Disruptive Companies, Passionate Teams

I’ve come to the realization that I like companies that try to disrupt a market. Whether it be phones, IoT devices, or software. Love rooting for the next up and coming success story, even if it means some growing pains along the way. I tend to be a very passionate person when it comes to technology.  I find myself pouring over details, specs, and features with each new thing. It’s rewarding to engage their teams over the details, as you get to see their drive and dedication.

The products trying to disrupt the market are often ones that bring in their own special flare. Even though they may not offer all the same features as the industry leaders, you can tell they are making a difference through the details. The communications coming out of these teams show their passion.  They don’t often generate hostility. As a result, their message tends to be softer and they normally try to rally others to join them.  As a result of a more neutral tone, hoping to rally people together, you often find that these teams often offer the best support. With good support comes a good and lasting impression on the market, because the best form of marketing is word of mouth.

Because of my passion for technology and great products, I often find myself going out of my way to find these new and upcoming products or technologies.  Over the years, I’ve bought into or crowdfunded numerous products that were either help achieve a personal or professional need.  I don’t always buy into products solely for the product itself, I often do it for the experience and the support. I’ve had the opportunity to follow a number of companies who were just starting out to flourishing into companies now competing against some industry leaders or going through large acquisitions. These teams were huge on gathering feedback and interacting with their communities or “evangelists”.

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Should Products Ensure Developer Happiness?

Over the past while, I’ve been fully immersed these days into figuring out how to build Marvin.  In doing so, I’ve been researching products, services, or even technology that would help me do it. While diving into each one and evaluating whether to proceed in using them, I’ve found myself looking for the very same thing in each one.  That is, are they working to ensure their developers are happy?  Would I be happy working with them?

One of the biggest gaps that I’ve been looking to fill is the financial transactional information.  To do that, I’ve been evaluating Plaid, Xignite, Yodlee, and Finicity.  All are very capable and established services.  However, of the 4 services, Plaid is the only one that makes me feel that they care about developers. They have a healthy set of SDKs, great documentation, and their dev portal is welcoming.

Companies from all over are beefing up their engineering and development teams.  In many of those technology focused companies, the decision makers are those who are working directly with the product or service, the developers.  Developers normally choose the product that is the most effective at helping them achieve their goals.  Many products today continue to focus on selling to the business minded person, focusing on the features and pricing.  While that is certainly not a bad strategy, they tend to completely avoid the developers who would be working with the product or service.

I believe we are reaching the tipping point where you need to appealing to developers and their happiness in order to succeed. Many products brand themselves as a platform, normally with some externally facing API.  Those that don’t have an API likely have it near the top of their roadmap.  The API can serve multiple purposes: to bring a richer experience, to share data with other tools, or to build new functionality which isn’t supported within the parameters of the service. The market is flooded with technology companies, each trying to cater to a niche. While that company is using your product or service, their goals may be different, which is why they look for API access to enable them to perform their own business logic.

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Find me on User Experience Stack Exchange

I’ve recently joined the User Experience chapter of Stack Exchange. Though I’ve been on for only a week, this is a community I am excited about joining.  It is a terrific community for exchange knowledge and providing answers to questions on user experience.

I’ve been getting a lot more requests lately by email for User Experience questions which I am happy to answer. However it you are comfortable, posting on Stack Exchange would allow others to use the feedback myself and others of the community provide to help with user experience.

Check out User Experience on Stack Exchange or my profile.

Great design and user experience for smiles

I’m taking a bit of a break from writing my contextual series to address a few crucial problems that I’ve been seeing on a daily basis. That is the lack of a good user experience. On any given day, I visit close to 50 different sites and use over a dozen apps.  Of those I would say that 75% of them I would not visit or use if they had decent competitors.  The biggest problems with sites and apps these days is that they like to bombard the users with information.  I get that you want to make money from your ads, but displaying them elegantly will yield better results.  Design is also crucial, these days the simple look works and it looks great.

I’ve built my site around the same principles that I talk about. Yes my blog has ads, but I in no way try to distract my readers from the content. I push users to signing up to my newsletter in a box that appears in the top right. That box is set only to be seen once a week.  As for the look and feel, I kept things simple with no fancy logos, gradients, etc. While I may not get a huge amount of traffic, I am sure this design and approach could be used with great success from more popular bloggers.

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Contextual Series: Gathering User Information

This is the third part of my contextual series which will focus on a few technical details on how to gather user information.  I cannot stress this enough, be wary of the user’s privacy.  Make sure that anything you do is covered under your privacy policy and that the data you gather is done with the user’s consent.  As soon as a user considers their experience with your product as being creepy, you have lost the user.

Social networks like Facebook provide us with a wealth of data.  Social networks are a great way to get a user to consent to data without having to get them to fill in forms.  The information these social networks provide to you are bound by terms of service, terms of user and of course a privacy policy. Make sure you keep these in mind while thinking of ways you can use the data.

Before considering social networks as your primary source for data, keep in mind that with the modern web and native applications, your product may already have access to a lot of data that may be useful to you, especially regarding the user’s location. More specific information on a user, like age and gender will require input methods. If the user’s social connections are important to your product or you don’t want to submit users to numerous input fields social networks would be important.

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Contextual Series: User Engagement

In the second part of the contextual series, I will be continuing from where I left off last time with User Onboarding. I’ll be covering how to make your application relevant after the user has gotten past their initial experience.  The goal is to engage with the user in a way that will retain them and have them spend money.

The first few minutes of the user trying your product is crucial. In that short period of time they will decide whether they will uninstall it and move on or keep trying it out. But the next 30 minutes are also just as important. Like a drug, you want the user hooked to your product, you want them to feel as though they are dependant of it.  The most common way products get you addicted is through social engineering by getting you to engage with people you know. While it is something I would recommend each product would do, the product should be able to stand on it’s own even if the user has no friends.

Let’s assume that your product is capable of tracking a lot of data, including basic user profiles to narrow down their demographics and activity history. The data can be used to improve your analytics, determine business logic, and can be used to feed into your contextual engines.

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Contextual Series: User Onboarding

Over the past few years I’ve been working with new technologies and working new techniques for approaching user experience problems. Companies have routinely approached the problem of providing segmented user experiences by selling different products or services. Those who don’t have the resources to do so pick one segment and focus on them while alienating all other users who are trying out their product. I am not a fan of either solutions and there are others who aren’t either.

The proper solution for ensuring that users are happy is by providing a product or a service that feels as though has been built for them. When a user comes to your newspaper site and you know that they like cars, you shouldn’t start giving them news about fashion.  They will see this and leave immediately, likely to never come back. First impressions are everything. But even with that great first impression, if you can’t keep the user interested and engaged, you’ve also lost them.

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A happy user is a happy customer

Understanding human to computer interactions is a crucial step for insuring users are happy using your product.  As technology advances, it tends to get more complicated as a result.  The user experience should not.  Complications in interfaces and user experience often stem from privacy regulations, connection to multiple third party networks, a result of software that tries to give user options, or by overwhelming the user with features.  While valid problems, they can all be solved through innovative UI.

Some of the best and most used products on the market feature a very simple on boarding process for the user and keep the user engaged with limited options.  Can you get a user to get your product in 5 steps or less?  Can you get them to find the value of your product in those steps?  What about keeping the discovery process simple for the user as they continue to explore your product?

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