Use 4 Design Principles to Gain Market Share
Jared Spool of UIE has written a little case study of how the company Pure Digital has captured 13% of the video camera market in just a few months. They designed the Flip Video camera with 4 principles that really made a difference:
- Think like a minimalist. The camera has just a few buttons to do what the vast majority of users want to do: record, play, delete, zoom, scroll through movies, and control volume during playback. Compared to multi-level menus in most cameras, this minimalism creates an ease-of-use that sets them apart.
- Remove your customer’s worries. Their different approach to batteries means the camera owner doesn’t have to think so much about the batteries and is more likely to use the camera as a result.
- Eliminate that which has no value. They loaded the software onto the camera instead of a disc, so there’s no need to install software on any computer you go to. The camera does it all seamlessly.
- Integrate the next step. Realizing that the next logical step after making a movie is to share it. so, they made it easy to email your video or share it on YouTube
I think these principles are great ones to keep in mind whether you’re designing a website, a physical product, or a service, and especially if you are designing an end-to-end customer experience that may include all of these things.