do I have to know when and where I want to travel? I only have 20 mins to kill before the next meeting. All I want to see is some offers to compare what’s out there. To get an idea about what’s available. To daydream the dreary afternoon of conference calls away. Eventually I’ll decide where to go and what to book, but that’s not even on my mind right now.
Here is the challenge: Research says 70% of people know what they want to do on holidays, but not where they want to go. Yet travel websites are structured to demand to know where you want to go before they show you any search results.
I am working with a startup at the moment to challenge that status quo.Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could find holidays that suit your idea of a great time, not the search engine’s? What if the search treated all options equal, and none of them would be mandatory? What if we add more relevant controls, to filter for temperature, a whole host of activities, even down to hotel and room facilities or the type of pool you are looking for.
We distilled two core design tenets from this idea, to create a traveller agent service that focusses on traveller needs, not travel operator ones:
1 – Choice without hierarchy
You can choose as many, or few, search parameters as you wish. We have collected over 200 to choose from, to truly pinpoint your best holiday match.
2 – Compare prices and best value
Compare prices from trusted travel companies, but let people define their own idea of ‘best value’. This may not be the cheapest price, but depend on flight times, comfort level or location.
How do you make that kind of search intuitive? How do you educate your customers? The unpopular truth is that users expect that frustrating search form. They don’t expect dynamically updated results. Most will faithfully fill in all the details (when, where, who) and not engage with the unexpected options.
As BJ Fogg says, you have to take baby steps towards behaviour change. With regular rounds of user research we learned that we had to adapt the concept from a dashboard to a more familiar faceted browse in the short term. The system needed more affordances to inspire trust in this new search paradigm for travel, then we would be able to build on the search experience with a more unexpected, yet more powerful and elegant, interface.
Try it out at travelmatch.co.uk
Designing for discovery
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Leave a Comment April 18, 2011