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.
It’s time to get active
I’ve been swamped lately and frantically trying to stay afloat. As a result blog postings have been few and far between and I apologize. I’m still working like a fiend trying to catch up, but I think that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As our company grows we’ve managed to secure bigger and bigger clients. Earlier this year, we’ve not only signed on to work on a government project, but four. It’s been very exciting to work on large scale projects that require much more planning and strategizing.
UBC Vault wins CCAE award
The UBCVault.ca website won GOLD award for e-Innovation from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education. The UBCVault newsletter, eVault also won the Bronze Award for Best Newsletter.
Congratulations to the entire team at UBC for making this website a great success.
Open ID - easier Internet logins
For anyone who spends time on the Internet and takes advantage of social media technologies in particular remembering a growing list of passwords and login details can be a challenge. Thankfully, there is a solution in the making in the form of OpenID.
Open ID is an open identity system that allows you to use one single identification (or digital identification) across many of your favorite sites. Participant sites include the likes of Ma.gnolia, pbwiki, 37 Signals, Technorati and Plaxo.
With Open ID, you register once for an ID then use that to identify yourself on different sites. The result: you don’t have to remember numerous login and password details. It makes surfing much faster, more secure and less of a pain.
Developed by the OpenID Foundation an organisation that was formed in June 2007 to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community, the group is quickly expanding and some of the behemoths in the industry are now OpenID providers.
To claim your ID use a reputable providers such as MYID, Claim ID or Vidoop and make the process easier by using a downloadable browser plugin like Vidoop’s to manage your standard logins.
At last my brain can take a rest and doesn’t have to store all those endless password details.
Creating Html newsletter can be a real pain in the…
The folks from the email standards project have released their 2008 gmail appeal. If you’re a gmail users you might have noticed that html newsletters just plain suck on gmail. Creating these newsletter is a real challenge. This video demonstrates how I feel when dealing with gmail…..
Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.