Future of Web Design 2007: User Centered Design for Evolving Products
Saturday, April 21, 2007Comment, or trackback from your own site.
User Centered Design for Evolving Products
Ryan Freitas, Adaptive Path
What Ryan does: introduce teams to design principles that can improve the quality of their process and their products.
plazes.com - geolocation service. Website is a bit of a mishmash. Not streamlined enough. Need to evolve.
1) Evolution and product design
“The web is moving away from big sites with lots of pages and towards applications with interfaces”
- Peter Merholz
All products undergoing iteration evolve - some faster than others
eg Wordpress - tweaks on a very regular basis
process refinements
taxonomy and IA iteration
inteface improvements - removing impediments
What’s the opposite of gradual iteration?
topix.com - get specific news for a certain area. Successful, and relaunched with a different idea:
- users were engaging with local forums, so they focussed on this
Punctuation in product development
In evolutionary biology ‘punctuation’ refers to a sudden appearance of a new species
At a slow-enough pace, gradualism looks like statis - eg ebay.com
eg riya visual search - scan photos, analyse and give you others like it. 95% approval/satisfaction rate, so people weren’t coming back
Relaunched as a shopping engine eg to imitate celebs - http://www.like.com
Differentiation in the name of survival
Gradualism - small iterations
Punctuation - redefinition and refinement
How do you prepare for punctuation? It’s a big deal. Pick the right tools for the job.
2) A toolset for evolution
Restate the value
You don’t have a blank slate!
Forced to handle the history of the work you’ve done
What’s your elevator pitch? What’s the current goal/mission of your team? If you can’t describe it then you’ve added feature after feature chasing users, but you’ve lost sight of what/who you had in the beginning
Know your audience, know your benefit, know your competition, know your differentiation
Elevator strategy: For/Who/The/Is a/That/Unlike/We
Team activity makes people agree on common goals
The needs of users and the market will shift over time. Take the opportunity to understand your audience.
Tell the story
Conversations about future releases tend to begin with feature roadmap
It’s more about where people are taking the product instead of setting in stone where the product is going next [power to the people!]
Releases should be built on how you envision users engaging with your product
Personas are just marketing segments with headshots
Storytelling is about understanding motivations, intentions and expectations rather than segmenting them
A day in the life - cartoon of someone using the site at different times of the day
With plazes - use cases - users updating their location and then a friend asks plazes who’s nearby
Stories teams tell capture experiences that reduce frustration and celebrate engagement and extension.
Storytelling strongly links an appreciation for users’ needs with ideas for how to fulfil them
From these stories a feature set and rodmap aligned with current and future users is able to emerge
Atomize the features
With a common goal, and user stories to fulful, it’s helpful to understand the feature set
It’s the atomic structure - the core tenets
What’s the easiest way to sort out what features lie at the core of your product?
Working within constraints
For plazes the SMS component was imperative - very constrictive environment
Plazes core is: communicate presence as simply as possible (wifi went, everything else went)
Sometimes referred to as ‘peeling the onion’
Rich Skrenta [http://tinyurl.com/2fwexd] - post about evolving topix. Ride the winners. What on the site is working and reorganise around those principles
Nail the core feature. Everything else will follow
Tidy the seams
Conway’s law “organisations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations”
Design tends to be a function of the the team that put it together
No coherence/consistency between features on different platforms
The silo-ed way in which you built the channels are not the way in which people are experiencing them.
Twitter is good, identical commands in all channels IM/Mobile. Yay 
Exercise thoughtful restraint
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com - world of checkboxes to select how you hear about the sites
37 signals’ todolist offering much more straightforward/restrained
Reduce noise where you can - overloading people with information is not a good way to engage with them. Don’t fill the screen just because you can.
3) Summary
[Phew. Fingers sore]
Evolution is tricky. Consider carefully before evolving too fast - your current audience and your team’s cohesion are both at risk
Simplification feeds back into the entire design process, simplifying the product and enabling differentiation
