Good Experience - 28 Aug 07 ====================

=================== Good Experience - 28 Aug 07 ====================
By Mark Hurst
Sign up: http://goodexperience.com/signup.php
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

- On product management, personas, and customer focus
- For more reading...
- 7 Job Openings: SF, Minn., CA, CA, NC, & Hotlanta, Georgia.
- Fun Stuff

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On product management, personas, and customer focus
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Three years ago I wrote "You DO Talk to Customers, Don't You?" ...
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000055.php
.... in which I stated what I thought was obvious: customer
experience work requires working with customers. But this idea is
still not practiced widely enough.

A friend sent me this roundup of a recent entrepreneur conference at
Stanford, where PayPal founder Max Levchin offered some tips.
From http://urlx.org/venturebeat.com/d6846 ...

> Product management, he says, is 85% user interface and 15%
> channeling the user.
>
> For user interface, Levchin told the audience to measure how their
> visitors interact with the sites. Slide.com tracks mouse clicks,
> mouse overs, abandonment rates, the funnel, and more. Levchin and
> his team mine the data for intelligence that helps guide future
> iterations of the site.
>
> For channeling the user, Levchin says founders must step inside
> the minds of their target customers. In Levchin's case, he says he
> must imagine himself as a 15-year-old girl with attention deficit
> disorder who's looking for digital bling to dress up her MySpace
> or Zanga web page, while at the same time she's chewing gum,
> talking on the phone, instant messaging with five friends,
> listening to music, and twirling her fingers through her hair.
>
> Levchin cautioned his techie audience to keep their customers in
> mind and not go overboard with technology for technology's sake.
> He pointed to the early social networking site, Friendster, which
> lost critical momentum when it ran into scaling problems because
> of a "cool" feature that calculated friend trees, and caused page
> load times of up to a minute. MySpace.com, by contrast, was
> successful because it cared less about technology and more about
> the user experience.

Levchin is right to tell people to study both data and users.
However, in terms of "channeling the user," while he's on the right
track, he's still missing the key step - and a LOT of developers
miss this step.

Rather than "channel" the user, i.e. think of what these theoretical
people might theoretically want, it's better to actually sit with
*actual* people to see what they *actually* want. Of course it takes
more time and energy to do that, so lots of developers (and even UX
practitioners) prefer instead to invent "personas" of theoretical
people, and then make strategic decisions based on what those
theoretical people might want.

Yes, personas are helpful for some uses. But the primary way of
understanding a customer's experience with a site, tool, or business
must be with an actual customer, not an imaginary figment.

Post a comment here:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009991.php#comments

- - -

P.S. Speaking of customer focus, or the lack thereof, in other news
this week Gateway was sold off to Acer. I wrote a post about how the
company changed from investing in customer experience to where they
ended up...

"That one project made Gateway many millions of dollars, and now the
entire company has sold for $710 million. It's quite an end for a
company that once led the consumer PC market with its friendly,
customer-oriented attitude."

Read the full post:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009995.php

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For more reading...
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A new source of advertising - your neighbor's SUV:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009994.php

MIT researchers measure clutter:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009983.php

List of good Mac software:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009988.php

How to manage "bacn":
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009985.php

Broken: Microsoft Office message:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009998.php

Broken: "No buses" sign:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009986.php

Review of "Bit Literacy" from Orlando:
http://goodexperience.com/blog/archives/009993.php

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Job Opening: Hotwire.com (Lead Interaction Designer)
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Company: Hotwire.com
Title: Lead Interaction Designer
Location: San Francisco, CA

Hotwire.com is looking for a full-time lead interaction designer.
The right candidate should be able to develop big ideas, and execute
flawlessly against them in a highly collaborative environment.

Check out www.hotwirejobs.com for full position description or email
resume to lsavage@hotwire.com

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Job Opening: Corel (User Experience Design Manager)
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Company: Corel
Title: User Experience Design Manager
Location: Eden Prairie, Minnesota

You will be responsible for building an environment where external
customer satisfaction is a priority by leading the UED processes
through ongoing research and driving new technology and by bringing
your self-motivated energy to make clear decisions and take direct
action in order to deliver best in class results.

www.corel.com or email your resume to vicki.carver@corel.com

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Job Opening: Autodesk (Interactive Art Director)
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Company: Autodesk
Title: Interactive Art Director
Location: San Francisco, CA

The Interactive Art Director is responsible for conceptualizing,
prototyping, creating and documenting engaging and systemic rich
media solutions and final assets for our clients on a wide range of
projects.

please e-mail responses to thomas.schneider@autodesk.com

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Job Opening: ORACLE (UI Architect)
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Company: Oracle Corporation, USA
Title: UI Architects and Lead Designers (Multiple Positions)
Location: Redwood Shores, CA

You will drive innovation and compelling user experience design into
critical features and applications. You will tackle only important
projects where we know we can make a huge impact.

chris.colosimo@oracle.com

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Job Opening: Align Technology (User Experience Analyst)
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Company: Align Technology
Title: User Experience Analyst
Location: Santa Clara, CA

The User Experience Analyst works with internal customers to
articulate user experience requirements and to develop
commercial-grade graphical and textual user interface prototypes for
multinational software products.

To respond, e-mail your resume to jobs@aligntech.com.

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Job Opening: Emergent Game Technologies (Product Manager)
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Company: Emergent Game Technologies
Title: Gamebryo Product Manager - 147
Location: Chapel Hill, NC