Experience Planner

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading and thinking about this week.

Fever, a Self-Hosted Feed Reader (TechCrunch)

Here’s another example of “Genius Design” in action. Shaun Inman designed a new type of RSS reader, which actually sounds really intriguing to me and would probably match well with my own style of managing RSS feeds. Previously, Shawn created other successful web products by designing with himself as the only intended audience. In fact, in the TechCrunch article he says, “I designed Fever (like Mint) first and foremost for myself. Any money I make on top of the personal utility I get out of it is just icing on the cake.”

That’s a totally valid approach to design, especially since he’s upfront about not caring who else gets benefit from the product. But Shaun is lucky to be working only on products for himself and where he already has deep knowledge of the space. For most design projects, I would argue that insights developed through user research are critical to making a great design.

Did Chase consider the importance of the customer experience before throwing out WaMu’s “Occasio”? (AdaptivePath)

I love this story, even though it’s kind of sad. When Chase took over Washington Mutual bank locations, they redesigned them to meet their usual business objective: aggressively cross-selling financial services. But in doing so, they (probably unwittingly) destroyed a customer utopia.

Customer experience has so many parallels to user experience design online. Yes, we need to design to achieve business objectives, but not at the cost of turning off customers. The key to good product design is finding the balance between meeting business objectives and serving customer needs.

Nielsen Debunks Myths On Teens And Media – They Still Watch TV! (TechCrunch)

Would you have guessed that adults between 21 and 35 watch online videos 35% more than teens? Or that adults spend 25 hours and 15 minutes per month browsing the internet, versus only 11 hours and 32 minutes per month for teenagers? This kind of research is so important for debunking myths about our target audiences and helping us keep a clear understanding of where and how to reach them.

The Semantic Web (Adaptive Path)

The semantic web really interests me since it holds the potential for us to finally build Star Trek-like computers — ones the actually understand what we’re saying and can intelligently answer our questions. Unfortunately, discussions of the semantic web have mostly been relegated to:

1. Confused nonsense about Web 3.0
2. Detailed discussions of the technology necessary to make it work

So I was encouraged to see Chiara Fox from Adaptive Path say that the industry is making progress. The technology is now reasonably well understood so we can now get busy actually doing it. In fact, just this year at the IA Summit, some people from the BBC presented about their thorough and very smart efforts to catalog and present all of the BBC’s content in a semantically valid way. Very clever stuff!